Aristotle’s lectures on the city-state. Two short passages are the earliest surviving discussion of town planning: the portrait of Hippodamus of Miletus, who first divided cities into regular blocks, and the advice on where to put the walls, the temples and the two kinds of agora.
The Politics is a set of lecture notes on how communities are, and should be, governed. It is not about architecture, but Aristotle thought that the physical city expressed its constitution, and in two places he stops to discuss its plan.
In Book II he examines the ideal constitutions proposed by earlier thinkers, among them Hippodamus of Miletus, son of Euryphon, who invented the division of cities into blocks and laid out the Piraeus, the port of Athens. Aristotle paints him as a vain eccentric with long hair and costly ornaments, who wore the same cheap warm cloak in summer and winter, and who wanted to be learned in all of nature. His ideal city had ten thousand citizens in three classes (craftsmen, farmers and soldiers) and its land in three parts, sacred, public and private.
In Book VII, sketching the best city, Aristotle turns practical. The site should be healthy, turned to the east and sheltered from the north, with plenty of water. A citadel suits oligarchy and monarchy, level ground democracy. The houses are pleasanter and more convenient laid out straight in the modern, Hippodamian manner, but the old tangle of streets was safer against invaders; so lay out only parts regularly, as vine-growers plant their vines in clumps, and not the whole city. Walls are necessary, whatever the old-fashioned say. The temples and the magistrates’ halls should stand together on a conspicuous and strong site; below them lies a “free” agora kept clear of trade, where no craftsman or farmer comes unless summoned, with the gymnasium of the older men beside it; and the market agora is a separate place, convenient for goods brought by land and sea.
The book, part by part
I Book II, ch. 8 (1267b–1269a): Hippodamus
The inventor of the division of cities, planner of the Piraeus; his ideal city of ten thousand in three classes, with sacred, public and private land.
Rules: The Hippodamian grid
II Book VII, ch. 11 (1330a–1331a): site, streets and walls
Health, water and defence in the choice of site; the citadel and the constitution; regular streets are convenient, irregular ones safer, so combine them; the city must have walls.
Rules: The Hippodamian grid
III Book VII, ch. 12 (1331a–b): temples and agoras
Temples and magistrates on a commanding site; a free agora without trade below them, with the gymnasium of the elders; a separate market agora for buying and selling.
Rules: Two agoras: one for citizens, one for trade · Temples on a conspicuous site