High Density Living, 2000 Years Ago: Inside the Roman Apartment Building
commonedge.org
commonedge.org
I can't say more without spoilers. Excellent for "feeling" what Rome was like.
Do I need to read the first book in the series, or are they independent? If independent, can you recommend the best one for someone who only has time to read one?
You make me think I should reread, and I will start at the beginning here too.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/6505103-a-day-in-the-...
See how pots strike and dint the sturdy pavement.
There’s death from every window where you move.
You’d be a fool to venture out to dine,
oblivious of what goes on above,
without your having penned that dotted line,
of your last testament.
If you ban loud bass I don't think I'd mind. Until then, no thank you.
Not sure what you mean. I've been to many lakes and have yet to hear any bass.
Home invasion murder is super rare.
Walking around a Roman town, hearing what people talked like, what they wore, what technology was around, what did they do most of the day.
Someone please make it real.
The “education mode” is officially called Discovery Tour: Ancient Greece. It removes all combat, enemies, and time pressure from the game and turns it into a large, interactive, open-air virtual museum.
https://www.ubisoft.com/en-us/game/assassins-creed/discovery...
My kids have actually used this (without any prompting from me) in middle school history classes.
There’s also a Story Mode, which lets players build their own narratives and share them. It can be quite a lot of fun.
There's an interesting small YT channel that did a series on ACB + History
Zoning has nothing to do with separating uses. It never has. In Seattle, for instance, you absolutely can put an apartment building next to a pig farm. Nobody bothers because the market isn't interested in doing that. That also isn't atypical, zoning has never been used to pad uses away from each other like you see in Simcity.
Seeing the sky and getting sunlight are also very suspect reasoning. It is darn near impossible to find real problems there that zoning prevents.
Zoning also doesn't limit damage or impact earthquake survivability at all. Except - where zoning prevents you from building new buildings, it preserves old unsafe buildings. Without zoning, more of those buildings would be replaced with new structures that are safe.
There's no dystopia zoning is preventing. Most of the comments I see like this have very little understanding of what it does.
Your point is much more valid in a car-centric (or car-enabled) world. Back when most industrial inputs and outputs moved by rail, and labor moved on foot, there were noxious and dangerous industries very close to housing. Just read up on Seattle's Skid Road. Pig farming wasn't in cities, but things like tanneries, slaughterhouses, sawmills, etc, were. Not to mention that at the time, almost everything was powered by coal.
Now, with electrical transmission and flexible truck-based movement of goods, it's a much safer world to let the market decide. But cities during the industrial area were really, really rough.
Industrial zoning came much later, as a post hoc justification, long after that was an issue.
Zoning truly never has.
You should have said something sooner. You could have prevented this whole mess where the government in Seattle mistakenly thought that zoning rules prevented shops from being opened in the middle of places zoned as residential. https://www.axios.com/local/seattle/2025/02/10/neighborhood-...
Maybe you've got a different definition of zoning laws, but I'm talking about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning_laws the history of which is entirely based on "separating uses" and "padding uses away from each other"
From the wiki: "The origins of zoning districts can be traced back to antiquity.[7] The ancient walled city was the predecessor for classifying and regulating land, based on use. Outside the city walls were the undesirable functions, which were usually based on noise and smell. The space between the walls is where unsanitary and dangerous activities occurred such as butchering, waste disposal, and brick-firing. Within the walls were civic and religious places, and where the majority of people lived."
> Zoning also doesn't limit damage or impact earthquake survivability at all.
It isn't just me who thinks it does. For example, the Earthquake Hazards Reduction Act of 1977 provided states with grants and assistance to "update building and zoning codes and ordinances to enhance seismic safety" (https://www.nehrp.gov/about/PL108-360.htm)
As they say, "earthquakes don't kill people, buildings do." The Alquist-Priolo Earthquake Fault Zoning Act came after the 1971 San Fernando earthquake and prevented the building of new structures on fault lines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alquist_Priolo_Special_Studies...) but earthquakes also cause problems beyond shaking buildings apart and making them fall onto each other and zoning can help with those other hazards too "Large water waves, such as produced by tsunamis, seiches, and dam failure or overtopping, can be anticipated in many places. Their effects can be lessened by land-use regulations similar to flood-plain zoning, restrictions on location of critical structures, and appropriate warning systems." (Seismic hazards and land-use planning - https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/cir690)
> Seeing the sky and getting sunlight are also very suspect reasoning. It is darn near impossible to find real problems there that zoning prevents.
It's harder to find examples in the US where this has gone horribly wrong because people tend to be very opposed to these situations whenever they arise. Many places have already placed restrictions to prevent worst cases.
"A number of states have enacted zoning statutes which allow municipalities to consider solar access a legitimate public purpose.56 The statutes tend to employ conventional zoning techniques, such as building height limitations, lot size restrictions and set-back requirements." (https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/cjel/article...)
Cities tend to talk about the problem in terms of skyline preservation and residents tend to talk more about access to the sky as "their view" being obstructed but folks really do care about it when a tall building takes their sun away. Recently the problem of dense urban housing and tall structures impacting access to sun and sky have gotten a boost as interest in solar power has risen.
