Hippodamus of Miletus

He is seen as the originator of the idea that a town plan might formally embody and clarify a rational social order. However, as cities were built with orthogonal plans centuries before his birth, he cannot be considered the originator of the concept.[4]

He is referred to in the works of Aristotle, Stobaeus, Strabo, Hesychius, Photius, and Theano. He evidently had a reputation as a lover of attention. According to Aristotle's description in Politics, "Some people thought he carried things too far, indeed, with his long hair, expensive ornaments, and the same cheap warm clothing worn winter and summer."[5] In the treatise On Virtue, Theano (apparently the wife of Pythagoras) told a certain Hippodamus of Thurium (presumably this same man) that her work contains the doctrine of the golden mean.[6]

• Illustration — Map of Piraeus, showing the grid plan of the city

According to Aristotle (in Politics ii.8), Hippodamus was a pioneer of urban planning, and he devised an ideal city to be inhabited by 10,000 men (free male citizens), while the overall population (including women, children, and slaves) would reach 50,000. He studied the functional problems of cities and linked them to the state administration system. As a result, he divided the citizens into three classes (soldiers, artisans and 'husbandmen'), with the land also divided into three (sacred, public and private). Aristotle criticized the monopolization of arms-bearing by a single class in Hippodamus' "Best State" writings, arguing that this would lead to oppression of the "farmers" and the "workers" by the arms-bearing class.[7] Aristotle's own concept of polity included a large middle class in which each citizen fulfilled all three functions of self-legislation, arms bearing, and working."

According to Aristotle, he was the first urban planner to focus attention to proper arrangements of cities. He laid out the Piraeus (the port of Athens) for Pericles, with wide streets radiating from the central Agora, which was generally called the Hippodameia (Ἱπποδάμεια) in his honour, and built the refounded city of Rhodes[10] in the form of a theater.[8] In 440 BC he went out among the Athenian colonists[11] and planned the new city of Thurium (later Thurii), in Magna Graecia, with streets crossing at right angles; as a consequence he is sometimes referred to as Hippodamus of Thurium. His principles were later adopted in many important cities, such as Halicarnassus, Alexandria and Antioch.[12] Strabo credited the architect of Piraeus with the layout of the new city of Rhodes in 408 BC; however, as Hippodamus was involved in 479 BC with helping the reconstruction of Miletus he would have been very old when this project took place. The grid plans attributed to him consisted of series of broad, straight streets, cutting one another at right angles.[14] In Miletus we can find the prototype plan of Hippodamus. What is most impressive in his plan is a wide central area, which was kept unsettled according to his macro-scale urban prediction/estimation and in time evolved to the "Agora", the centre of both the city and the society.