Given its affinity with the ideas of Leone Battista Alberti (1404-1472)1 and Pietro Cataneo (c. 1510-c. 1574)2, On the Ordering of Cities (1599) is usually situated within the tradition of the ideal city, the tradition of the Città Ideale. ‘His (Stevin’s) proposals regarding the city resonate so deeply with the (…) Italian treatises that his book is best understood in the light of this tradition.’3 Viewed as a typical intellectual product of its time, the work enjoys a far greater reputation than it does when seen as in purely pragmatic terms. These interpretations have long dismissed it as either a collection of utopian and literary fantasies or a meticulous study of the Dutch city.
The interpretation as part of the tradition of the ideal city inserts the document into the classifications deployed in the history of ideas with its penchant for creating series. It is therefore all the more surprising that immediately after this insertion On the Ordering of Cities (1599) is found to deviate from this Italian and French dominated tradition as well and that precisely herein lies its meaning. The deviation is thought to be the starting point for a new series, that of the Dutch city and Dutch town planning in the seventeenth century.
These conclusions are arrived at by adopting a typical art-historical approach, by concentrating on the forms of the cities and comparing them. Stevin is thought to have prised a new type, the rectangular city, out of a tradition epitomized by the circular form and the polygon with radials.4
The Città Ideale was a typical product of Renaissance culture. It was defined by the law of proportion and the epistèmè of the similitudes. Alberti was the first architect and theoretician who, for aesthetic reasons, drew up rules that pointed in the direction of an idealization of the city. Like his contemporary Filarete (1400-?), who surrounded his ideal city Sforzinda (c 1460) with a star shape inscribed within a circle