Lecture

Urban Life in Ancient Greece

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In course

AR-502: The origins of domestic space

The course is part of a three-year trajectory dedicated to a comprehensive history of domestic space. This year the course will be devoted to the origins of domestic space, from hunter-gatherer forms of life to the rise of private property. ...

Description

This lecture explores the political organization of urban life in Ancient Greece, focusing on the transition from village to Polis. It covers the rise of the Demos, the importance of property, and the significance of the Polis as a citizen state. The instructor delves into the architecture of domestic space, from Megaron to Oikos, and discusses the colonization efforts of ancient Greeks. Additionally, the lecture delves into the originality of the Polis as a political association according to Aristotle's Politics. The presentation also touches on Hannah Arendt's concept of the Human Condition, emphasizing labor, work, and politics as essential domains of human life.

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Instructor

Pier Vittorio Aureli

Expertise Architecture, political theory, urban history Pier Vittorio Aureli (Rome, 1973) is an architect and educator. He studied at the Istituto di Architettura di Venezia (IUAV) and later at the Berlage Institute and TU Delft where he earned his PhD. Aureli currently teaches at the école Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne where he direct the Laboratory Theory and Project of Domestic space and teaches courses on History and Theories of Architecture. He has taught at the Architectural Association in London

Official source

Related concepts (31)

Urban geography

Urban geography is the subdiscipline of geography that derives from a study of cities and urban processes. Urban geographers and urbanists examine various aspects of urban life and the built environment. Scholars, activists, and the public have participated in, studied, and critiqued flows of economic and natural resources, human and non-human bodies, patterns of development and infrastructure, political and institutional activities, governance, decay and renewal, and notions of socio-spatial inclusions, exclusions, and everyday life.

Urban history

Urban history is a field of history that examines the historical nature of cities and towns, and the process of urbanization. The approach is often multidisciplinary, crossing boundaries into fields like social history, architectural history, urban sociology, urban geography, business history, and archaeology. Urbanization and industrialization were popular themes for 20th-century historians, often tied to an implicit model of modernization, or the transformation of rural traditional societies.

Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece (Hellás) was a northeastern Mediterranean civilization, existing from the Greek Dark Ages of the 12th–9th centuries BC to the end of classical antiquity (600 AD), that comprised a loose collection of culturally and linguistically related city-states and other territories. Most of these regions were officially unified only once, for 13 years, under Alexander the Great's empire from 336 to 323 BC (though this excludes a number of Greek city-states free from Alexander's jurisdiction in the western Mediterranean, around the Black Sea, Cyprus, and Cyrenaica).

Property

Property is a system of rights that gives people legal control of valuable things, and also refers to the valuable things themselves. Depending on the nature of the property, an owner of property may have the right to consume, alter, share, redefine, rent, mortgage, pawn, sell, exchange, transfer, give away, or destroy it, or to exclude others from doing these things, as well as to perhaps abandon it; whereas regardless of the nature of the property, the owner thereof has the right to properly use it under the granted property rights.

Urban design

Urban design is an approach to the design of buildings and the spaces between them that focuses on specific design processes and outcomes. In addition to designing and shaping the physical features of towns, cities, and regional spaces, urban design considers 'bigger picture' issues of economic, social and environmental value and social design. The scope of a project can range from a local street or public space to an entire city and surrounding areas.

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