ABSTRACT
In the fourth century BCE, when Plato wrote the Republic, to found and design a city was far from a fantasy. Hippodamus, who has often been called the ‘father of city planning’, was a fifth-century BCE theorist – indeed according to Aristotle, the first to write about constitutional matters without experience of political office – who not only drew up the plan for Piraeus, the port of Athens, but also designed the new colony city of Thurii in southern Italy. Hippodamus is significant, however, not just as the first theorist whose plans were enacted, but because in his thinking and planning he linked social structure, land tenure and civic administration into a coherent system. Scholars of urbanism have emphasized how damaging the unintended consequences of urban planning decisions are when they do not adequately integrate local problems within a broader context and do not calibrate social, economic and political values with enough sophistication.