Here's some additional info on the problem if you're interested:
https://www.groundreport.in/environment/cloud-cover-and-urba...
https://skyscrapersworld.com/skyscraper-shadows
https://nationalpost.com/news/world/architects-claim-no-shad...
https://www.architectmagazine.com/technology/this-week-in-te...
In the West at least, basically every street and block was laid out by planners from the early 1800s until post WWII. After that it's much more done by large scale private land developers (e.g. Levittown, Irvine).
Of course what you read in history is from the rich point of view. If you had wealth (slaves back on the farm) city life was really good.
the wealth explosion in the high middle ages and significant rise in standard of living was fully accompanied by (and maybe precisely because of) the flourishing of urbanity as well. there were great jobs in the city. proto industry and cottage industry, specialized trades, guilds, ... would you rather be a farmer, subject to the whims of your lord and the weather, or instead weave cloth at a more individualized pace, as a band of brothers?
that city was also a much more calm and verdant atmosphere than we now image as well. gardens, high intensity cultivation, markets, plazzas, all within city walls, not to mention a very accessible country side outside in walking distance ... no noise pollution from cars. i think people tend to forget this aspect a lot more, because they imagine the crowded industrial city. that machine-environment wasnt the norm for the hundreds of years preceding it. we should image bruges in 1370 here as the norm, not manchester in 1870.
sure, the city could be filthy, but farmlife was miserable in its own ways. and sanitation was bad in the city, it was just as bad as on the farmstead.
What you state as "urban sprawl" would be "mostly normal" living density for a city like Rome. When I walk the streets of larger cities, its not like the downtown core has acres of land per house, or even a 1/4 acre.
Now of course, there are some differences over time. But my point is that it's not as if the car has caused urban sprawl, in fact, downtown cities are far more dense than 500 years ago. Or 2000, or whatever. One 40 story apartment building, which is common not even just in downtown cores, is a lot more dense than anything 1000 years ago, land use would be 10x or 20x or even 40x.
I know there's this fad to pretend the car caused every problem ever, but it's just not true.
2000 years ago, Rome had similar population density to Paris 500 years ago.
Historically, urban people wanted to live inside city walls, if possible. When the population grew, most of the growth turned into higher density inside the walls. There was always some urban sprawl outside the walls, but that was mostly poor people and those who didn't have the right to live in the city proper. Major cities occasionally built a new set of walls surrounding a wider area, but that didn't happen every century.
3-4 story apartment buildings gives a net residential density of 30-100 units per acre. Typical 20th century urban development is 3-10 units per acre, with suburban "urban sprawl" at the low end of that. See [1] for examples.
Yes towers exist now, and downtown areas have much more intensity and square footage. But outside of NYC (861 of the top 1000 densest census tracts) and a very short list of other parts of other US cities[2], residential density is much lower almost everywhere than it was in 1950, including in cities. Units per acre and especially people per unit have steadily and dramatically dropped. The drop in NYC population density is dramatic even as built square footage has increased[3].
But for every 40 story tower out there, there are hundreds of square miles of car-centric suburban development.
[1] https://mrsc.org/stay-informed/mrsc-insight/april-2017/visua... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFB5YooSo5M&t=936s [3] https://urbanomnibus.net/2014/10/the-rise-and-fall-of-manhat...
And completely not based on reality, I also liked the British comedy series Plebs that also follows regular people living Rome. But it's just a way to show modern issues satirically, not really historical.
A lot of history focuses too much on leaders and elites. I would like to see much more information about how regular people lived. Or for example, when a some king “built” something, maybe we should know how life was for the workers there.
There's a classic five volume series "A History of Private Life" that works through a breadth-first survey over time. It can make for a great starting point, and is a bit like an encylopedia in the way you can engage with it as essays on certain times and topics instead of being expected to read it through serially.
https://patrickwyman.substack.com/p/new-history-podcast-past...
I guess that's the rear (or arse) end, if anyone else is puzzled and doesn't have a couple of spare minutes to chase it down ...
>> top floors were the least desirable. Poorer residents occupied the upper story.
Some writers placed Julius Caesar's aristocratic but down at the heel family in the lower floors of a Subura tenement, but apparently it really was a house.
This remained true in Western cities until elevators became widespread in the late 1800s. In New York city, for example, buildings didn't reach above 6 floors because even the poorest people would not walk up more stairs. Street level was frequently retail space, next floor up might be office space, everything higher was residential. Until Otis showed how to make a safety brake.
Nobody in their right mind would have even wanted plumbing in their home at the time.
Plumbing of the time was not airtight - this was before cheap metal and S-traps. So any drainage would be a highway for noxious odors and gasses right into your home. Bringing in fresh water would only be marginally useful without some sort of drainage.
Outbuildings persisted in the West for a while after modern plumbing because unless you are acclimated to it, the very idea of bringing refuse facilities into the home goes against every natural human instinct.
Well spotted. India is apparently going through that, and they have a joke - older people complain that new generations are lost: "They dine outside and shit inside!"
And someone below mentioned 'Plebs', which is the humorous take on all this. Recommended.