Rome and the Colonial City: Rethinking the Grid

Sofia Greaves and Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, eds., Rome and the Colonial City: Rethinking the Grid (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2022). 9781789257809.

Reviewed by Maarten Schmaal, University of Groningen, m.p.schmaal@rug.nl.

This hefty volume is one of the outputs of the ‘Impact of the Ancient City’ project (funded by the European Research Council). It consists of the proceedings of the ‘Rome and the Colonial City’ conference, which was held under the umbrella of this project in January 2020 at the British School in Rome and the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome. The conference, and by extension this book, challenges traditional views and reception (in Western scholarship) of the orthogonal street grid found in many Roman colonies.

As the volume’s editors, Sofia Greaves and Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, make clear in the introduction, Western scholars and colonial powers have long drawn on the Roman grid as an urban layout which symbolized civilization and the justness of empire, and which was part of the Western inheritance of Rome. They present the British archaeologist Francis Haverfield (1860–1919) as a champion of this view before briefly setting up the challenges to the Haverfieldian paradigm which set the stage for the rest of the book. Greaves and Wallace-Hadrill show how the supposed ancient roots on which Haverfield and his colleagues built their perspective were perhaps not as strong as they thought, thus creating the necessary space for the book’s contributors to re-examine how urban planners and politicians alike perceived and used the orthogonal grid throughout history.

Part 1 of the book concerns the idealization of city planning throughout time. Irad Malkin starts off with an analysis of egalitarian ideals in ancient Greek colonies, and expertly shows how egalitarianism at the moment of foundation was entirely compatible with material inequalities emerging later in the colony’s lifetime. Malkin thus emphasizes the importance of viewing urban foundations in their chronological context, instead of focusing exclusively on the (idealized) moment of foundation. Along the way, Malkin makes an excellent case for the complementary nature of history and archaeology. Andrew Wallace-Hadrill then takes us to the Roman period and beyond to show how both the ancient cultures, which later Western urban planners and politicians so loved to connect with the civilizing nature orthogonal grid plans, and their medieval successors were themselves not at all concerned with the alleged civilizing aspects of urban grid plans. Authors from Vitruvius to Leon Battista Alberti espouse the values of grid (and radial) plans not for their civilizing influence but because of the environmental and health benefits of such layouts. Keith Lilley builds on this notion in his detailed examination of urban planning under Edward I of England, where he shows that urban plans expressed power structures and societal interests more so than any explicitly civilizing notion.

Sam Ottewill-Soulsby then proceeds to an exposé of the urban ideals of the fourteenth-century Catalan writer Francesc Eiximenis, who envisioned the city as the practical expression of heavenly vision. While this chapter is mostly descriptive and perhaps lacking somewhat in its overarching argument, it nonetheless contextualizes the previous chapters by extending the geographic range of their arguments to the Iberian peninsula. In a joint chapter, Javier Martinéz Jimenéz and Sam Ottewill-Soulsby then deepen this contextualization in a compelling and well-argued chapter on the late medieval Spanish authors Peter Martyr and Cervantes de Salazar. The views espoused by the two writers are used to demonstrate the flexibility of the ancient past in supporting differing and even conflicting views on later urban ideals. In both cases, ancient ideals helped to frame the New World in conceptualizations that could be understood by the Spanish mind of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

Edward Zychowicz-Coghill rounds out the geographical scope of the book by examining two foundations in the Islamic world: Kufa and Baghdad. The foundation narratives of these cities are used to show how early Islamic urbanism did not reflect the straightforward “march of progress” that is so often connected with rapid urbanization. Instead, debates on how to structure the new empire politically and socially were reflected in the urban plans of new foundations, thus resulting in the magnificent capital that was Baghdad as well as the military settlement of nearby Kufa. Finally, Reuben Rose-Redwood brings us to the modern era, examining how urban planners in the United States framed the grid. While this is not the easiest chapter to grasp (for readers less familiar with the concept of framing, it remains somewhat nebulous), it makes abundantly clear how, even in the modern age, the legacy of the orthogonal grid is a flexible tool that can be deployed in various ways to support a wide array of opinions and perspectives on cities and society in general.

Having thoroughly analyzed the various ideals that have been connected to urban planning in the first part, in Part 2 the book proceeds to subject the resulting urban realities to closer examination. Starting off, in one of the strongest chapters of the book, Alessia Morigi expertly shows how the modern Emilia-Romagna is still shaped by the ancient Roman settlement of the region by comparing the non-hierarchical relationship between the Roman cities to the relationship between their modern counterparts, thereby exposing the continuities between the two.

