Urban and House Form Constrained by Water Resources—Morgantina

Although we may think that physical form of a city is mainly the result of cultural preferences interacting with the inherent potential of local materials, there are in fact even more basic constraints that constitute the substratum of every urban form because they are the basis of life itself. These factors are food, water, and the earth that provides them and makes life possible. The urban form makes explicit how the society provides food and water for its members and how they relate to the earth. Intentionally and unintentionally, the forms of the houses, the work places, the public buildings, and the open spaces reflect the people's values and ways of behaving, as well as what they know about their environment and how they manipulate it. We are so accustomed to analyzing modern cities or “primitive” cultures in these terms that to state them is to utter a truism, but in the study of ancient cities these ideas have been applied rarely if at all. One cannot exhaust this broad subject in one chapter, since the formal and technical details are not condensible, nor are the cultural-historic aspects susceptible to terse summary. Rather, we will take one basic constraint—water—and examine it in the light of the evidence from one particular place—Morgantina, Sicily—with just enough comparative material to make the details from Morgantina stand out clearly. This singular analysis will, I hope, suggest how fruitful it would be to study ancient urbanization in terms of the social and architectural results of resource management. The ordinary provisions for urban form and water management as they interrelated at one ordinary site are discussed in this chapter. The desired urban form dictated placement of water system elements, and the water potential was exploited to make possible the kind of physical arrangement preferred by the urban dwellers. In this provincial town, the standard solutions for water management were applied, and the resulting urban form differed from the typical only in the feature of the great steps, which as we have seen, were specifically built to solve a drainage problem. The street patterns of ancient Greek cities are discussed in Chapter 5, Urban Patterns.