Euclid’s dream: Hippodamus of Miletus

[…] is directed not to the rituality that celebrates the God who will come to inhabit it, but towards the Nous, the mind, and the city Lògos (Λόγος), which by ordering thought exercise their dominion over nature46 .

Euclid’s dream: Hippodamus of Miletus

Euclid’s admirable theoretical construct, which relies on just a few elements of plane geometry to rethink the entire vision and measurement of the world47, is translated in a harmonious and linear way into the plan of Miletus. Hippodamus of Miletus (498-408 B.C.) marks an epoch-making step in urban planning: he was the first Greek architect and urban planner to use regular planimetric schemes in city planning. On the one hand, the Hippodamian urban scheme consists of a street network characterised by straight streets with orthogonal intersections, with main (Πλατεῖαι, platêiai) and secondary (Στενωποί stenopói) streets, which subdivides the space into regular quadrangular blocks, with different functions but with similar importance (Fig. 10).

46 Chiodi G. M. 2010, Propedeutica alla simbolica politica, II, FrancoAngeli, Milano. 47 Euclidean geometry is a mathematical system attributed to the Alexandrian Greek mathematician Euclid, described in his textbook on geometry: The Elements. Euclid’s method consists of taking a small set of intuitively appealing axioms (the point, the line and the plane) and deducing many more propositions (theorems) from them. Although many of Euclid’s results had already been stated by earlier mathematicians, Euclid was the first to show how these propositions could fit into an overall logical and deductive system. With Euclid plane geometry, conceived as the first axiomatic system and an example of formal demonstration, began.

Fig. 11 Schematic city plan of Alexandria, Egypt. Source: Meyers Konversations-Lexikon. Ein Nachschlagewerk des allgemeinen Wissens, 5th edition 17 volumes Bibliographisches Institut-Leipzig 18951897.

On the other hand, places dedicated to worship and the administration of the city were generally located in a decentralised position on the acropolis, the highest point around which the polis was structured48. The Hippodamian layout characterised a number of Greek cities between the 5th and 4th centuries B.C.. It was also used for the reconstruction of Miletus and the design of Alexandria derives from it. The Hippodamian urban layout was designed to meet the specific needs of the community, the dimensions and the forms dictated by the availability of resources and the need for the population to participate in public affairs. For this reason Hippodamus held that for a city to be balanced and

48 Nifosi G. 2008, L’arte svelata, Editori Laterza, Bari.