Books
Andrew Wallace–Hadrill,Sofia Greaves

Rome and the Colonial City

According to one narrative, that received almost canonical status a century ago with Francis Haverfield, the orthogonal grid was the most important development of ancient town planning, embodying values of civilization in contrast to barbarism, diffused in particular by hundreds of Roman colonial foundations, and its main legacy to subsequent urban development was the model of the grid city, spread across the New World in new colonial cities. This book explores the shortcomings of that all too colonialist narrative and offers new perspectives. It explores the ideals articulated both by ancient city founders and their modern successors; it looks at new evidence for Roman colonial foundations to reassess their aims; and it looks at the many ways post-Roman urbanism looked back to the Roman model with a constant re-appropriation of the idea of the Roman.
818 printed pages
Original publication
2022
Publication year
2022
Publisher
Oxbow Books
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Quotes

  • Talia Garzahas quotedlast year
    distribution), the grid plays a main role in the early stages of a city. As such, the grid is closely linked to the cosmovision of the original founders. But these perceptions and associated meanings change, and we cannot expect them to be eternal.91 In their two thousand years of history, Roman grids in the Iberian Peninsula have had time to change and to be changed according to the shifting priorities of the
  • Talia Garzahas quotedlast year
    But deviations and alterations of the grid do not need to be part of decline and fall narratives: they represent the evolution of civic communities and changes in their perception of their own urban environment
  • Talia Garzahas quotedlast year
    ). This contrasts sharply with the Mesopotamian model, where roads work as axes towards focal buildings,21 or the nineteenth-century boulevards of many European cities
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