Rome and the Colonial City

distribution), the grid plays a main role in the early stages of a city. As such, the grid is closely linked to the cosmovision of the original founders. But these perceptions and associated meanings change, and we cannot expect them to be eternal.91 In their two thousand years of history, Roman grids in the Iberian Peninsula have had time to change and to be changed according to the shifting priorities of the

But deviations and alterations of the grid do not need to be part of decline and fall narratives: they represent the evolution of civic communities and changes in their perception of their own urban environment

). This contrasts sharply with the Mesopotamian model, where roads work as axes towards focal buildings,21 or the nineteenth-century boulevards of many European cities

One level of understanding represents the cosmological perception of the city. In this sense, the establishing of a new city should reflect the ideal concept of urbanism, but a city could also represent the values and visions of the cosmos. Circular cities are a very clear example of cosmological ideas imposed on an urban plan, but rectangular grids can also represent the ideal worldview

underlining the fact that the urban form at the foundation represents the cultural values of the founders and not necessarily those of their successors centuries after

key element is also the individuality of the settler as a concept and the understanding that the settler is a citizen with a role within the community, which normally becomes associated with ownership of urban and rural allocated plots. In the Mesopotamian tradition, which had enough mathematical knowledge to do perfect right angles, the distribution of urban spaces in new foundations was done by granting sectors to groups based on kinship or other form of collective self-definition, and this did not result in street grids