Indus Towns and Huanghe Towns
The Origin of the Grid Pattern Town Plan
1984 Volume 57 Issue 2 Pages 101-110
Details
1984 Volume 57 Issue 2 Pages 101-110
The twentieth century is called the century of towns because large and small towns spread throughout the world. Most of them have a planned lay-out. Among them the grid pattern with straight streets intersecting others at right angles is the most widespread.
Dan STANISLAWSKI, starting from the Spanish towns of the New World, traced the origin of this design back to Mohenjo-daro in the Indus Plains. A. SMAILES also considered the development of the grid pattern in the Orient, Greece, Rome, and Europe in the Middle Ages. However, both studies explained little about the plan of Mohenjo-daro itself.
This author restored the original grid plan of Mohenjo-daro, and further took up another grid town, the ancient Chinese towns in the Huanghe Plains, which occurred not much later than the Indus towns, for not only their plans but also their measurement standards resemble each other very much.
The author proposes that the basic grid of Mohenjo-daro would have been about 180 meters (which correspond to 100 danda in ancient India) square and subdivided into 16 sections of about 40 meters (120 Mohenjo-daro feet) square; and that, starting with the Shang capital at Zhengzhou, the Chinese grid of one li (about 400 meters) square could have begun. Thus the idealized capital plan written in Zhouli could have been modeled after this Shang capital, but it was not followed fully from the beginning. Later, however, it was realized with some modifications during the Northern Wei, Sui and Tang Dynasties.
The grid pattern town planning of the Indus towns was adopted in the Indian subcontinent, namely not only India but also in Nepal, Ceylon, Burma, and as far as Cambodia. On the other hand, it spread via the Orient to Europe and finally to the New World.
At the same time the Huanghe town plan was practised in Korea and Vietnam, and inspired the capital planning in Japan, i. e. Nara and Kyoto were modeled after Luoyang and Chang'an in the Sui and Tang Dynasties.
