The present work examines Greek, Etruscan, Italic, Hellenistic, and Roman cities that were based on orthogonal or grid plans--those characterized by streets intersecting at right angles to form blocks of regular size and spacing.

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.

New Directions in Urban Planning in the Ancient Mediterranean assembles the most up-to-date research on the design and construction of ancient cities in the wider Mediterranean. In particular, this edited collection reappraises and sheds light on ’lost’ Classical plans. Whether intentional or not, each ancient plan has the capacity to embody specific messages linked to such notions as heritage and identity. Over millennia, cities may be divested of their buildings and monuments, and can experience periods of dramatic rebuilding, but their plans often have the capacity to endure. As such, this volume focuses on Greek and Roman grid traces - both literal and figurative. This rich selection of innovative studies explores the ways that urban plans can assimilate into the collective memory of cities and smaller settlements. In doing so, it also highlights how collective memory adapts to or is altered by the introduction of re-aligned plans and newly constructed monuments.

The orthogonal, or rectangular, grid plan arose out of a need to organize the sprawling cities of Ancient Greece. To one particularly enigmatic figure in history, this problem was met with a blueprint and a philosophy. The ancient city-planner known as Hippodamus of Miletus (c. 480-408 BCE) was more of a philosopher than an architect, but his erudite connections and his idealistic theories provided him with numerous opportunities to experiment with the design that has come to bear his name. According to Aristotle, he was commissioned by the city of Athens to redesign its port-city, the Piraeus, and it is likely that he later followed a Pan-Hellenic expedition to an Italic colony known as Thurii (Thourioi). Strabo argues that the architect was also present at the restructuring of the city of Rhodes; however there is some debate on this issue. Hippodamus' blueprint for a planned, districted city soon came to define the Greek polis in the Classical period, culminating with Olynthus in the Chalcidice, but his ideas were by no means unique to his own mind.