27/10/2018 Equity in the City (2): Three Lessons from the Ancient Roman Metropolis | UrbanRegions

UrbanRegions

PLANNING. IDEAS. DISCUSSION.

ESSAY

Equity in the City (2): Three Lessons from the

Ancient Roman Metropolis

POSTED BY ISABEL CERON ⋅ OCTOBER 8, 2011 ⋅ LEAVE A COMMENT

FILED UNDER EQUITY, ESSAY ON ROMAN CITIES AND EQUITY, URBAN FORM
Lesson 1

SOCIAL EQUITY AND THE ECONOMY OF PROXIMITY AND DENSITY

CENTRALITY OF PUBLIC FACILITIES AND SPACES.

The fact that advantageous urban locations are scarce and prohibitively expensive strikes us as
natural deed today. However, as most other features of the urban form, the distance between
residential and other civic/social land uses is the result of deliberate man-made choices and, as such,
can and should be the subject of urban planning reflection and change.

In the old Rome, planning split ways with sustainability the moment they combined centralised
location of civic buildings and social amenities/facilities with a lot-distribution system based on social
status and political privilege.

At first sight, the neat grid of the Roman city plans evokes a natural good sense of organization. But
neatly-looking does not necessarily mean fair in urban form. The facilities of the newborn metropolis,
materialized in built structures such as the market, the temple and the theatre, inaugurated a whole
new economy of access which inevitably gave advantage to some people over others: only a few
would enjoy these facilities in the vicinity of their homes, while the majority would have to struggle
to gain the less advantageous lots. The question then was: who should be granted the best spots?

VIEW FROM THE SLUM. View of the city of Medellín from the heights of Santo Domingo Savio, one
of its biggest slums and home to more than 170,000 people (Romero 2007). The disadvantage of place
experimented by the poor turns evident in this picture: the prosperity and wealth of the metropolis
are, figuratively and positively, a mirage in the distance. The photograph was taken from Romero’s
article 'Medellin’s Nonconformist Mayor Turns Blight to Beauty', published in The New York Times,
15th July 2011.

“The units outlined in this way were assigned to the inhabitants according to their ranks and offices
(…) Soon we recognize neighbourhoods being formed. The patricians wished to live on the Palatine
or the heights of the Quirinal. The common people massed in the narrow valley of the Subura”.
(Grimal 1983, pp.11-13).

Deciding the spatial allocation of residential uses with respect to social infrastructure and services is
one task government planners led in the hands of markets until it was too late. The longstanding lack
of more equitable choices in this area means, today, that the poor usually live at greater distances
https://isabelceron.wordpress.com/2011/10/08/equity-in-the-city-2-three-lessons-from-the-ancient-roman-metropolis/ 1/3
27/10/2018 q Equity in the City (2): Three Lessonsyfrom the Ancientp y | UrbanRegions
Roman Metropolis g
from the city facilities, spend more time and money on transportation, and tend to restrict their access
to centrally-located amenities such as libraries, schools and parks. Proposing different principles is a
theoretically and politically daring task.

Ebenezer Howard’s plans for the Garden City offered a solution to the problem of inequitable access
by imposing limits to city size (so that no uses could ever be too far from dwellings), as well as by
providing decentralized facilities in peripheral residential areas (Scargill 1979).

The distribution of urban beauty is another interesting but rarely mentioned angle of this topic,
recently brought up by Sergio Fajardo, a former mayor of Medellín, Colombia, who in 2007 decided
to build public libraries in the slums with the same grandiloquent architectural style of those public
libraries in the city centre. “Our most beautiful buildings” said the mayor “must be in our poorest
th
areas” (The New York Times, 15 July 2007).

When deciding the location and characteristics of future uses, planners should keep alert to the
existence of alternatives to usual practice and old common sense, so far represented in the centrality
of civic buildings and social amenities, and aim to reinvent, as much as possible, the installed
hierarchies of access and location.

HOWARD’S IDEAL. The Garden City of Howard was much more than an exhibition ground for
ornamental gardens. Its supply of workplaces and schools in the nearness of all dwellings was a
creative response to the problem of differentiated access. His formula took advantage of the circular
outline by placing the facilities in the inner and outer rings. This diagram was taken from Scargill
(1979, p.160).

Back to Essay Intro / Go to Next Section

REFERENCES

Grimal, P 1983, Roman Cities, The University of Wisconsin Press, Wisconsin.

Mumford, L 1961, The City in History. Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects, Secker &
Warburg, London.

Scargill, DI 1979, The Form of Cities, Bell & Hyman, London.

Romero, S 2007, ‘Medellin’s Nonconformist Mayor Turns Blight to Beauty’, The New York Times, 15
July 2007 (visited 18 March 2009).

Discussion

No comments yet.
https://isabelceron.wordpress.com/2011/10/08/equity-in-the-city-2-three-lessons-from-the-ancient-roman-metropolis/ 2/3
27/10/2018 Equity in the City (2): Three Lessons from the Ancient Roman Metropolis | UrbanRegions

UrbanRegions

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

https://isabelceron.wordpress.com/2011/10/08/equity-in-the-city-2-three-lessons-from-the-ancient-roman-metropolis/ 3/3