Aristotle names Hippodamus of Miletus as the first man not engaged in politics to write on the best constitution, and credits him with a tripartite division of citizens, of laws and of land into sacred, public and private. His name attached to the orthogonal layout of Piraeus and of Miletus rebuilt after 479 BCE, in which uniform rectangular insulae are subdivided into equal house plots. The geometry was political as much as technical: equal lots distributed by drawing lots expressed isonomia, the equality of citizens, in surveyable form. The same instrument then served colonisation, because a grid can be measured, allocated and defended before any settler arrives.
The grid became the standard device for founding cities - Greek and Roman colonies, the Laws of the Indies, the American township - precisely because it converts land into countable, comparable, tradeable units. Its double life is the whole argument: the lines that promise equal shares are the same lines that let land be sold sight unseen.
See it on the timeline →