Critical Point 1:
Foundation as the Colonial capital of the Province of Georgia (1733):
The first such critical event is clearly its foundation as the British colonial capital of the Province of Georgia. Savannah had three key objectives behind its foundation. It was a practical philanthropy to support unmanageable and unemployed poor and foreign born Protestants in England and provide them with work in the New World; a military need to use Savannah as buffer between English occupied Carolina and Spanish ruled Florida and finally an agricultural experiment, primarily silk culture and the production of wines and drugs, to find out new revenues for job opportunities for the colonists. All of these objectives were the key driving factors that encouraged the rapid growth of the city in its initial days.
To serve its varied functional purposes Savannah was conceived as a series of wards and squares. Each ward was planned around a central square which was flanked at its eastern and westerns sides by four “Trusts” lots, reserved for public buildings of the colony, and its northern and southern ends by four “Tythings”, lots granted to the colonies for their private homes. Oglethorpe designed the basic layout of Savannah into blocks of five symmetrical 60-by-90-foot lots. The layout he followed was blindly carried out and turned from four squares to twenty-four squares from 1734 to 1855, which were intended to serve both as public meetings places and as areas to camp and fortify the citizens against attack from natives, Spaniards and raiding pirates. Savannah's plan reflects political and organizational considerations of the day. Its noble intentions to help the colonists was the base of a governmental form that existed in Savannah by which land was equally distributed among the colonists and were protected by laws to prevent them from selling and purchasing. This has been a very critical paradigm for the city that has helped keeping intact its original plan and layout through ages. Wards were tied to a larger regional plan of garden and farm lots. The repetitive non-hierarchal placement of wards, squares, and equal-sized lots points to the utopian ideals of the colony. The regularity of these lots controlled the size and rhythm of development in the third dimension to create a visually diverse and humanly scaled city. This system of city building was conceivably one of a kind in its time making Savannah "America's first planned city" as described in the official website of Visit Savannah.
To serve its varied functional purposes Savannah was conceived as a series of wards and squares. Each ward was planned around a central square which was flanked at its eastern and westerns sides by four “Trusts” lots, reserved for public buildings of the colony, and its northern and southern ends by four “Tythings”, lots granted to the colonies for their private homes. Oglethorpe designed the basic layout of Savannah into blocks of five symmetrical 60-by-90-foot lots. The layout he followed was blindly carried out and turned from four squares to twenty-four squares from 1734 to 1855, which were intended to serve both as public meetings places and as areas to camp and fortify the citizens against attack from natives, Spaniards and raiding pirates. Savannah's plan reflects political and organizational considerations of the day. Its noble intentions to help the colonists was the base of a governmental form that existed in Savannah by which land was equally distributed among the colonists and were protected by laws to prevent them from selling and purchasing. This has been a very critical paradigm for the city that has helped keeping intact its original plan and layout through ages. Wards were tied to a larger regional plan of garden and farm lots. The repetitive non-hierarchal placement of wards, squares, and equal-sized lots points to the utopian ideals of the colony. The regularity of these lots controlled the size and rhythm of development in the third dimension to create a visually diverse and humanly scaled city. This system of city building was conceivably one of a kind in its time making Savannah "America's first planned city" as described in the official website of Visit Savannah.