Why did old cities have roads like this...

Why did old cities have roads like this? Did people build their homes and buildings wherever they wanted and just say "Fuck it"?

>Did people build their homes and buildings wherever they wanted and just say "Fuck it"?
Yes.

Some ancient cities had city planing tho so your question makes no sense.

The oldest cities in europe, especialy central europe, growed out of villages thus never really had planed streets like in the us. It was more an Ad Hoc thing.

Old World cities started as villages and grew out along their lines of transportation (rivers, roads, canals, eventually train lines, motorways etc). These lines aren't always straight as they follow geographic features and contours. Hence the cities having this more organic look than U.S. cities based on a grid system.

Romans used grid systems in all their cities (except Rome itself, for some reason).

The ruler could equally say "we are building a straight road through the middle of the city" and knock down slums without consequence.

A lot of cities in medieval Europe had street plans, in England they were based around rectangular burgage plots and a central marketplace.

You have to remember that a lot of maps were not made to be accurate representations.

truly a libertarian paradise

>for some reason
Because the city is older than the system obviously.

>and knock down slums
Sure
>without consequence.
Not really.

Ignoring how expensive large scale infrastructure redevelopment is, pissing off the urbanites is a good way to get a rebellion going. Urbanites being generally wealthier and better armed than your rustic dwelling peasants.

>Urbanites being generally wealthier and better armed than your rustic dwelling peasants.
More like the opposite. However there are more and more densely packed urbanites around the king that there could be rustics after a month of mustering. Urban mobs riot, they don't need to rebel.

>Because the city is older than the system obviously.

But it continued to grow for centuries after they started using it, but the growth was still not planned. Compare to cities like New York and Boston, where the oldest parts are chaotic but they started using grids later on to expand.

BEcause autistic city grids don't always work.

Stockholm is a bit off an odd ball though, it's the Venice of the north. Only prettier of course.

The seven hills of Rome had hosted lots of villages more ancient than Rome proper (Roma Quadrata, the area marked by the pomerium). As the city grew larger, it joined the old outlying communities on the other hills, just like a modern city merging with its surrounding towns. Where would you have started the planned area, user? What would have been the point of setting a decumanus and cardus, when they would have met walls after a few hundred meters in both directions?
Rome did have planned neighbourhoods, usually due to them being built up as a single project, but there wouldn't have been any point just trying to implement the classic colony building principles to the Urbs.

I'll give you greener but certainly not prettier. It's very boring looking and doesn't compare at all with the peculiarity of Venice.

It heavily depends on city in question but generally yes.

this Modernists are just lazy administrators who want to turn cities into a spreadsheet.

What is this, a medieval city for ANTS?

>Did people build their homes and buildings wherever they wanted and just say "Fuck it"?
Kind of, they grew that way because they weren't planned, look at how the favelas in Brazil show the same pattern of narrow, crooked alleyways and a few main central routes. It just seems to be the way cities naturally form,left to their own devices, like a kind of human hive.

>tfw you'll never live in a medieval city founded in the middle of a crater.

Better hope it never rains.

>Venice looks like two hands rubbing from a top-down perspective.

I always saw it as a big fish.

You know crater implies that the edges are standing above the level of the land around it.

Only bad part then would be the city square where all the water gathers.

>Only bad part then would be the city square where all the water gathers.

So.... "better hope it never rains". Welcome to the end of his point.

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>What is drainage

What is New Orleans ?

>Coastal city below sea level on some sand shelf that's slowly being worn away.

>Inland city set inside a mildly bowl shaped geographic feature that breaks wind.
>In Europe to boot

But spreadsheets are fun.

Same with Greeks, Ching Chongs, some Southeast Asians, and in some cases medieval Europeans.

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>That

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Quality post, lad.

No seriously, that's fucking disgusting.

Is there a SimCity style game but for building a medieval city? Anno and Banished are nice and all, but there's way too much micromanagement.

Caesar/Zeus/Pharaoh are the only decent historical city builders, but there's no middle ages edition.

Where is this?

Try Medieval Lords.

Read a simple school book on history. Three systems were generally used to build cities in medieval times.

1. From antique cities, if it was based on a plan it didn't look so crooked. E.g. most of the times the roman cities were planned.

2. Simple settlement upgraded to a city. Since farmers simple choose a nice looking spot the city looked crooked like your pic related.

3. On a "green hill", these were all based on plans.

Again this is a simple description and if you want to know more just read something specifically concentrated on this topic.

Look at a map of Rio de Janeiro sometime, it's a literal maze. People, rich or poor, just picked a nice spot in which to build their houses, and only later the government came to build roads connecting them all.