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Nineteenth century Spanish engineer Ildefonso Cerda made a great contribution to the theory and practice of town planning, and indeed was probably the first person to suggest a general scientific discipline based on the town. Cerda believed that town planning was needed to ease the burden which the industrial revolution was putting on towns. However, he took a flexible approach to planning, in a bid to avoid arbitrariness. Cerda was both a theoretician and a practitioner, and his new town planning theory centered on economic, legal, administrative and political bases.

The ideas behind town planning have been blamed for having a harmful effect on the environment, but it could be that there is not yet enough awareness about what is needed to improve the environment. If the idea of the environment itself is better defined, this will help develop criteria for measuring town planning performance in terms of enhancing the environment, and for working out what is meant by the concept of environmental quality.