The main principles of Roman town planning.pdf (original) (raw)
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Urban form, infrastructure and spatial organisation in the Roman Empire
Antiquity, 2019
Although there has been considerable scholarly interest in the nature of ancient cities, it has been difficult to identify and explore quantitative patterns in their design and amenities. Here, the authors offer a model for the relationship between the population size and infrastructural area of settlements, before testing it against measures of urban form in the Roman Empire. They advocate a more consistent approach to the investigation of settlements that is capable of not only incorporating sites with divergent physical forms and historical trajectories into the same model, but also able to expose their similarities and differences.
Roman Urbanism. Syllabus 2008-9
The study of the Roman city has traditionally focussed on urban topography and the study of major public buildings. This course seeks to understand how and why cities develop and change, their physical and economic fabric, their historical and cultural context, and their place in Roman self-definition.
Introduction: Decolonising the Roman grid
Rome and the Colonial City: Rethinking the Grid, 2022
Introduction to the Volume; Rome and the Colonial City. According to one narrative, that received almost canonical status a century ago with Francis Haverfield, the orthogonal grid was the most important development of ancient town planning, embodying values of civilization in contrast to barbarism, diffused in particular by hundreds of Roman colonial foundations, and its main legacy to subsequent urban development was the model of the grid city, spread across the New World in new colonial cities. This book explores the shortcomings of that all too colonialist narrative and offers new perspectives. It explores the ideals articulated both by ancient city founders and their modern successors; it looks at new evidence for Roman colonial foundations to reassess their aims; and it looks at the many ways post-Roman urbanism looked back to the Roman model with a constant re-appropriation of the idea of the Roman.
[first published in Roman Urban Topography, 37-40, edd. F Grew and B Hobley, CBA Research Report 59, London, 1985] When the Romans established a new town of any status down to Civitas Capital, they planned it.
Modern ideology and the creation of ancient town planning
European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire, 1994
This paper examines the historiography of ancient town planning and the Roman city, with particular attention to its origin in the town planning debate of the early twentieth century. It questions the existing dichotomies, 'civilised'/'uncivilised', 'classical'/'barbarian', 'urban'/'proto-urban', that have characterised this history. Finally, the paper examines the effect of the separation of the academic disciplines of classics and archaeology in Britain upon the history of ancient urbanism. The modern town planning movement, in the early twentieth century, took part of its inspiration from recently excavated Classical cities. At the same time, the predicted results of modern town planning were attributed to these classical cities. This created a clear distinction between Roman and non-Roman nucleated settlements, which was accepted by classical archaeologists and has led to a distorted view of the classical city. To explain, Roman nucleated settlements are usually referred to by the terms 'city' or 'town* in the archaeological literature. In contrast, Iron Age nucleated sites are referred to as 'proto-urban'. This distinction between urban and non-urban sites has its origins in the work of Francis Haverfield, circa 1910-1913. 2 He asserted that the Roman city was systematically planned, in contrast to non-urban settlements outside the Graeco-Roman world. This interpretation of ancient towns as planned has never been questioned. 3 Classical archaeology unlike the rest of archaeology has not undergone the frequent revisions of method that characterise so much of the subject in recent years. 4 In contrast, 1. I do not include an account of the historiographical traditions outside Britain in this paper, because it has been recognised that archaeologies and histories have become part of national psyches, and should be approached critically from within these contexts to avoid nationalistic accidents when examining another culture's intellectual tradition. See I. Hodder ed., Archaeological Theory in Europe, London, 1990, reviewed in Europa. Revue européenne d'Histoire. European Review of History, 0 (1992), p.159-160. For a more up to date account of Eastern European archaeology see Antiquity, 67 (1993), p. 121-156. This paper is written to open up part of the British historiographical tradition. Ideally, I hope that the paper might provoke similar contributions by others working upon urban history in Europe. A previous version of this paper was given at the European Association of Young Historians Colloquium in Oxford (December 1992); I would like to thank all the participants for the stimulating discussion that followed the paper. Any present errors are my own. 2. F. Haverfield, 'Town Planning in the Roman World' in
2011
Researchers have virtually ignored the legal aspects of town planning in Roman times and we intend to approach the research from a contemporary conceptual and methodological framework, and, for this reason we have articulated the project around the following interdependent subjects, which are currently accepted as the components of Urban Development Law: spatial cohesion, town planning, housing and the environment. Therefore, it should be emphasized that Roman Urban Development Law distinctly evolved towards a social configuration thus providing the constant tension between private and public interests.
COLONNADED STREETS WITHIN THE ROMAN CITYSCAPE: A “SPATIAL” PERSPECTIVE
Studies tackling the Roman legacy of colonial cities and Arabian provinces are still grappling with these cities from an urban planning perspective and/or building typologies. They do not provide a ‘spatial’ analysis that allows reading the Roman cities through the features that structured its urban language; one of which is the colonnaded streets. The study adopts a holistic approach to confront the ambiguities about possible origins, uses and meanings of the Roman colonnaded streets when traced in the Roman East as well as other Western cities. Besides its utilitarian and cultural value, the colonnaded streets are analyzed according to two interrelated interpretations: astrological interpretation to represent an empire of astral divinity and performative interpretation to represent an empire of imperial power. The colonnaded streets is transformed from a ‘line on site’ into a ‘line of sight’ that testifies to the social norms of the Roman people but also to their ideologies, beliefs, and aspirations. Keywords: colonnaded streets, Roman urbanism, spatial analysis, astrological interpretation, performative urbanism.
Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry, 2018
In this work we try to identify if there exist specific patterns in the orientation of Roman towns and military settlements across the Roman Empire, and whether this can be explained by astronomy, as suggested in a number of ancient texts and latter discussed by contemporary scholars. In order to check if cosmology was present in the urban planning at Roman times we have analyzed the orientations of more than 250 Roman sites located in different regions, from the Roman West to the East, and is the largest dataset of this kind obtained so far. Our results present suggestive orientation patterns and point towards an astronomical intentionality, maybe by the integration of important dates of Roman and pre-Roman calendars into the urban layout.