Category: History - Ancient

Ancient Town-Planning

Town-planning--the art of laying out towns with due care for the health and comfort of inhabitants, for industrial and commercial efficiency, and for reasonable beauty of buildings--is an art of intermittent activity. It belongs to special ages and circumstances. For its full...

Chapters

7. Chapter 7

The preceding chapters have dealt with the origins and general character of the Italian town-plan. We pass now to the remains which it has left in its own home, in Italy. These...

5. Chapter 5

If Greek and Macedonian town-planning are fairly well known, the Roman Empire offers a yet larger mass of certain facts, both in Italy and in the provinces. The beginnings, natu...

4. Chapter 4

The Macedonian age brought with it, if not a new, at least a more systematic, method of town-planning. That was the age when Alexander and his Macedonian army conquered the East...

8. Chapter 8

The provinces, and above all the western provinces of the Roman Empire, tell us even more than Italy about Roman town-planning. But they tell it in another way. They contain man...

3. Chapter 3

Greek town-planning began in the great age of Greece, the fifth century B.C. But that age had scant sympathy for such a movement, and its beginnings were crude and narrow. Befor...

10. Chapter 10

These points yielded a regular plan of streets crossing at right angles, which in many of its features much resembles that of Autun. Thirteen streets were traced running east an...

2. Chapter 2

The beginnings of ideas and institutions are seldom well known or well recorded. They are necessarily insignificant and they win scant notice from contemporaries. Town-planning...

6. Chapter 6

During the later Republic and the earlier Empire many Italian towns were founded or re-founded. To this result several causes contributed. Like the Greeks before them, the Roman...

1. Chapter 1

Town-planning--the art of laying out towns with due care for the health and comfort of inhabitants, for industrial and commercial efficiency, and for reasonable beauty of buildi...

12. Chapter 12

What was the sequel to this long work of town-planning? Two facts stand out distinct. First, the Roman planning helped the towns of the Empire to take definite form, but when th...

9. Chapter 9

In the preceding chapters Roman town-planning has been treated in connexion with towns of definite municipal rank, which bore the titles 'colonia' or 'municipium'. The system is...

11. Chapter 11

Archaeology tells us that the western half of the Roman Empire and many districts in its eastern half used a definite town-plan which may be named, for brevity, the chess-board...