Some precedents of the physical planning of the city and the territory through Google Earth.

Abstract

As public function and scientific discipline, urban and regional planning are recent inventions whose origin can be located straddling the nineteenth and twentieth century with the industrialization of cities. However, it is possible and necessary to place contemporary events in a broad historical perspective. We must go back in the past as much as necessary to understand why we plan cities and territories in the way we do it. In this paper we study some experiences of representation, control and modification of land developed during the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries and which are clear precedents of contemporary spatial planning because they anticipate certain attitudes and practices followed by the current city and territory planners. The issue is raised using satellite images taken from the free version of Google Earth, which has become an important tool for research and teaching of social and natural sciences.