metres = 0.97 English feet. For practical
purposes 100 Roman feet = 97 English feet.

1 Iugerum = 120 x 240 Roman feet = 116.4 x 233.8 English feet. For
practical purposes a _Iugerum_ may be taken to be rather over
2/3 of an acre and rather over 1/4 of a hectare, and more exactly
2523.3 sq. metres.

1 Metre = 1.09 English yards, a trifle less than 40 ins. 402.5 metres
equal a quarter of a mile.

1 Hectare (10000 sq. metres) = 2.47 acres (11955 sq. yds.).

1 Acre = nearly 69-1/2 x 69-1/2 yds. (208.7 ft. square) = 4840 sq. yds.

CHAPTER I

PRELIMINARY REMARKS

Town-planning--the art of laying out towns with due care for the
health and comfort of inhabitants, for industrial and commercial
efficiency, and for reasonable beauty of buildings--is an art of
intermittent activity. It belongs to special ages and circumstances.
For its full unfolding two conditions are needed. The age must be one
in which, whether through growth, or through movements of population,
towns are being freely founded or freely enlarged, and almost as a
matter of course attention is drawn to methods of arranging and laying
out such towns. And secondly, the builders of these towns must have
wit enough to care for the well-being of common men and the due
arrangement of ordinary dwellings. That has not always happened. In
many lands and centuries--in ages where civilization has been tinged
by an under-current of barbarism--one or both of these conditions have
been absent. In Asia during much of its history, in early Greece, in
Europe during the first half of the Middle Ages, towns have consisted
of one or two dominant buildings, temple or church or castle, of one
or two processional avenues for worshippers at sacred festivals, and a
little adjacent chaos of tortuous lanes and squalid houses. Architects
have devised beautiful buildings in such towns. But they have not
touched the chaos or treated the whole inhabited area as one unit.
Town-planning has been here unknown.[2]

[2] Compare Brinckmann's remarks on mediaeval towns: 'Der
Nachdruck liegt auf den einzelnen Gebaeuden, der Kathedrale, dem
Palazzo publico, den festen Palaesten des Adels, nicht auf ibrer
einheitlichen Verbindung. Ebenso erscheint die ganze Stadt nur
eine Ansammlung einzelner Bauten. Strassen und Plaetze sind
unbebaute Reste.'

In other periods towns have been founded in large numbers and
full-grown or nearly full-grown, to furnish homes for mu