The culture of urban design

no defensive walls, and agricultural crops surrounded the city. The peoples of central Mexico developed various types of urban settlements: the large, densely populated imperial capital of Tenochtitlan, with its focus on economic activity and administration of an empire, the many smaller towns organised as city-states devoted to religion and local administration, and other towns that focussed on particular trades or cults. This urban heterogeneity, in spite of common features, is one of the most striking characteristics of the early cities from which, largely, all contemporary cities derive.

The culture of urban design

From its origins the city has always been interpreted according to two different points of view, namely the ‘city as a womb’, a place of safety and peace, and the ‘city as a machine’, a complex instrument of functions, requiring efficiency and effectiveness. The moment in history when these two meanings merge and overlap with greatest originality can certainly be identified in the birth of Greek and then Roman culture. As Massimo Cacciari reminds us43, these two civilisations, although often understood in historical continuity, developed two very different concepts of the city. In Greek, the word Polìs (πόλις) means seat, dwelling, the place where a ‘people’ with specific traditions have their Èthos (Ἦθος), their origin, thus generating a lineage. In Latin, Civitas, on the other hand, links the origin of the city to the Cives, a group of people gathered to form the

43 Cacciari M. 2004, La città, Pazzini editore, Verucchio.