Rome, Ostia, Pompeii captures how studies of the Roman city are currently shifting away from architecture towards a dynamic understanding of activities within the urban space. This is becoming a defining feature of new and innovative research on the nature of ancient urbanism and is underpinned by an understanding of the relationship between space and society - the two sides of the core dialectic of the 'Spatial Turn' in cultural studies. In this volume a new generation of scholars provide detailed case studies of the three best known cities from antiquity, Pompeii, Ostia, and Rome, and focus on the movement or flow of a Roman city's inhabitants and visitors, demonstrating how this movement contributes to our understanding of the way different elements of society interacted in space. Through a uniquely broad range of historical issues, such as the commoditization of movement in patronage relationships, the appropriation of 'architectural space' by 'movement space', the importance of movement and traffic in influencing representations of ancient urbanism and the Roman citizen, this volume studies movement as it is found both at the city gate, in the forum, in the portico, and on the street, and as it is represented in the text and on the page.
Throughout this book, the authors are concerned with the residues of movement - the impressions left by the movement of people and vehicles, both as physical indentations in the archaeological record and as impressions upon the Roman urban consciousness. The volume's interdisciplinary approach will inform the understanding of the city in classics, ancient history, archaeology and architectural history, as well as cultural studies, town planning, urban geography, and sociology.
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