Cardo

This is the cardo in Apamea.

A cardo is the north-south road that the Romans built when they first settled an area. There was an east-west road that they built at right angles (obviously) to the cardo called the decumanus. More on that later.

The cardo represents the main street of the town. It delineated the two halves of the city, and by extension, the world. The Romans had a very interesting and unique way of viewing the world. By delineating the cardo, they divided something that is natural and organic - the landscape - into two distinct halves. This division also determined how and where various other buildings were laid out. The other interesting aspect of this is that the Romans didn't use city walls unless the city already had them. Thus, these roads became a physical representation of the Roman conquest of the world, both the natural world and the imperial domination of the other peoples of the world.

In almost every culture, there is something analogous to the cardo - a main street. This was the focus of transportation, commerce, communication, civics, and promenade. Even where the grid system was utilized, with it's parallel streets arriving at similar destinations, invariably one street would become the most heavily used street, either for subconscious reasons or because of its location/proximity to desirable destinations. People who were looking for goods or services instinctively find their way to this street, which leads merchants to locate their businesses there. It then finds a life of its own, growing, thriving, expanding or contracting depending on local economic conditions.

Many times these roads would lead somewhere - a temple, cathedral, civic building, etc. These roads find an anchor, a terminus, at the end of the street that leads all to refer to heading toward the destination or away from. Other times, these roads would be build purposely to extend on to eternity, showing - like the Romans - that we are interested in extending our dominion forever.

Why is it that even in a grid street system that there are a few streets that stand out? Why is this phenomenon almost ubiquitous amongst civilizations throughout the world - even those that had no contact with each other, such as the Greek/Roman, the Chinese/Korean/Japanese, and the pre-Colombian native Americans?

A famous early 20th century architect, Le Corbusier, tried to demonstrate how a primitive man would somehow inherently know that this layout was good - geometric forms have a beauty and order that makes the chaos comprehensible. This would help establish the modernist movement in architecture.

In our world, however, we have changed all of this. The main streets now (and I purposefully did not capitalize that "main") are only "main" because they carry a lot of traffic. They are referred to as collectors or arterials. There has been some loss of the mystic element. This is due in part to the utilitarian view we have of the world - move people and goods around as efficiently as possible.

But I think something is lost. There is a human interaction that used to take place as we looked people in the face as we moved past them. Now we fly past people at excessive speeds, barely registering that there are other PEOPLE in the vehicles we share the road with. Pedestrian traffic is almost non-existent - who would want to walk near traffic whizzing by so quickly? - and in all our streets have become vacant, desert places with no connection with the goods, service, and people for whom they were actually constructed.