alt.hn

5/29/2026 at 12:30:02 PM

High Density Living, 2000 Years Ago: Inside the Roman Apartment Building

 https://commonedge.org/high-density-living-2000-years-ago-inside-the-roman-apartment-building/

by surprisetalk

5/29/2026 at 2:47:14 PM

I can highly recommend Lindsey Davis' Falco series, murder mysteries set in Ancient Rome. She brings the city to life, it's remarkably vivid, and -- I promise this comment is on topic for this thread! -- Roman apartment living is threaded throughout the series and apartment building construction even forms a major plot point in one book.

I can't say more without spoilers. Excellent for "feeling" what Rome was like.

https://www.goodreads.com/series/42173-marcus-didius-falco

by vintagedave

5/29/2026 at 3:22:21 PM

I’m looking for new fiction to add to the queue but my reading time is limited (unless you count children’s books in which case I’m reading 100s of books per year).

Do I need to read the first book in the series, or are they independent? If independent, can you recommend the best one for someone who only has time to read one?

by Aurornis

5/29/2026 at 4:49:58 PM

The earlier stories are mostly independent (the last few in the series build on previous stories). I would recommend starting with the first book, The Silver Pigs because there is a romance that starts and continues. The central character is what today we would call a "private eye".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silver_Pigs

by Tangurena2

5/29/2026 at 4:01:38 PM

It's been several years since I read them, but I think starting with the first book is good. It's not quite as polished as the others, and I think not quite with the same tone, but it introduces the characters that will be throughout the series. My memory is the series is more lighthearted in general than the first book is.

You make me think I should reread, and I will start at the beginning here too.

by vintagedave

5/29/2026 at 11:18:50 PM

There's a follow-up series with Falco's adopted daughter Flavia Albia that I found equally good. (And the details of her apartment lifestyle are a major plot point in at least one of them)

by GolfPopper

5/29/2026 at 5:21:56 PM

I mentioned this in another comment but The Forgotten City is a game with a similar setting, it's an ancient Rome first person mystery RPG where the player is supposed to figure out what happened.

by satvikpendem

5/29/2026 at 6:52:56 PM

Wow she's certainly prolific!

by jimbokun

5/29/2026 at 1:55:34 PM 

  See how pots strike and dint the sturdy pavement.

  There’s death from every window where you move.

  You’d be a fool to venture out to dine,

  oblivious of what goes on above,

  without your having penned that dotted line,

  of your last testament.
This feels very modern. "Sure, you might get randomly killed by a pot flying out a window, but there are _walkable_ restaurants!"

by everdrive

5/29/2026 at 5:17:41 PM

Sure, you might get killed just on the drive between your home and the grocery store by someone on their phone in a pickup truck, but at least you don’t have to share a wall with another human!

by pastel8739

5/29/2026 at 5:45:46 PM

>but at least you don’t have to share a wall with another human!

If you ban loud bass I don't think I'd mind. Until then, no thank you.

by everdrive

5/30/2026 at 1:58:32 AM

> If you ban loud bass I don't think I'd mind

Not sure what you mean. I've been to many lakes and have yet to hear any bass.

by trelane

5/29/2026 at 9:10:23 PM

The murder risk in cities like Baltimore, NYC, and Chicago have nothing to do with cars.

by irishcoffee

5/30/2026 at 10:38:34 AM

Except the motor vehicle death rate in NYC is 1/5 of the national average and the nationwide motor vehicle death rate is higher than the NYC murder rate by around 3x.

by pastel8739

5/30/2026 at 6:31:41 PM

A terrifying home invasion murder is such a world of difference from dying in a car accident. Comparing the two just ignores basic human psychology.

by everdrive

5/31/2026 at 3:00:53 PM

Majority of murders are among people who know each other. Partner violence, friends killing friends or street deal violence.

Home invasion murder is super rare.

by watwut

5/30/2026 at 9:36:53 PM

Daww, a bonafide strawman.

by irishcoffee

5/29/2026 at 2:00:25 PM

That's still very real in NYC. https://tribecacitizen.com/2026/04/27/rubble-falls-from-the-...

by josefritzishere

5/29/2026 at 4:17:38 PM

Its very much everywhere you have large swaths of people pasding through. I distinctly remember my aunt complaining that in the student dorms back in the day, two students bought a whole pig and roasted it in the iron bathtub

by warumdarum

5/29/2026 at 5:55:34 PM

Where I studied there was a tradition to throw out the TV out of dorm room window at graduation. Now that were early nineties, ~21" CRT TVs and a 24 storey dorm.

by lstodd

5/29/2026 at 6:32:48 PM

For thousands of years, people have seen the benefits of living in cities.What is really a city? Simply a place where people have a mutual interest in living close to each other. Urban sprawl and car centric society seems to be a really bad idea. Build better cities rather than self driving cars.

