Urban Space and Urban History in the Roman World

M. Flohr (ed.) (2021) Urban Space and Urban History in the Roman World. Studies in Roman Space and Urbanism. London and New York: Routledge.

This volume investigates how urban growth and prosperity transformed the cities of the Roman Mediterranean in the last centuries BCE and the first centuries CE: it highlights how these cities developed landscapes full of civic memory and ritual, saw commercial priorities transforming the urban environment, and began to expand significantly beyond their wall circuits. These inter-related developments not only changed how cities looked and could be experienced, they also affected the functioning of the urban community, and together contributed to keeping increasingly complex urban communities socially cohesive.

By focusing on the transformation of urban landscapes in Late Republican and Imperial period, the volume adds a new, explicitly historical angle to current debates about urban space in Roman studies. Confronting archaeological and historical approaches, the volume presents developments in Italy, Africa, Greece and Asia Minor, thus significantly broadening the geographical scope of the discussion. As it offers novel theoretical perspectives alongside well-documented, thematic case studies, the book will appeal to a broad scholarly audience.

With contributions by Amy Russell, Annette Haug, Miko Flohr, Patric-Alexander Kreuz, Chris Dickenson, Cristina Murer, Marlis Arnhold, Elizabeth Fentress, Touatia Amraoui, Candace Rice, Saskia Stevens, Sandra Zanella, and Stephan Mols and Eric Moormann.

This book is sold in hardback, paperback and digital format through Routledge

 

Table of contents

1. From urban space to urban history – an introduction (Miko Flohr)

SECTION I. EXPERIENCING THE CITY

2. Political space and the experience of citizenship in the city of Rome: architecture and interpellation (Amy Russell)

3. Emotion and the city. The example of Pompeii (Annette Haug)

4. Hilltops, heat and precipitation: Roman urban life and the natural environment (Miko Flohr)

SECTION II. COMMUNITY, IDENTITY AND URBAN SPACE

5. Topographical permeability and the dynamics of public space in Roman Minturnae (Patric-Alexander Kreuz)

6. Antique statuary and urban identity in Roman Greece (Chris Dickenson)

7. Women in the forum: the cases of Italy and Roman North Africa (Cristina Murer)

8. Religion in the urban landscape: the special case of Rome (Marlis Arnhold)

SECTION III. COMMERCE AND THE URBAN LANDSCAPE

9. Sacred transactions: religion and markets in Roman urbanism. (Elizabeth Fentress)

10. Fora and commerce in Roman Italy. (Miko Flohr)

11. The archaeology of urban workshops in the Roman Maghreb (Touatia Amraoui)

12. The ports of Roman Lycia: urbanism, networks and hierarchies (Candace Rice)

SECTION IV. URBAN LIFE BEYOND THE CITY WALLS

13. Urban borderscapes in Roman Italy. Arenas for social, political and cultural interaction.(Saskia Stevens).

14. The tabernae outside Porta Ercolano in Pompeii and their context (Sandra Zanella)

15. Roman roads as an indicator of urban life: the Via Appia near Rome (Stephan Mols and Eric Moormann)

 

Bibliography