According to the aforementioned notions of urban planning, Upper Mesopotamian cities are not highly planned in that they lack strict orthogonal or rectilinear layouts. Instead, these cities often form semi-orthogonal plans when adjacent structures are built with the same orientation as their neighbors, or additions to existing structures are added in orthogonal segments, often for reasons of convenience and efficiency rather than urban planning (Smith 2007:13). Yet, several sites discussed here exhibit semi-orthogonal architectural elements that clearly developed from supra-household planning. The most obvious centralized planning in these cities is found in infrastructure, including streets, city walls, sector walls, and water works. Decentralized, or mid - and low-level planning, is most evident in residential areas that were built and rebuilt according to varying codes of spatial production.
There are six major categories of urban features in Upper Mesopotamian cities:
1) infrastructure, including circuit walls and dividing walls between sectors or neighborhoods (in a few cases), city gates, streets, water and sewer systems;
2) institutional structures, including palaces, temples, and associated storage, living, and support facilities;
3) residential neighborhoods;
4) industry or craft-production facilities;
5) open areas; and
6) burial installations. This category is highly variable, including burials beneath house floors, special (sometimes mass) burials in tombs or monuments, and a variety of types of burial in intramural or extramural cemeteries.
Due to the high cost of infrastructure, features such as city walls and streets often become fixed and shape the direction and form of later development and the movement of people through the city (Herman and Ausubel 1988:13; Hillier 2008:226). Thus, urban plans may be shaped early in the developmental process with later development acting within the boundaries set by roads, city walls, and
Waterworks. Accordingly, realignment or rebuIlding of these features requires major organization of labor and funds. Although institutional, residential and craft production facilities are subject to remodeling and rebuilding by their inhabitants, shared walls among neighboring buildings in built-up cities require supra-household organization to accomplish significant reorientation of structures. This may explain in part why, despite opportunities for flexibility in the use or definition of spaces between elements of infrastructure, these areas generally maintained their primary use or function.
Spatially, palaces tenD to be located on the citadel or upper city (at Leilan [Ristvet et al. 2004; de Lillis-Forrest et al. 2007], Ebla [Matthiae 1981], Mozan [Buccellati and Kelly-Buccellati 2001], Beydar [Lebeau and Suleiman 2009], and Chuera [Meyer 2006]), although Beydar has palaces both upon its mini-acropolis and below in the upper city, and administrative buildings - including possible palaces - have been excavated in the lower and outer town at Kazane (Creekmore 2008, 2010). Magnetometry data show some larger, possibly administrative or elite buildings in the outer town at Titris and Chuera (Meyer 2006; see also Nishimura Chapter 3, this volume). Temples are found in a variety of locations, including on citadels, in the center of the city (aT Beydar [Lebeau 2006a], Chuera [Meyer 2006], Mozan [Buccellati and Kelly-Buccellati 2001], and Sweyhat [Danti and Zettler 2007]), in solitary walled compounds (at Al-Rawda [Castel and Peltenburg 2007]),4 or as small individual structures tucked away in neighborhoods (at Chuera, possibly also Kazane5). Industrial activities sometimes cluster (at Banat [McClellan 1999; Porter 1995, 2002]), but in other cases are scattered throughout domestic areas (as at Sweyhat [DanTi and Zettler 2007]) or located in isolated workshops (for example, in the Titris suburbs; see Nishimura, Chapter 3 in this volume). Houses form contiguous clusters within blocks defined by wide main streets and narrow lanes. Burials occur both within tombs beneath house floors (at Kazane anD Titris) and in extramural cemeteries (at Titris, Chuera, Sweyhat, and Al-Rawda). With the possible exception of Titris, for which magnetometry data indicate somewhat large, open, unpaved areas toward the periphery (see Nishimura, Chapter 3 In this volume), open space is limited in these cities, and is usually paved, or grey space, as opposeD to unpaved, green space consisting of gardens, parks, anD the like (see Stark, Chapter 11 In this volume, for a complete discussion of types of open space). When present, open space occurs in narrow spaces between buildings, in
Courtyards or puBlic plazas, in culs-de-sac, and sometimes on the periphery, just wIthin the city wall.
World History
