structural:summarization
Urban planning

The Sumerians were the first society to conceive and construct the city as a planned construct. That they were proud of this achievement is attested to in the Epic of Gilgamesh which opens with a description of Uruk —its massive walls, streets, markets, temples, and gardens. Uruk became the template of an urban culture which spread throughout Western Asia via colonization and conquest, and more generally as societies became larger and more sophisticated.

The construction of cities was the end product of trends which began in the Neolithic Revolution. The growth of the city was partly planned and partly organic. Planning is evident in the walls, high temple district, main canal with harbor, and main street. The finer structure of residential and commercial spaces is the reaction of economic forces to the spatial limits imposed by the planned areas resulting in an irregular design with regular features. Because the Sumerians recorded real estate transactions it is possible to reconstruct much of the urban growth pattern, density, property value, and other metrics from cuneiform text sourceThe typical city divided space into residential, mixed use, commercial, and civic spaces. The residential areas were grouped by profession. At the core of the city was a high temple complex always sited slightly off of the geographical centre. This high temple usually predated the founding of the city and was the nucleus around which the urban form grew. The districts adjacent to gates had a special religious and economic function.

The city always included a belt of irrigated agricultural land including small hamlets. A network of roads and canals connected the city to this land. The transportation network was organized in three tiers: wide processional streets (Akkadian: sūqu ilāni u šarri), public through streets (Akkadian: sūqu nišī), and private blind alleys (Akkadian: mūṣû). The public streets that defined a block varied little over time while the blind-alleys were much more fluid. The current estimate is 10% of the city area was streets and 90% buildings. The canals; however, were more important than roads for good transportation.