The basic rational principles of Renaissance urban design--geometric order, gridiron or single focus radial plans, primary and dispersed activity centres, and restricted and unlimited vistas--as stated early in the Renaissance by the 15th-century Italian architects Filarete, Alberti, and Francesco di Giorgio, remained basic to 17th-century thought. Only in the New World--in the Utopian religious settlements that were founded by dissident sects in the American colonies--were there new cities planned as agrarian communities composed of closely spaced but freestanding houses that seemed to reject both medieval and Renaissance urban-design theories.

By the middle of the 17th century, new organizational principles, developed in France by Le Nôtre in garden design (Vaux-le-Vicomte and Versailles), replaced the diffuseness of Renaissance urban design with a more highly integrated radial axial scheme, with multiple subordinate radial focuses at locations of significant activities that gave overall coherent form to an entire city. A city form that disclosed the hierarchical interrelationship of functions and portions of a city reinforced prevailing concepts of hierarchical social and political order. The fusion of form and content had the effect of transforming the concept of a city and continues to be felt to the present day.

Encyclopedia Brittanica