The following three chapters then focus on the necessity of taking a perspective on urban foundations that stretches beyond the moment of foundation. Andrew Dufton does so by examining Roman foundations in North Africa to show how their inhabitants shaped post-foundation city plans and adapted them to their interests, thus eroding any orthogonal grids. Efthymios Rizos examines Roman foundations in the imperial age, from Augustus to Justinian, and argues that the steady decline of grid plans in these foundations was the result not of moral decline and an increasing failure of the Roman civilizing mission but of shifts in the function of Roman colonies. Earlier colonies were mainly founded for the purposes of land division and were thus well served by orthogonal plans, while later colonies, founded in an age when Roman expansion steadily stalled, possessed a stronger logistical and military function. For these later colonies, grid plans added little practical value. Javier Martinéz Jimenéz rounds out this triad of chapters with a return to Iberia, in which he illustrates that the grid plan is not the only layout by which an orderly city can be created. Additionally, he stresses that such plans are ideals which are not necessarily respected after foundation of the city. The interests and needs of the city and its inhabitants change and the urban plan changes with them.

The final chapter in Part 2, by Martin Millett, critically examines how archaeologists approach the urban plans of the settlements they study. He shows in great detail how the drawings of orderly, gridded cities that are so often seen in scholarly publications are often based on extensive extrapolation. In some cases, the original excavators even went so far as to deliberately smooth out finds that contradicted the orthogonal grid plan by moving them so they would align with the excavator’s idea of what the urban plan should look like. Millett thus expertly shows how certain scholarly conceptions of urban grids can lead to circular reasoning: we believe that urban grids were omnipresent, so we interpret the evidence in such a way to confirm that belief. This chapter thus draws out an enormously relevant aspect of the subject of the book, one which holds particular relevance for those studying historical urban layouts. It is somewhat surprising that the rest of the book does not show more awareness of these issues, instead relegating them largely to this one chapter.

Finally, Part 3 of the book analyzes the impact of the Roman urban model, or urban ideal, in a long-term perspective. Frank Vermeulen’s chapter illustrates how the exceptionally ordered nature of the Roman colonia maritima served as inspiration for coastal towns and cities well into the late medieval period. Unfortunately, the motives for this continued use of the urban plan of Roman maritime colonies remain underexplored. Wim Boerefijn then proceeds to remind us that deliberate city planning did not disappear with the Roman Empire only to be rediscovered during the Renaissance, as some adherents to the civilizing narrative may argue. Instead, Boerefijn shows a wealth of examples of such plans from the more than 1,500 towns and cities founded in Europe between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries. This chapter is short and high-paced, and may have benefitted from a few more pages of source analysis, but nonetheless presents a convincing argument.

Sofia Greaves then brings us to the nineteenth century and analyzes Ildefonso Cerdà’s Eixample plan for Barcelona to show how Cerdà divorced the grid plan from Rome while maintaining its perceived civilizing properties. Greaves’s illustration of Cerda’s complex relationship with ancient Rome is effective in complicating nineteenth-century views of the urban ideal. The next chapter, by Said Ennahid, shows the other side of these views by expertly illustrating how French and Spanish colonial authorities in Morocco in the first half of the twentieth century employed selective and biased interpretations of local Roman archaeology to justify colonial domination over the Moroccan population. Grid plans were an essential tool in the imperial repertoire, and were deployed to visually and physically separate colonizer from colonized. Robin Cormack expands on Ennahid’s contribution by examining British colonial possessions in Sudan and India. By analyzing Khartoum and New Delhi, he argues that a grid plan does not automatically equate to a Roman-style city.

The last chapter of the book, by Aristotle Kallis, addresses what is perhaps the elephant in the room: urban planning under Italian fascism. His semiotic analysis of the deployment of romanità in fascist foundations in the Pontine Marshes and East Africa convincingly shows how Roman heritage was a flexible glue for various ideological currents within Italian fascism. The orthogonal grid plan was one tool among many in this—widespread, but certainly not omnipresent.

The bundle thus presents a particularly thorough diachronic examination of the Roman urban grid and its legacy. However, as is the case in most, if not all, edited volumes, and particularly in conference proceedings, some of the clarity and sharpness of argumentation is lost between chapters. Despite Greaves and Wallace-Hadrill’s best efforts in the introduction and their respective chapters, distilling a strong, final argument from the book is a task left to the reader.

Perhaps more importantly, the book’s analysis of ancient colonial realities on the ground, which were later used by the likes of Haverfield to justify the colonialist civilizing mission, is somewhat light. For instance, recent studies carried out by archaeologists connected to the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome have questioned the assumption that the ordered settlement and land division patterns on which these views are predicated can be causally related to the establishment of Roman colonies.¹ Morigi’s chapter on Emilia-Romagna tacitly acknowledges these challenges, but they are otherwise left untreated in this volume. Since these challenges could form a powerful decolonizing argument in line with the rest of the book, it is unfortunate that more attention was not paid to these studies.

