Neighbourhoods and City Quarters in Antiquity

Book excerpt: Studies on ancient urbanity either concerns individual buildings or the city as a whole. This volume, instead, addresses a meso-scale of urbanity: the socio-spatial organisation of ancient cities. Its temporal focus is on Late Republican and Imperial Italy, and more specifically the cities of Pompeii and Ostia. Referring to a praxeological and phenomenological perspective, it looks at neighbourhoods and city quarters as basic categories of design and experience. With the terms 'neighbourhood and 'city quarter' the volume proposes two different methodological approaches: Neighbourhood here refers to the face-to-face relation between people living next to each other - thus the small-scale environment centred around a house and an individual. Neighbourhoods thus do not constitute a (collectively defined) urban territory with clear borders, but are rather constituted by individual experiences. In contrast, city quarters are understood as areas that share certain characteristics.