I know this is a rather broad question, but I'm as interested in variations with time/society as the answer for any particular time or place. But my wonderings are prompted by thinking about bronze age Mediterranean/middle eastern city-states (specifically, early Rome).
Anyway, my question concerns the real estate within walled cities. Is it more correct to imagine that walled cities were more like citadels enclosing the "guts" of a city state (though not most of its nominal inhabitants), or that they were much like modern cities in that the population lived and worked within the walls?
Looking at maps like Timgad, it seems like every un-labeled city block would have to house ~200 people to get the population to 15000. Would there have been dense, multi-story, multi-family houses to cram people in? Or would only the wealthiest citizens live within the walls in single-family homes. Would the rest of the nominal population have been farmers living in surrounding areas?
My impression was that most of the e.g. Roman citizenry, particularly the Patrician class, were landowners and farmers, and I've never taken that to mean they had a house in the city. So would there be a disconnect between "citizens" and "inhabitants" of a city?
Anyway, if anyone has an interesting insights/descriptions of what urban life in these ancient cities would have been like, I'd be fascinated to hear it. For some reason, when I imagine what such places would have been like, it's hard to come up with a coherent picture.
It depends on the time and place, as walled cities have been extremely common in history.
In Ming Chinese Beijing, for example, quite a large urban (not farmers but people you would expect to find in cities) population lived in the "suburbs" outside the walls, particularly south of it (the city walls enclosed 36km^2 , but much of that was non-residential space enclosed by another wall). This, the Ming recognized, was a problem when Beijing was besieged, as there was an immense population outside the line of defense. So after Altan Khan and his Mongols briefly laid siege to the city and burnt much of the "suburbs" in 1550, a new wall 15 kilometers long was built to protect the densely populated southern suburbs (a plan to make walls around the suburbs in the other three directions was scrapped due to financial issues). The result was that the city walls now became seven-sided (Korean language map)
It was similar for Suzhou, another metropolis near today's Shanghai. Although the area enclosed by Suzhou's walls (around 15km^2 ) made it the third largest city in China of its time, the commercial sector representative of the city, where a large number of foreigners resided, was actually in the suburbs west of the city walls. Eventually Suzhou was also attacked, by supposedly "Japanese" pirates, from 1553 to 1555; there was a proposal to build walls around the important western area (like Beijing had done with its southern suburbs) but this was scrapped due to issues including the lack of money. I would say that the proposal alone, however, still shows how important the suburbs were to "Suzhou proper."
So with these two Ming cities (both of whch were enormous, mind you) you're more correct that the walls enclosed the guts of the city rather than all of it.
