Town Planning in Ancient India c6.3

c6.3

Cities may be grouped into two main divisions according as they evolved consciously or unconsciously. It cannot be definitely asserted in the history of any city that every stage of its growth from the very foundation was due to deliberate efforts to improve and expand it. Neither can the contrary proposition be seriously adduced, that at no period of a certain city did it receive any trimming from human hands. The truth perhaps lies midway between these extremes. Either it was first laid out by a certain king; then it grew and grew until the unseemly state of things called for an appropriate resetting. Or it may be where we now find a full-fledged city, there resided a patriarchal family in days of hoary antiquity. The family grew into a village; the village, possibly because of containing a market-centre, outgrew its rural dimensions and significance until it came to be a city and was, at some stage or other, rightened and improved according to the best town-planning traditions. Any locality bidding fair to grow into a town must be endowed with advantages of a market or temple, facilities of easy access and conveyance especially by water (e.g., prominent trade-routes, navigable rivers or seas), a satrapy or fortress. This is true for all towns, whether in India or outside it. It may be the existence of a river or of a trade-route attracted the others. Generally in all countries it is the temples or churches that are established in the already existing towns and not the towns that are founded about them. Only in India it has been possible for a temple to throw out a city round about it.