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Modern urban design can be considered as part of the wider discipline of Urban planning. Indeed, Urban planning began as a movement primarily occupied with matters of urban design. Works such as Ildefons Cerdas General Theory of Urbanization , Camillo Sittes City Planning According to Artistic Principles , and Robinsons The Improvement of Cities and Towns and Modern Civic Art , all were primarily concerned with urban design, as did the later City Beautiful movement in North America. Urban design was first used as a distinctive term when Harvard University hosted a series of Urban Design Conferences from 1956 . These conferences provided a platform for the launching of Harvards Urban Design program in 1959-60. The writings of Jane Jacobs, Kevin Lynch, Gordon Cullen and Christopher Alexander became authoritative works for the school of Urban Design. Gordon Cullens The Concise Townscape, first published in 1961, also had a great influence on many urban designers. Cullen examined the traditional artistic approach to city design of theorists such as Camillo Sitte, Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin. He created the concept of serial vision, defining the urban landscape as a series of related spaces. Jane Jacobs The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, was also a catalyst for interest in ideas of urban design. She critiqued the Modernism of CIAM, and asserted that the publicly unowned spaces created by the city in the park notion of Modernists was one of the main reasons for the rising crime rate. She argued instead for an eyes on the street approach to town planning, and the resurrection of main public space precedents, such as streets and squares, in the design of cities. | 
