Lesson Learned from the Ancient Greek Polis

Abstract

Historical speaking, cities, and towns have been always identical with the centers of cultural cultivation. Accordingly, the relation of urban settlement and culture is less explored in the context of the question: What are the conditions of urban settlement? To what extent is democracy necessary for urbanism? This study argues that Aristotle’s Polis is one of its resourceful references for democratic urbanism because its conceptual system, structure, and elements potentially provide people with a democratic political organization and compact urbanism. The focus of the study is to divulge and unfold the Greek concepts, which are constitutive to the idea and reality of urbanity. All this is in the hope that the findings of the study contribute to the philosophical foundation of urbanism. The theoretical expositions are to recognize, to recollect, to reconstruct, and to develop the ancient traces and concepts of urbanism as depicted by Aristotle in his Politics and other bibliographical sources. The purpose of this study is to explore theoretical groundwork on urbanism from the ancient Greek experience of the polis, especially with reference to the Classical and Hellenistic periods.