ABSTRACT

The form of cities has been influenced by design since the earliest times, though the motivation has varied a great deal, from mythology and religion to geopolitics, military strategy, national identity, egalitarianism, public health, economic efficiency, profitability and sustainability. Similarly, the driving forces behind urban design and planning have ranged from despotic powers to utopian idealists, and from democratic governments to private developers. The earliest antecedents can be traced to the centralized power of early empires. Roman town planning was characterized by rectilinear street layouts that were oriented to the cardinal points of the compass. The latter was a result of Roman mythology, while the grid layout was a practical solution to laying out new settlements as the empire expanded geographically. Greek city-states were designed with rectilinear street patterns for the same reason. Meanwhile, both Greek and Roman cities shared another aspect of design that derived from centralized power: imposing symbolic and institutional

structures, systematically arranged in the urban core – the forum of the Roman urbs and the agora of the Greek polis.