German sociologist Georg Simmel (1858-1918) decried the modern city as a place that is dispassionately punctual, calculated and impersonal. For northern Europeans, however, the calculated rationality of the urban metropolis was an answer to the uncertainties of war. During the Dutch Revolt against imperial Spain (1568-1648) Netherlanders sought existential refuge from the destruction that ravaged cites like Naarden and Antwerp. They found comfort in the rationality and visual order of science. Simon Stevin (1548-1620), one of Holland’s most important scientific minds, turned to science and mathematics to theorize the city of the future. This paper triangulates Stevin’s publications Het Burgherlijk Leven (1590) and Vande oirdeningh der steden (c. 1610) with Dutch cityscape paintings of Golden Age Amsterdam to argue that Netherlanders proposed urban planning as a means to reclaim peace and order following 80 years of war.

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First, I explore the Dutch city of the late medieval period as a site of uncertainty steadied by Catholicism and monarchical rule. I will illustrate this by looking at paintings depicting Netherlandish cities between the late 15th through the 16th centuries. Second, I will evaluate the writings and municipal designs produced by Simon Stevin to indicate that he designed a break with the organic urban designs of the Renaissance to hypothesize a city of the future, built on mathematical objectivity and Neostoic detachment. Stevin, a mathematician, linguist and engineer by training, was himself a refugee displaced from his home in Bruges by Spanish troops. His designs reify the Dutchman’s plea for peace and certainty by developing urban planning schematics governed by wisconst, or “the knowledge of what is certain”: mathematical order, visual symmetry and organizational predictability. Third, I will argue that his designs, as well as his contributions to the Dutch language and geometrical perspective, influenced the art of the Dutch Golden Age. In particular, paintings of cities, such as Haarlem and Amsterdam reflect urban environments that are ordered, rational and punctual, theoretically providing every bit of the existential certainty that Stevin and his peers sought during the height of the Dutch Revolt against Spain.