Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 The creation of an urban culture
- 2 Colonisation and the development of Roman urbanism
- 3 City foundation, government and urbanism
- 4 The reception of Roman urbanism in the West
- 5 Town planning, competition and the aesthetics of urbanism
- 6 Defining a new town: walls, streets and temples
- 7 Assembling the city 1: forum and basilica
- 8 Assembling the city 2: baths and urban life
- 9 Assembling the city 3: theatres and sacred space
- 10 Assembling the city 4: amphitheatres
- 11 The Roman city in c. AD 250: an urban legacy of empire?
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Town planning, competition and the aesthetics of urbanism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 The creation of an urban culture
- 2 Colonisation and the development of Roman urbanism
- 3 City foundation, government and urbanism
- 4 The reception of Roman urbanism in the West
- 5 Town planning, competition and the aesthetics of urbanism
- 6 Defining a new town: walls, streets and temples
- 7 Assembling the city 1: forum and basilica
- 8 Assembling the city 2: baths and urban life
- 9 Assembling the city 3: theatres and sacred space
- 10 Assembling the city 4: amphitheatres
- 11 The Roman city in c. AD 250: an urban legacy of empire?
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Everywhere is full of gymnasiums, fountains, gateways, temples, handicrafts and schools. And it can be said in medical terms that the inhabited world was, as it were, ill at the start and has now recovered. Never does the flow of gifts from you [Rome] to these cities stop, nor can it be discovered who has received the greater share, because your generosity is equal toward all. Indeed, the cities shine with radiance and grace, and the whole earth has been adorned like a pleasure garden.
(Aelius Aristides Orations 26.97–9)From ‘town planning’ to a new urban aesthetic: armature
One of the most distinctive and widely remarked elements of the Roman city is the presence at very many sites, from the middle Republic in Italy onwards, of a regular, orthogonal grid of streets; particularly noticeable of course to modern scholars working from two-dimensional plans of these sites. Because of the ubiquity of such sites with street-grids and the way in which those grids control the placing of buildings and other features of the urban landscape, they have been accorded great importance in the modern literature on Roman urbanism.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The City in the Roman West, c.250 BC–c.AD 250 , pp. 115 - 134Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011