Chapter One
Greek City Planning in Theory and Practice [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]
From here godlike Nausithoös had removed [the Phaiakians] and led a migration, and settled in Scheria, faraway from men who eat bread, and driven a wall about the city, and built the houses, and made the temples of the gods, and allotted the holdings. (Homer, Odyssey 6.7-10, trans. Lattimore)
In this earliest reference to Greek colonization, the basic elements of founding a new polis are already in place: the uninhabited land, the construction of fortifications and the temples of the gods, the division and allotment of agricultural land, and the building of houses, presumably on lots assigned to the colonists like the farmland. In its essence, the process remained basically the same for a thousand years.
The goal of this chapter is not to provide a history of Greek city planning. Rather, it will consider a few literary accounts and historical cities which develop issues concerning the relations between polis and household, issues which relate to the understanding of the archaeological remains at Olynthus. These issues include the composite nature of the citizen body in new cities and the consequent need to unify a diverse population, the correspondence between physical organization and social structure, and the importance of the distribution of land as a mechanism for achieving unity and order.
A variety of situations could lead to the creation of a new Greek city. Colonization and clerouchies far from the homeland were frequent and familiar phenomena. Villages, small towns, and cities were joined in synoikisms (literally "a dwelling together") to form a single larger city. Cities were destroyed and rebuilt, or moved and refounded on a new site, or expanded onto a new terrain. According to one estimate, by the fourth century B.C. one-third of all Greeks who lived in cities, lived in cities which had been newly founded since the Geometric period. This continuous founding and rebuilding of cities gave the Greeks ceaseless opportunities to develop theories about the organization of the ideal state, and left traces of those theories in philosophical writings, in the accounts of historians, in inscriptions, and in the remains of the cities themselves. The processes of colonization, synoikism, and refoundation, repeated over the centuries, were important motivating factors in the development of the polis as a characteristically Greek institution. The problems of organizing a new settlement - of drafting laws, designing a city, building its walls, dividing the land, distributing temples to the gods and houses to the citizens-had to beworked out over and over, and the process of solving these problems gave the planners and the inhabitants of these new communities fresh insights into the nature of human society.
By the sixth century B.C. and probably earlier, theorists and oikists had begun to design ideal states based on principles of cosmology and natural history, and to apply those ideas to the foundation of actual cities. They began to recognize explicitly and study the dual aspect of the polis, as concrete city and as social community, and to redefine the relation between those twin aspects to create a society whose social and spatial organizations were correspondent and reflected higher moral and philosophical ideals. In a general way, such redefinition and restructuring occurs in any city foundation. But these processes are particularly important in highly planned and organized communities like the Greek colonies where new laws, new constitutions, new systems of land tenure, and the like were drawn up at the outset, and the city and citizen body laid out and organized taking future expansion into consideration.
We know little about the earlier civic theorists. We know some names, but none of their written works survive save Plato's and Aristotle's. Aristotle's Politics, the most complete surviving discussion of ideal states, mentions a few notables: Hippodamus of Miletus, Phaleas of Chalcedon, and Plato; and these are all rather late in the development of Greek urban planning. We can draw some conclusions from extant city plans and from surviving laws and constitutions, but while this evidence suggests that the planners of these early communities were concerned with many of the same problems as later theorists, and seem to have come to sophisticated conclusions about the planning and organization of towns, it does not for the most part help us to reconstruct their thoughts. Their theories were nevertheless familiar to a contemporary audience: Aristophanes could draw a laugh from his Athenian audience by parodying these thinkers in the Birds. The reforms of early lawmakers, such as Cleisthenes in Athens and Aletes in Corinth, also demonstrate their concern that the physical organization of the polis reflect its social organization (and vice versa) and help us identify different means of achieving such correspondence.
HIPPODAMUS OF MILETUS
The most famous Greek urban theorist, and the earliest of whom we have any real knowledge, was Hippodamus of Miletus. If he wrote treatises they are long gone, and we know of his personality and thoughts primarily from Aristotle's brief description in the Politics. Although (wrongly) famous as the inventor of the grid-planned city and discussed today mainly as an architect and city planner, Aristotle tells us that Hippodamus "wished to be a man of learning in natural science generally, [and] was the first man not engaged in politics who attempted to speak on the subject of the best form of constitution" (Politics 1267b). Hesychius and Photius, both late lexicographers, describe Hippodamus as a meteorologos, a natural philosopher. Hippodamus thus seems to have come to city planning from the theoretical, rather than the practical side of things; he was concerned not solely with the physical layout of cities but in the ordering of an ideal society, and he designed his ideal city to accommodate such a community. But he was also involved in the planning of a number of historical cities: the Piraeus is securely attributed to his hand, and Thurii and Rhodes are also associated with him. Thus although we know few details of his utopia, we can fill out some of his thoughts, at least about its physical appearance, from its realization at those sites.
Aristotle tells us that Hippodamus "discovered the division of poleis" ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]). This could refer to the physical planning of the city - not the invention of the grid plan, which was already ancient when Hippodamus was born, but some other aspect of the city's organization - as well as to the division of the polis as a community of citizens. It very probably refers to both, and to the correspondence between physical and social planning. Hippodamus organized his ideal state in a tripartite system. The polis, of 10,000 citizens, was divided into three sections based on occupation: one section of artisans, one farmers, and the third soldiers. Likewise the land was to be divided into three parts, religious, public, and private sections; the laws were organized into three classes, wanton assault, damage, and homicide; and the magistrates were to attend to three subjects, public matters, matters relating to aliens, and matters relating to orphans. Such an attention to numerology is sometimes attributed to either Hippodamus's background in Ionian natural science or to Pythagorean influence, but it is encountered in other political and architectural works, for instance in the Laws of Plato, and could be seen as characteristic of general Greek ideas about city and social planning rather than of Ionian thought in particular.
