Cities are not simply made up of buildings; rather, they are ordered spaces in which roads, fortification walls, houses, government buildings, monuments, churches and temples are related to create a whole. All societies relate these elements in some formalized way, the most common of which is called city planning.

1. No evidence of planned communities at an early date, although some point to the Mycenaean megaron as the basic idea behind all ancient urban planning (this is probably an overstatement).

2. As with early Mesopotamian cities, planning of some sort was apparently first connected with religious sanctuaries.

a. In part this may have had to do with the "liturgical/ceremonianl" aspect of religious sites: processions toward the complex.

b. It may have to do with the fact that buildings in religious sanctuaries were seen as related structures and these were controlled by a single body of individuals.

c. This may also have had to do with the great Pan-Hellenic sanctuaries (Olympia, Delphi, Isthmia, Nemea) that were controlled by individual powers and that were developed in large part to demonstrate certain ideas--largely political power.

3. Smyrna

a. Hippodamos (Hippodamus) is usually seen as responsible for "inventing" orthogonal planning, yet some elements existed earlier.

b. The example of Smyrna, which was rebuilt after a great fire in the 7th century B.C.

c. The rebuilt city had a series of parallel streets running north and south; at one point there was an open space laid out for the agora and near it, on a hill, was a temple.

d. This scheme was a simple one, but it represents a definite plan, applied to the larger urban area and based on the natural topography.

4. Importance of the Greek colonies.

a. Colonies were independent cities "sent out" by states in the Greek "motherland" in the 8th to 5th centuries.

b. These were not like colonies in the early modern world (American colonies, etc.)--most importantly they were totally independent in the political sense.

c. Colonies established on the shores of the Black Sea, southern Italy and Sicily, and southern France and Spain.

d. There is little evidence of what these early cities looked like, but the creation of the colonies presented an opportunity -- or even the necessity -- to consider how a city should be laid out.

e. It would be natural to use simple systems of road layout and division of house-plots and monuments.

f. Land (i.e., farms) was also normally divided since the citizens of the new city would normally be given farms in the new colonies.

1. Hippodamos of Miletus

a. Born in Miletus (in Asia Minor) toward the end of the 6th century B.C.

b. According to Aristotle: "he invented the division of cities by classes;" he was eccentric in appearance and habits; and the author of a treatise on the ideal constitution. So he was a theoretician more than a practicioner.

c. Hippodamos, however, was responsible for the laying out of Piraeus (the port of Athens) at some point during the second quarter of the 5th century B.C. and he took part in the foundation of the colony of Thurii in southern Italy in 444/3BC.

2. Miletus (in Asia Minor)

a. Rebuilt after the defeat of the Persians in 479BC, perhaps (although there is no specific evidence) with the assisance of Hippodamos.

b. This was done with a rigidly orthogonal plan using a repeated pattern of identical units (city "blocks").

c. Ample space was provided for the city's commercial and religious buildings.

d. The plan provided a limited number of wider arterial avenues (main streets).

e. The city wall enclosed but was not organically related to the city.

f. Miletus was thus "ahead of its time" and it was not until several decades later that these ideas received their full development -- most toward the end of the 5th century.

3. The "principles" of Hippodamian planning.

a. It is not certain what role Hippodamos actually played in this development: he may have been a "codifier," who took the ideas of others and wrote about them in a theoretical way, saying how cities should be laid out.

b. The primary characteristic was the orthogonal plan ("gridiron" plan, with streets at right angles), adapted to function and topography (i.e., not mechanically applied).

c, Regular housing blocks.

d. Large areas set aside for public use: temples, theaters, offices, commercial centers.

e. Wide arterial avenues.

f. Walls that enclose the city, but are not necessarily related to the plan.

4. Rhodes (island in the southeast Aegean, near the coast of Asia Minor).

a. City was founded in 408/7BC.

b. Orthogonal layout based on broad avenues (in one case 16 m. wide) that intersect to form 600-foot squares, these in turn subdivided by narrow streets into smaller rectangular blocks. (Note that the Greeks used a foot that varied from place to place, but that was more or less the size of the English foot.)

c. The site was carefully chosen, ringed with hills, shelving down to the harbors, with city blocks terraced up the slopes.

d. This means that the city as a whole was considered a "monument," or that the whole city was "monumentalized." This is a really important and revolutionary idea.

e. The street drainage may have been the first of its kind.

5. Priene (in western Asia Minor)

a. City refounded in the middle of the 4th century BC.

b. It had a spectacular location on sloping ground at the foot of a nearly perpendicular cliff, some 1000 feet high, that was the akropolis.

c. Priene was based on rectangular blocks 120 x 160 feet.

d. Many of the steep streets were stepped, but there was excellent east-west communication.

e. The agora occupied a central terrace overlooking the gymnasium.

6. Olynthos (Olynthus)

a. Olynthos was an ancient city of irregular plan.

b. A spacious new plan was laid out ca. 432BC with broad avenues intersected at right angles.

c. The blocks were 120 x 300 feet and each contained ten houses: five houses were on a side, with a narrow alley between them.

d. The houses were all of the same type: the main rooms facing south across a courtyard.

1. Some form of planning had characterized sanctuaries and other important complexes from a fairly early date.

2. In one sense, Hippodamian planning represents the application of the principles used in sanctuaries to the city (or society) as a whole.

3. Why did people thing this was worth doing?

4. To a certain degree this represents the desire to systematize knowledge and social and political arrangements that characterized the classical period.

5. One sees this in the work of the sophists, the historians, and philosophers such as Sokrates and Plato -- considerations of the ideal society, how society should be organized.

6. Another approach is to see this as an aesthetic consideration--to make the city beautiful.

7. Yet another approach is to connect this with religious ideas about the nature of space: making all of society reflect "divine truths."