Roman Urbanism

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The Greek Model

The formation of towns is not simply a matter of the agglomeration of communities, but of the forging of a community of distinct character. For in stance in Hellenistic times no Dark-Age community deserves to be called a town, and the growth of towns in the 8th and 7th cents. seems in many cases to be a result of separate village communities coalescing for political and economic reasons . Greek political thought did not recognize the existence of urban communities which were not also politically independent: Aristotle in Politics 1 sees the polis as the natural evolutionary product of the growth of the village. Urbanism and political independence should therefore be seen as going closely together. The development of the stoa, from the mid-6th cent. onwards, had an important part to play in this: the stoa originated as a place of shelter in sanctuaries, but came to be used as a flexible meeting-place suitable both for official gatherings, such as lawcourts and is where the Stoics first gathered and took their name for the stoa.

The Roman Model

See Main Article on Early Roman Urbanism

The Romans, ‘the most city-proud people known’, founded their city-policy and urban ideology principally on their own city. Already in the 6th cent. bc extensive in surface-area, imposing in its public buildings and private houses, and complex in its management of space. It is only from the perspective of the super-city that the long-lasting tradition of Roman urban policy can be understood.

The military successes transformed Rome. Not only because it has the money to build great monuments to their success bit also because it imported influences form southern Italy and the Greeks in their towns. Notably forum, porticoes, comitium, temples, streets, sewers and monuments.In military establishments we see the building of fortifications on the model of Hellenic military engineering It was particularly apparent in the regularity and uniformity of the plan, which have become the most famous features of Roman cities, and which is reflected in the legal and political institutions and their architecture (comitium and basilica, for instance), and increasingly by the late republic, the provision of the latest in the people's perks or commoda, such as baths and places for spectacles.

By the age of Cicero Romans had embellished their communities with the latest in Hellenistic taste, in a way that was still intermittent at Rome and was somewhat haphazard in its planning. Sulla, Pompey, and Caesar made strenuous efforts to remedy this, and Augustus completed the process of making Rome a worthy model for the founding and embellishing of cities everywhere. The legacy of rectilinear planning and subdivision of space apart, Roman urbanism and its apparent uniformity in the early imperial period are the product of the imitation in local communities of canons of monumentality made fashionable by people further up the chain of patronage and was and a symbol of conversion from barbarism.

Fires and expansion into the periphery made possible the development of large areas of the city on a more regular plan. The great baths and prestige projects like the Colosseum or Pantheon were imitated in favoured centres; in projects like the forum Traiani, however, or the great temples of the reigns from Hadrian to Aurelian, it is the grandiose architecture of the provinces that was being recreated on a grander scale in the centre.

The destruction of cities (Carthage, Corinth, Jerusalem) must be considered part of Roman urban policy. Posing as the first or new founder of a city was a potent image that came to be frequently used. New imitations of the centre were made on an ambitious scale, and certain cities were singled out to enjoy the full benefit of imperial favour like Leptis Magna. The city was usually the focus of administration and the base for supervision.

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