Ancient Urban Planning
Explore ancient urban planning — from the grid streets of Mohenjo-daro to Mesopotamian temple districts — and how early cities organized space and society.
The world's earliest cities reveal strikingly different approaches to urban organization. Some, like the Sumerian city of Uruk, grew organically around temple complexes — a tangle of narrow streets and irregular blocks radiating outward from a sacred center. Others, like the Indus Valley cities of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, were planned with geometric precision: grid-pattern streets, standardized brick dimensions, and municipal drainage systems that wouldn't be matched for thousands of years.
These differences in urban form reflect differences in social organization. Mesopotamian cities organized around temples suggest societies where religious institutions dominated economic and political life. The Indus Valley's standardized, egalitarian-seeming urban layouts hint at a different kind of authority — one focused on civic infrastructure and collective welfare rather than monumental self-glorification. Egyptian cities were planned around palace and temple complexes that physically expressed the pharaoh's divine authority.
Ancient urban planning was not merely aesthetic — it was a technology of social control and community life. The placement of walls, the width of streets, the location of markets and temples, the provision (or absence) of public spaces — all these choices shaped how people lived, interacted, and understood their place in society. The urban plans of antiquity are, in a very real sense, fossilized social structures.