ABSTRACT
At the end of his now classic essay, ‘Orbits: the Ancient Mediterranean Tradition
of Urban Networks’, the late Jean Gottman pondered whether ‘this ancient
Mediterranean tradition [of city networks] express[es] basic curiosity or even
more, the impulse to learn how to deal with others, how to overcome distance, and
perhaps even how to overcome human diversity?’ (Gottman, cited in Gottman
and Harper 1990: 34). In exploring this question Gottman counterposed two
trajectories of urban Mediterranean civilization, the one Platonic, characterized
by small, insular and self-sufficient city-states, the other Alexandrine, marked by
vast, poly-nuclear and densely interconnected territories. ‘Which is the essential
orbit?’ (Gottman and Harper 1990: 24). While recognizing the subtle
interdependencies linking both patterns of urbanization, from the vantage point
of the 1983 Oxford lecture from which his essay derives, Gottman cautiously left
the question open.
