ancient cities

46 Athens, Greece
of myths and processions in her honor in the
Parthenon marble friezes. It was the major monument
of a city-state that rose to hegemony for a
mere 100 years, but still, it became a model for
European—and indeed global—culture: language,
political institutions, philosophy, drama, art, and
architecture. This eternal “city of memory” inspired
European geographical imaginations and reproduced
global prototypes not only in archaeology or
philosophy or cultural studies but in several fields,
including urban studies.
After the sixth century BC, following a first
wave of flowering of Greek culture in Ionian cities
and especially Melitus in Asia Minor, classical
Athens rose from a sea of tyranny, first defeating
the Assyrians and then expelling its tyrant, Hippias,
in 510 BC. Its short-lived civilization (510–404 BC)
offered many of the advances and concepts of
today’s European culture and global institutional
discourse: Citizenship from “city” (politis from
polis), the person participating in public life, in
contradistinction from idiotis, the private person
and the etymology for idiot, as in Marx’s “rural
idiocy”; polis, policy, politics, politismos, that is,
civilization; theatron, with “view” as its etymology;
tragedy, comedy, philosophy, history; geography is
a Greek word, too, though a later one, of the
Hellenistic period (second century BC). The main
thrust of classical culture was not commerce and
material production but the quest for knowledge,
advances in sexuality and politics—generally, reason,
culture, and investigation rather than religion.
In the realm of politics, Athens offered the
word, the theory, and the practice of democratia,
“democracy.” The etymology comes from demos/
demoi, local communities surrounding the citystate.
According to Aristotle, the union or community
(koinonia) of Demoi was the full polis—a
society, a community, and a state. The words polis/
politeia/politis (i.e., city/citizenship/citizen) have a
common root and denote urbanism in a positive
light. This legitimizes the introduction of “citizenship”
on multiple spatial levels, as we do today,
using it in connection with the urban, the national,
and now the European level—despite its etymology
based on the city. Planning also centered on the
city by definition—polis/poleodomia (i.e., city/
town planning)—and classical architecture contributed
the Doric and Ionian orders, while later
the Corinthian order emerged in Corinth. The harmonic
rules for building were perfected in the
Acropolis temples, especially the Parthenon, built
by Ictinos and Callicrates in the age of Pericles and
inaugurated in 432 BC. Hippodamus from Miletus
introduced the “hippodamian system” of urban
design there and also in Piraeus and Rhodes: A
checkerboard of equality engraved on the urban
landscape represented democracy on the ground
and in effect introduced modern urban design.
The ancient city-state was centered on the agora,
the forum, the urban public space where direct
democracy and citizenship were concretized (civitas,
politeia). Ideas and policies were debated here
in the citizens’ assembly without any censorship.
Decisions were made by all eligible “citizens”
rather than just their representatives, and every
man (but no women) participated, irrespective of
income, property, or rank. Leaders were elected to
office only to carry out the people’s will. Pericles
was not a ruler but the city’s leading citizen, who
was elected annually. The agora was much more
than physical space (urbs: Latin) or a “speakers’
corner” or an open space for strolling. It literally
meant “marketplace,” where commerce was centered,
but it was actually a complex space of mixed
uses and intense social interaction. In the agora,
the Acropolis, and the city at large, the interpenetration
of nature and culture was harmonized in
classical architecture by the in-between space of
the colonnade, the stoa, a pathway of columns
open to the outside but also connected with the
inside through the roof of the relevant building
bordered by the stoa.
This was the landscape in which classical civilizations
developed. Citizenship and participation in a
real, natural city were considered as a precondition
of civilization and the essence of democracy.
However, among the three claims of citizenship in
modernity, the city-states of antiquity respected
two: the right to voice, to express (democratization);
and the right to human flourishing; but not the right
to difference. In this, classical Athens was a weak
democracy in many senses. Citizenship was bounded
by gender, territoriality, and social exclusion—of
women, slaves, and “barbarians,” or noncitizens. It
was actually this exclusion of the “others”
from citizenship and the army that constituted the
main weakness of the Athenian democracy and its