We often see drawings of ancient and medieval walled cities posted on Reddit.
This illustration of Rome was posted today, for instance.
To me, this looks far too low-density - it looks comparable to modern day Aylesbury, population c 60,000.
I think a much larger population would be needed to justify the labour-intensive construction of all those big buildings.
Whenever I see an imagine like this, I imagine that every spare space would be filled with shanties. I'd expect that a villa might have a shed or two at the bottom of the garden, for example, allowing accommodation for the nanny or the maids.
Another poster on the thread to which that image was submitted agrees: "the artists probably depicted only the 'nice' buildings and forgot the slums and shanty-towns that hosted a great part of the population."
But someone else says: "Nope, you need that open space in case of seige, thats where your armys will camp." (I see that he has now added to this comment)
I'm sorry that I don't know how to phrase my question to be more specific, but does anyone here have any more thoughts on this?
Although there certainly is much, much more room for discussion, I actually wrote about walled city density here.
The short answer is that although the city centers were almost always dense and crowded, it was common for there to be open spaces like gardens and orchards between the city walls and the inhabited center, in addition to communities outside the walls. So crowding like you see in dramatic TV/movie scenes wasn't a problem, but the built-up areas of walled cities were still absurdly dense.
