How to Build a City: The Roman Operating System

There is no doubt that the Roman cities were wonderful artifacts, which represented their society and the empire in a way cities today struggle to match. But exactly how did the romans manage to achieve this?


   The first chapter of Rem Koolhaas's Mutations  book (published by ACTAR in 2001) is a manual for building your own Roman city (thank you Ewa M. for pointing it out to me!). The chapter discusses the way Roman cities were planned and created in a DIY style of writing which tempts you to go out there, buy a plot of land, and actually try it out! 

   The birth of the Roman cities were all the same: using the axial cross - called the cardo  and ducumanus - to align themselves to the heavens above, then generating a grid, and finally placing the buildings. In a way, this planned view of city building is very simple and strict, however the romans knew that rules where meant to be broken, and that the basic form of the city had to co-exist with the specific conditions each individual city presented. The argument is that Roman cities were "100% generic" - thus having common principles making them all the same - but equally, they were "100% specific" as they each reacted and adapted to local environmental, typographical, site specific situations as well as diverse cultures which spread across the empire. This makes the Roman city a successful tool...

"... the Roman Empire's most elevated subject and most useful object..." (Koolhaas, 2001, p.11)

...And what the author classes as a "200% city". The city was the object through which Rome expressed their authority and through which trade - the most valuable resource of the Empire - was maximized. Cities were like independent islands but interconnected through the infrastructure technology of the time - the road - to form a unified whole.


   The chapter hits on some interesting principles: it aims at setting up the city as a program rather then a series of buildings. To use Stephen Marshall's analogy, the city is explained as a computer which does a specific function within the network of the Roman Empire, and the singular buildings within the city (which in themselves are standardized and categorized) are seen as hardware to make the city function. In other words, the way the Romans built the city was like an intricate game of chess: set pieces (being the key buildings) organized in such a way onto a centuratio (or grid) and confined by limites (or edge systems of walls). 


   Through the city, the Romans created an Empire, and through the infrastructure connecting each city, they strengthened it. I wonder if today we can take these ideas and adapt them to our time. Is there a way of creating cities which are like flat packed Ikea furniture, containing within them all of the elements which, if placed together properly following a set logic, can become a fully functioning city? One might say that planned cities have existed way after the Roman Empire fell, such as the modernist cities envisioned by Le Corbusier and his colleagues. But although these statements are true, then why is it that today we identify problems within cities in areas which are primarily planned... and not organic historic centers? Perhaps we should take a time leap backwards to the Roman way of doing things and try to understand why their methods were so successful, and ours are not.