Antiquity (before 500)

Harappa

c. 2600 BCE · Pakistan · South Asia · Hygienist and infrastructural reform urbanism · Planned by Indus Valley civilization
'The Prehistoric Site of Harappa': the ASI survey plan of the mounds, with the citadel Mound AB, the walled lower town on Mounds E and ET, the granary area on Mound F and the dry bed of the Ravi, excavation trenches marked in red.
'The Prehistoric Site of Harappa': the ASI survey plan of the mounds, with the citadel Mound AB, the walled lower town on Mounds E and ET, the granary area on Mound F and the dry bed of the Ravi, excavation trenches marked in red. · © Harappa.com — used with credit · Archaeological Survey of India survey plan (M.S. Vats, Excavations at Harappa, 1940), reproduced by Harappa.com

Core idea

Citadel-and-lower-town layout with standardized bricks and street widths

Why it matters

Companion to Mohenjo-Daro; demonstrates planned urbanism was regional, not a one-off

Description

Harappa, on the Ravi river in the Punjab of present-day Pakistan, was one of the principal cities of the Indus Valley civilisation and flourished from around 2600 BCE. The city followed the characteristic Indus arrangement of a raised, walled citadel alongside a lower town, with streets laid out in a broadly regular pattern and houses, drains and granaries built from standardised fired bricks. Uniform brick proportions and consistent street widths point to shared building conventions maintained across the settlement over centuries.

Significance

As the type-site that gave the Harappan civilisation its name, Harappa is central to the historiography of early planned urbanism. Together with Mohenjo-Daro it demonstrates that Indus city planning was a regional system reproduced across many settlements rather than the achievement of a single exceptional city, and its standardisation of bricks and infrastructure is often cited as the earliest evidence of codified building norms in urban history.

What shaped it

Plans it influenced

Sources

Open it on the interactive timeline →
hub.toekom.st — History of Urbanism · an interactive timeline of 850 planned cities across 6,000 years.