Why Is There an Empty Space in the Middle of Town? The Oldest Public Room

The open area at the centre of a town existed to hold a market, which was not simply a place where people sold things but a legally constituted event. The right to hold a market was granted by a charter from a ruler, specifying which days it could be held and frequently prohibiting competing markets within a stated distance, which made it a valuable monopoly and a source of revenue through tolls on those trading. Trading outside the designated place and time was prohibited, which concentrated commerce into the square where it could be supervised, taxed and regulated. Weights and measures were checked there, disputes between traders were settled there under specific procedures, and the space was therefore an administrative and judicial institution with a physical form.

The surrounding buildings follow from the functions, and the pattern recurs across Europe:

• •A market or town hall, frequently raised on pillars with the ground floor open for trading beneath
• •A church, since market days and holy days were linked and the two institutions shared the population
• •Arcaded frontages, which shelter traders and shoppers and add usable space
• •Inns, which housed traders who had travelled
• •A cross, a pillar or a fountain marking the centre and frequently marking where proclamations were made
• •Merchants' houses, narrow-fronted because frontage onto the square was the valuable commodity

The square is generally the oldest surviving element of a town plan and everything else is arranged around it. Streets converge on it, since the routes into a town are routes to the market. Plot boundaries running back from the square are frequently narrow and very deep, because a share of the frontage was what mattered and the rest of the plot held workshops, storage and gardens, and those medieval boundaries survive in modern property lines in many towns even where every building has been replaced. Planned towns founded deliberately in the medieval period were laid out around a square from the start, which is why they have a regularity that organically grown towns lack, and comparing the two is a standard exercise in reading a town plan.

Central open spaces serving comparable functions appear in city plans worldwide, and the comparisons are informative. The Greek agora and the Roman forum combined market, assembly and law court in a single space and are the direct ancestors of the European arrangement. Islamic cities organised commerce into covered bazaars and caravanserais rather than open squares, with the congregational mosque as the focal point, which produces a quite different urban texture. Chinese city plans centred on administrative compounds rather than on markets, with commerce in designated wards. Mesoamerican cities had large ceremonial plazas. Colonial Spanish towns were laid out by a written ordinance specifying a central plaza with church and government buildings on prescribed sides, which is why so many cities across the Americas share a plan.

The institution declined while the space remained, which is why so many are now car parks. Permanent shops made periodic markets less necessary, and retailing moved indoors and then out of town entirely. Charter monopolies lapsed or were abolished. The space survived because it was public land and because demolishing a square is harder than neglecting it, and through the twentieth century most were given over to parking, which was a use nobody granted a charter for. Many European towns have since reversed that, pedestrianising the square and restoring markets on some days, and the results are among the more successful pieces of urban policy of recent decades, largely because the space was designed for people on foot in the first place.

The space held a legally constituted market granted by charter, with specified days, a monopoly radius and prohibitions on trading elsewhere, which made it an administrative and judicial institution. Hall, church, arcades and inns follow from those functions. Narrow deep plots running back from the square survive in modern property boundaries in many towns.