PHILADELPHIA -- Edmund N. Bacon, a renowned city planner whose vision transformed postwar Philadelphia and whose influence continued to shape the look and feel of the nation's fifth-largest city, died Friday, his daughter said. He was 95.

The death was confirmed by one of his daughters, Elinor Bacon. He died of unspecified natural causes at his home in Philadelphia, according to a statement from the family.

"He told me when he was a little boy, he went to the top of City Hall and looking out on the city, he understood the plan William Penn laid out," said Alexander Garvin, a Yale University professor and member of New York City's planning board. "From that point on, his plan was very clear how the city should progress."

A Philadelphia native born May 2, 1910, to a staunchly conservative publishing family, Bacon maintained his influence, and his opinions, long after his retirement as the city's chief planner in 1970. Recently, he railed against a new waterfront hotel, plans to reconfigure the Benjamin Franklin Parkway leading to the city's art museum and the impending redesign of Independence Mall plaza, created in the 1950s with his oversight.

At 90, he lashed out at city leaders for banning skateboarders at a park adjacent to City Hall, saying, "Show me a skateboarder who killed a little old lady and I'll reconsider."

Bacon also bemoaned the relocation of a "Rocky" statue from the art museum's steps to a city sports arena and vehemently contested the lifting of a "gentlemen's agreement" that skyscrapers couldn't be taller than the pedestal of William Penn's statue atop City Hall, a pact lifted in 1984.

"He's not just a significant in Philadelphia; he's significant as a national figure," said Garvin, who interviewed Bacon for a 1996 book on city planning.

In 1933, as a 23-year-old graduate of Cornell University's architecture school, Bacon used a $1,000 inheritance from his grandfather to travel the world. With just $35 left in his pocket, he arrived in Beijing, which influenced his style for the rest of his career.

Beijing's groupings of black- and purple-roofed buildings leading to the red and golden buildings of the emperor's Forbidden City "taught me that city planning is about movement through space, an architectural sequence of sensors and stimuli, up and down, light and dark, color and rhythm," Bacon said.

"What is powerful is the crescendo of a musical sequence through distance," he said in 1993. "Fragmented architecture does not achieve that."

After returning from China, Bacon won a fellowship to study city planning at Cranbrook Academy in Michigan. He then worked as a city planner from 1937 to 1939 in Flint, Mich., where his push for public housing brought criticism that led him back to Philadelphia.

He returned home to become managing director of the Housing Association of the Delaware Valley, a nonprofit group advocating low-income development, and spearheaded efforts to create a commission that would oversee and guide city planning.

In 1943, he joined the Navy; he joined the new planning commission's staff upon his return in 1946 and became its chairman three years later.

However, it wasn't until reformers took control of City Hall in the early 1950s that Bacon's renewal ideas gained momentum. His first major plan was Penn Center -- a complex of high-rise office buildings, shops and restaurants to replace a railroad yard that was bordered with a huge stone viaduct nicknamed "the Chinese Wall."

The idea was considered so radical at the time that when Bacon introduced the idea to the city Chamber of Commerce, then-Mayor Joseph S. Clark "was so scared he refused to sit at the speaker's table," Bacon once recalled.

The project was approved, however. The complex was not executed exactly as Bacon and architect Vincent Kling envisioned it -- more space was devoted toward offices and less toward aesthetics -- and was criticized by some as being bland. But it marked the birth of the city's urban renewal.

"The landscape of this city would have been miserably different and decidedly poorer had Ed Bacon not chosen to be a Philadelphian," Gov. Ed Rendell, Philadelphia's mayor from 1992 to 2000, said in a statement Friday.

Bacon oversaw projects including the demolition of the decrepit wholesale fruit-and-vegetable market, which was relocated and replaced by a trio of I.M. Pei-designed high-rise apartment buildings called Society Hill Towers. Soon, people began moving into and renovating the run-down 18th-century rowhouses in the area -- now one of downtown's wealthiest neighborhoods.

Bacon's work landed him the cover of a 1964 issue of Time magazine, which called Philadelphia's redevelopment "the most thoroughly rounded, skillfully coordinated of all big city programs in the U.S."

His 1967 book "Design of Cities" remains one of the key texts for architecture students.

But Bacon and many planners of his day had their critics. Many lambasted urban renewal as being indifferent, even hostile, to the poor and minority residents who were displaced from their neighborhoods without any say in the matter.

After retiring as Philadelphia's planner in 1970, Bacon did planning work for the cities of Burlington, Vt., and Salem, Mass., and became vice president of a Canadian development firm.

He remained in a downtown Philadelphia rowhouse in the city's historic Rittenhouse Square neighborhood and was credited with guiding the 1980s rebirth of the city's Market East shopping district.

Bacon is survived by sons Kevin, an actor, and Michael, a musician and composer; and daughters Karin, Elinor and Kira. His wife of 52 years, Ruth, died of cancer in 1991.

A memorial service is scheduled for 3 p.m. Oct. 23 at the Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting at 15th and Cherry streets in Philadelphia. Memorial contributions may be made to the Ruth Holmes Bacon Scholarship Fund at the Community College of Philadelphia or the Ed Bacon Foundation; all contributions may be sent to 2117 Locust St., Philadelphia, PA 19103.