A related study has additionally suggested that the urban orthogonal grids so closely associated with Roman colonies often only appeared later in the colonies’ lifetimes, after they were founded on an organic urban pattern.² According to this study, orthogonal grids are connected to gridded land division patterns in the colony’s hinterland, which were not unique to Rome (or Roman colonies) and often did not result in an urban grid until later in the colony’s lifetime, if at all. While Malkin leaves some room for these conclusions in his chapter by acknowledging that in Greek colonies, too, grid plans often came well after the moment of foundation, both Dufton and Rizos posit a dynamic opposite to these findings. They argue that urban grids were a phenomenon associated with the moment of foundation, after which they often eroded. The apparent contradiction between these perspectives is left untreated, even though Rizos agrees that urban grids are causally related to a colony’s function as a tool for land division.

Aside from these issues, which could have used a more thorough treatment, Rome and the Colonial City is extraordinarily effective in its challenge of the urban grid as a civilizing ideal. Approaching the issue from a great variety of angles, it illustrates how the orthogonal grid was used and abused by urban planners, politicians, monarchs, and conquerors throughout history, and how those uses relate to ancient views on urban planning and realities on the ground. In doing so, the book successfully challenges the notion that Roman colonial urban planning supported or justified later colonialism. Instead, it shows how proponents of colonialism constructed Roman urban planning to support their endeavors, and how it could equally be constructed in a different light to support or oppose other perspectives. Thus, if the title of the introduction, “Decolonising the Roman grid,” is seen as this volume’s mission statement, it can be considered nothing other than a success.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Decolonising the Roman grid / Sofia Greaves and Andrew Wallace-Hadrill (1–24)

Part 1. City planning and ideals of the city (27–164)
2. Reflections on egalitarianism and the foundation of Greek poleis / Irad Malkin (27–40)
3. Ancient ideals and modern interpretations / Andrew Wallace-Hadrill (41–60)
4. Ruling the realm: Sovereign spaces and the spatial ordering of medieval towns / Keith D. Lilley (61–82)
5. Making men and cities: Francesc Eiximenis on the reasons for city-founding / Sam Ottewill-Soulsby (83–100)
6. Ancient cities in new worlds: Neo-Latin views and classical ideals in the sixteenth century / Javier Martínez Jiménez and Sam Ottewill-Soulsby (101–22)
7. Ideals of the city in the early Islamic foundation stories of Kufa and Baghdad / Edward Zychowicz-Coghill (123–50)
8. The grid enframed: Mapping the enframings of the North American grid / Reuben Rose-Redwood (151–64)

Part 2. Roman colonisation and urban experimentation (167–288)
9. Urban settlement in Emilia Romagna: Between spontaneous development, grid-planning and post-antique adaptation / Alessia Morigi (167–86)
10. The long–term aspects of urban foundation in the cities of Roman Africa Proconsularis / J. Andrew Dufton (187–208)
11. No colonies and no grids: New cities in the Roman east and the decline of the colonial urban paradigm from Augustus to Justinian / Efthymios Rizos (209–38)
12. Foundational grids and urban communities in the Iberian Peninsula in antiquity and the Middle Ages / Javier Martínez Jiménez (239–66)
13. Town planning from Falerii to Isurium: Understanding and enhancing the archaeological evidence / Martin Millett (267–88)

Part 3. The impact of the Roman urban model (291–412)
14. From Potentia to Porto Recanati: The Roman coastal colony and its modern legacy /Frank Vermeulen (291–310)
15. New towns of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries and the grid plan / Wim Boerefijn (311–26)
16. Ildefonso Cerdà and the Eixample grid plan (1859): To be or not to be Rome? / Sofia Greaves (327–52)
17. Searching for Rome: French colonial archaeology and urban planning in Morocco / Said Ennahid (353–66)
18. Planning the colonial capital: Khartoum and New Delhi / Robin Cormack (367–88)
19. Roma rediviva: The uses of romanità in Fascist-era urbanism / Aristotle Kallis (389–412)

Notes

1. Anita Casarotto, Jeremia Pelgrom, and Tesse D. Stek, “Testing Settlement Models in the Early Roman Colonial Landscapes of Venusia (291 B.C.), Cosa (273 B.C.) and Aesernia (263 B.C.),” Journal of Field Archaeology 41, no. 5 (2016): 568–86; Anita Casarotto, Jeremia Pelgrom, and Tesse D. Stek, “A Systematic GIS-Based Analysis of Settlement Developments in the Landscape of Venusia in the Hellenistic-Roman Period,” Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 11, no. 2 (2019): 735–53.

2 . Jeremia Pelgrom, “The Roman Rural Exceptionality Thesis Revisited,” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome – Antiquité 130, no. 1 (2018): 69–103.