The concept of beauty, as part of the philosophy of aesthetics, encompasses a wide area and is largely based on subjectivity but also connected to the spirit of the times. The paper will describe the genesis of conceptual approaches to city building in Western civilization from antiquity to the modern city, with a special focus on including the aspect of aesthetics. The goal is to point out major changes in the approach to urban planning, precisely in the domain of understanding beauty, and to understand the commitment to ecological, healthy, energy-efficient spaces from the position of establishing the foundations of the aesthetics of the contemporary city. The aim is also to point out the qualities that a contemporary urban plan must necessarily contain and also to sketch a portrait with a description of the necessary skills that a contemporary professional involved in urban planning should possess.