Ludwig Karl Hilberseimer (1885 – 1967) was a German architect and urban planner.

Hilberseimer studied architecture at the Karlsruhe Technical University from 1906 to 1910, when he left before completing a degree.
He stared to work in the architectural office Behrens and Neumark, he was coworker in the office of Heinz Lassen in Bremen, and later he led the planning office for Zeppelinhallenbau in Berlin Staaken.

In 1919 he was member of the Arbeitsrat für Kunst and November Group, worked as independent architect and town planner and published numerous theoretical writings over art, architecture and town construction.

In 1929 Hilberseimer was hired by Hannes Meyer to teach at the Bauhaus at Dessau, Germany. In July 1933 Hilberseimer and Wassily Kandinsky were the two members of the Bauhaus that the Gestapo identified as problematically left-wing. Like many members of the Bauhaus, he left Germany and went to America.

In 1938 he started to work for Mies van der Rohe in Chicago while heading the department of urban planning at the Illinois Institute of Technology College of Architecture. Hilberseimer also became director of Chicago’s city planning office.

Hilberseimer published his book City Plan in 1927, where he first elaborated his concept of Street hierarchy. Hilberseimer emphasized safety for school children to walk to school while increasing the speed of the vehicular circulation system.

At the Bauhaus, Hilberseimer developed studies for the decentralization of large cities. He developed a universal and global adaptable planning system which planned a gradual dissolution of major cities and a complete penetration of landscape and settlement.
He proposed a sustainable relationship between humans, industry, and nature where human habitation should be built in a way to secure all people against all disasters and crises.

An original and logical thinker, his first project for a new city was essentially two cities on top of one another, dwelling houses for workers being built above the offices and workshops. Later he developed a linear form of city with housing and industrial units related horizontally.

His most notable built project is Lafayette Park, Detroit, an urban renewal project designed in cooperation with architect Mies van der Rohe and landscape architect Alfred Caldwell.

The Ludwig Karl Hilberseimer Papers collection, including drawings, photographs, and other printerial material, is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.