Anthropomorphic view of the city dates at least to the
Antiquity (cf. Roman
umbilicus and
pomerium), yet the metaphoric mixture of the geometry of the street and surgery of city planning was most potent from the mid-18th century to the very beginning of the 19th century. By the late 18th century the medical research results, like
William Harvey's discussions on the blood circulation, were spilling over into other fields of study (cf.
Adam Smith comparing the
money circulation to the blood flow in
The Wealth of Nations). The works of
Ernst Platner suggested that the healthy skin requires both the blood and oxygen to be circulating. As a result, city planners in the 18th century came up with the idea that a healthy city needs good flows of traffic, air, and water. Large cities in the
Victorian era had environmental conditions that were borderline "intolerable". Coupled with Victorian obsession with visual beauty and an absence of an alternative
holistic model of city planning, the view of the city from above as a giant human body was promoted by the amateur
urbanists of the time that might then view themselves as "doctors" of the city. The streets became "arteries" and "veins" of the city, the parks were compared to its lungs. Pedestrians, the "blood" of the city, were expected to circulate in blood vessels of the streets around the parks/lungs thus being recharged by the fresh air. While some of body improvement ideas, like the exercise, were hard to translate into the city planning, the application of the dramatic and visual surgery was straightforward, with the most thorough treatment apparently applied by
Baron Haussmann to the city of Paris, including explicit references to "cutting", "piercing", and "
disemboweling". The fascination with geometric shapes (and the degree of freedom given to city architects) slowly declined, and metaphorical urban surgery to cure urban pathology mostly ceased by the end of the Victorian era. == 20th century and beyond ==