old town
Introduction
The historical and monumental core of the cities prior to the expansions of the century and beginning of the 20th century is called old town. In 1869, the center of a city was defined as "its grouped hamlet, and generally surrounded by the wall or enclosure, excluding suburbs."[1].
Historical background
The urban model appears with the Neolithic revolution. The possibility of growing plants implies not only a lesser need for a territory and a greater concentration of the population, but also the creation of agricultural surpluses that allow part of the population to be freed for other functions: crafts, commerce or public management. From the beginning, these other functions will be the most characteristic of urban life.
The Neolithic city becomes a model of coexistence. The industry and the market are located there, and thanks to these activities it can grow, both in size and population. But the size of this city is limited due to agricultural and industrial productivity, market capacity and technical possibilities, which do not allow large agglomerations, although some cities of Antiquity reached a considerable size, approaching one million inhabitants, such as Rome.
The first urban signs emerge in the oldest historical space in living memory. In Mesopotamia and its area of influence, the first groups of houses were built about 8,500 years ago: Jericho, in Palestine and Çatal Huyuk, in Anatolia. A few dozen buildings made of baked clay blocks, polished and colored floors and flat roofs, well organized in a common area. They are not yet cities in the sense of the term that was acquired thousands of years later, but the temple cities of the Sumerians already have a model of spatial organization and construction model that extends to the present day: the brick walls, the rectangular floor plan, the accessible flat roof, the organized grouping of several families (Çatal Huyuk in its heyday occupied 13 hectares and seems to have had 10,000 inhabitants). For the first time, humans built a deliberately built free-standing settlement, unlike the natural shelters used until then.
The first urban civilizations appear about 5000 years ago in seven different regions: the Hoang-ho River Valley Plain (Huixia, Anyang, Gaocheng), the Indus Valley (Harapa, Mohenjo-Daro, Balatok), the Tigris and Euphrates Valleys (Nineveh, Babylon, Ur, Uruk, Assur), the Nile Valley (Ilahun, Memphis, Giza, Thebes, Abydos), the of the Niger (Goa, Timbuktu), the high Mesoamerican plateaus (Tikal, Cocaxtlan, El Tajín, Tenochtitlan, Copán), and the Peruvian heights (Tiahuanaco, Pikimachay, Machu Picchu, Nazca). Communication between all these regions cannot be ruled out, but it does not seem that they were intense enough to determine that one of them is the origin and the others are foci of diffusion, particularly if we consider American urban civilizations. It is noteworthy that in all these areas there is a common denominator: the first cities were located in an alluvial plain with good possibilities for agriculture, which demonstrates the enormous dependence on the immediate surroundings of the ancient cities.