All citizens of Hippodamus's state were not landholders: the private section of land was owned by the farming class, while the public section of land was devoted to producing food for the soldiers, and the artisans presumably lived off their work. But although the majority of the population did not own land, all citizens were equally enfranchised: Aristotle says that the demos was composed of all three "sections" ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) of citizens, and formed the assembly which elected the city magistrates. The aim of Hippodamus here is to create a state in which, although both the citizens and the civic space are divided into specialized sections, these sections are uniform, parallel, and equivalent to one another. Thus although his state is organized along different lines from such previous states as Cleisthenes' Athens, it is still not explicitly hierarchical in its social organization nor in its conception of space.
Aristotle further tells us that he "cut up" ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) the Piraeus, and refers to cities planned "according to the newer and according to the Hippodamian manner" (Pol. 1330b). Hippodamus was a practicing planner, and aspects of his thought can be understood through how it was carried into practice. Hesychius and Photius provide glosses on I[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], "the nemesis of Hippodamus," explaining it as "Hippodamus, son of Euryboön and a meteorologos, divided (or distributed) the Piraeus for the Athenians." These nemeses thus seem to be related to the "division of cities," at least of the Piraeus.
A group of boundary stones from the Piraeus documents these nemeses. The inscriptions are dated by letter forms to the fifth century, and some at least probably belong with Hippodamus's replanning. Of particular interest are three boundary stones delimiting the nemeses of the city ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) and of the Mounichia hill. These inscriptions read: [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], "Up to this road here is the nemesis of the Mounichia," and two stones read [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], "up to this road here the City has been 'nemesized.'" The word [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] is derived from the verb [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] a rather general verb meaning "to divide, apportion, distribute," and is occasionally used, by itself and in compounds, in contexts of urban planning for the division of land or citizens into smaller sections, for distribution of land to citizens, and the like. McCredie suggests that in this context [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] had a technical meaning, and translates it as "'plan,' 'layout' or even 'grid,' rather than simply 'occupation' or some such."
The boundary stones themselves directly attest only one nemesis, the Mounichia, a hill in the eastern part of the city. This stone was found in situ just northwest of the hill. The other two stones, reading [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], were not found in situ. McCredie translates the inscriptions "Here, up to this street, the City has been planned," suggesting that the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], as distinct from the Mounichia and other regions, formed one nemesis. But the different phrasing of the two inscriptions might suggest a different meaning, and the second text might just as easily be translated "Here, up to this street, the City has been divided into nemeses." The City would then not be a single nemesis but a series of nemeses, of which the Mounichia is one.
Unfortunately the actual plan of the Piraeus is rather poorly known, since the Sullan destruction left the city in ruins and the modern port has destroyed or buried what was left. The little that is known, primarily from nineteenth-century observations, suggests that the hills of Mounichia and Akte were laid out without a true grid plan. Since the Mounichia formed one nemesis it is possible that the Akte formed another. The flatter central part of the Piraeus, in contrast, was laid out in a regular grid, with four main streets oriented northeast-southwest, and a number of main streets (five?) oriented northwest-southeast. These seem to define a series of large parcels of land, about 250 x 275 m, which were subdivided by smaller streets into house blocks. This type of hierarchical divisive planning, with wide streets defining "major rectangles" which are then subdivided into blocks, is a method quite different from that of cities like Olynthus, where streets of equal width divide the city into blocks, without larger arteries or clearly divided sectors.
Hippodamus's most significant contribution to city planning, then, is probably this special method of division of land and territory. Although Aristotle describes only three broad functional categories of land in Hippodamus's ideal state, his "division of cities" seems to be more complex, flexible, and generally applicable than a simple division of land by function. As McCredie points out, it is this aspect of Hippodamus's planning, rather than any innovations in orthogonal street patterns, which established his position as the father of Greek city planning.
At least in Aristotle's account of Hippodamus's thought, we find established most of the technical terminology used later in planning cities. Hippodamus's discovery of the "division of cities" and his "distribution" of the city into nemeses set the groundwork for later planners, both of utopias, such as Plato's Magnesia and Aristotle's city in the Politics, and of real cities.
PLATO'S LAWS
Of Plato's three utopian works, the Republic, the Statesman and the Laws, the last is his fullest account of the design and establishment of a new city. Published in 346 B.C., a year after Plato's death and two years after the destruction of Olynthus, the Laws is couched in terms of a plan to establish a colony - Magnesia - near the south coast of Crete. Although replete with details about the location of the city, the origins of its citizens, and so forth, and although Plato claims that this is not going to be an ideal utopia but will take into account the imperfections of human nature, the Laws is not meant to be a blueprint for an actual city, any more than the dialogue is intended as a record of a real conversation. Nonetheless, Plato's prescription for the foundation of Magnesia seems to agree in many respects with what we know or would expect of the planning of real Greek cities, and just as many of his laws are based on actual Greek codes, his account of the foundation of his Cretan "almost-utopia" may reflect, in some respects, actual Greek practice.
Plato's city is to be established in the middle of the countryside, far enough from the sea to be safe from the pernicious influences of ports and commerce.
Continues...
Excerpted from Household and City Organization at Olynthus by NICHOLAS CAHILL Copyright © 2002 by Yale University. Excerpted by permission.
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