Short, late, not particularly insightful, post tonight. I'm in Michigan; I saw Obama speak at the University of Michigan commencement. Which was awesome, but the whole trip has involved a great deal of sleep deprivation and so I've read little and have little to say. Alas.

But I've been reading a book about ancient cities, "From Mycenae to Constantinople". It's a welcome change of pace from Edge City. Edge City, like its subject, is sprawling and thinly populated, but From Mycenae ... is written in a dense academic style. And I majored in Classics in college, so dense academic books about the ancients kind of feel like home. On the other hand, the conjunction of what appear to be my two main interests, cities and Classics never really overlapped. This is my first direct study, as opposed to allusion and asides in other classes.

Anyway, I haven't extracted a whole lot to

put here, cause I was reading it on three hours of sleep, and the book is not much concerned with city life as such. That is, there is little direct discussion of things like infrastructure, traffic, economic development and daily life, in part because those things are so hard to establish, and in part because it's not the author's main goal. But there is a tie in to Edge City in the case of Rome.

The best way to avoid Edge City is to have marauding bands of Gauls running around your countryside. As late as the 3rd century AD (when the army could no longer keep the barbarians at

the frontiers) Rome could be encircled with a 19km wall. A similar wall for Los Angeles would be 300km or so, relying on the coast to cover the other half. Additionally, Rome had great mixed use: shops, industry and housing was all intermixed in tight-knit districts. Indeed, such was the diffusion of uses that there is an entire page where the author wonders what the point of the forum, in the empire, was. (In the Republic, political discourse and argument was conducted there, but that was unnecessary in the autocratic Empire.) Official government business was done in the vast complexes of the Emperors which were elsewhere in the city. This is mixed use too, since the emperor and presumably his bureaucrats also lived there. Additionally, Most fora had basilicae where legal business was done, but the Imperial fora did not have one. And commercial activity was spread out. He concludes that it is wrong to view the forum as 'utilitarian' and that it was mostly just a large embellishment to make the city look good. As an urban form I'm not sure there's an equivalent in a modern American city; a compact city with no substantial downtown. Any thoughts?

(Image Source: Romeartlover.it)