by thomasfl

5/29/2026 at 7:13:15 PM

You don't even have to tell anyone to "build better cities". All you have to do is get rid of the arbitrary restrictions on upward city growth. Zoning was a really bad idea.

by Schiendelman

5/29/2026 at 7:55:53 PM

It isn't that simple. The most important thing about a city is the streets and blocks. Manhattan and Barcelona are good examples of cities that have been designed in a way that make them walkable and high density.

by taffer

5/29/2026 at 9:18:34 PM

The only places where you get non-walkable streets and blocks are the ones where you restrict density dramatically. Most cities aren't designed by some individual planning out where the streets should go. They evolved. If you allow an existing city to increase its density dramatically, people start demanding the streets improve to meet their needs.

by Schiendelman

5/29/2026 at 9:51:40 PM

The more density that gets built, the harder it is to improve streets. Construction of the interstates, Haussman's remaking of Paris, etc were immensely destructive, even if they enabled much more legible and prosperous development afterwards.

In the West at least, basically every street and block was laid out by planners from the early 1800s until post WWII. After that it's much more done by large scale private land developers (e.g. Levittown, Irvine).

by pchristensen

5/30/2026 at 6:57:40 AM

It is harder but I also find that a poor excuse for not improving streets and infrastructure because it can be done and the taxes scale faster than costs. But people and politicians are short sighted and rather kick that can down the road either to make them look good from good financials or to leave enough money on the table for a bit of corruption.

by AngryData

5/30/2026 at 1:24:55 PM

It's not harder to improve streets in higher density, no. It's both politically easier when you have more pedestrians AND you have a higher tax base.

by Schiendelman

5/29/2026 at 7:55:23 PM

Zoning is useful for keeping people from building apartments right next to paper mills, pig farms, and superfund sites because those places tend to become slums. Building height restrictions and density limits provide people with the ability to see the sky and get sunlight. They improve air quality. They're pretty useful around places like airports. They can help improve safety and limit the damage resulting from disasters like fires and earthquakes. It's important to strike a balance between over-restrictive zoning and dystopian people-warehouses in perpetual shadow.

by autoexec

5/29/2026 at 9:23:20 PM

I strongly disagree - as do many scholars of land use law at this point.

Zoning has nothing to do with separating uses. It never has. In Seattle, for instance, you absolutely can put an apartment building next to a pig farm. Nobody bothers because the market isn't interested in doing that. That also isn't atypical, zoning has never been used to pad uses away from each other like you see in Simcity.

Seeing the sky and getting sunlight are also very suspect reasoning. It is darn near impossible to find real problems there that zoning prevents.

Zoning also doesn't limit damage or impact earthquake survivability at all. Except - where zoning prevents you from building new buildings, it preserves old unsafe buildings. Without zoning, more of those buildings would be replaced with new structures that are safe.

There's no dystopia zoning is preventing. Most of the comments I see like this have very little understanding of what it does.

by Schiendelman

5/29/2026 at 9:46:53 PM

> It never has.

Your point is much more valid in a car-centric (or car-enabled) world. Back when most industrial inputs and outputs moved by rail, and labor moved on foot, there were noxious and dangerous industries very close to housing. Just read up on Seattle's Skid Road. Pig farming wasn't in cities, but things like tanneries, slaughterhouses, sawmills, etc, were. Not to mention that at the time, almost everything was powered by coal.

Now, with electrical transmission and flexible truck-based movement of goods, it's a much safer world to let the market decide. But cities during the industrial area were really, really rough.

by pchristensen

5/30/2026 at 2:48:16 AM

And zoning didn't exist then. Zoning was created purely to keep black people out of neighborhoods. The first zoning attempts were entirely race based - SCOTUS overturned them in 1918. The same group came back and recreated zoning to keep apartment buildings out of white neighborhoods. The funny part? "Single family" zoning explicitly targeted black families, who didn't have the wealth for a house, and would buy larger houses as a two or three family collective.

Industrial zoning came much later, as a post hoc justification, long after that was an issue.

Zoning truly never has.

by Schiendelman

5/30/2026 at 6:40:46 AM

Just to stress that the world is larger than the US. Zoning exists pretty much everywhere and the reasons for its introduction were diverse and mostly about quality yof life, citizen health, or city esthetics (keeping polluting businesses out).I have no view on whether what you're saying is true for the US, it is however definitely false for most other places.

by goobatrooba

5/30/2026 at 1:25:31 PM

In the vast majority of the world, you can trace it to class and race. Feel free to give me an example location and I'll find you its history!

by Schiendelman

5/30/2026 at 12:44:40 AM

> Zoning has nothing to do with separating uses. It never has. In Seattle, for instance, you absolutely can put an apartment building next to a pig farm. Nobody bothers because the market isn't interested in doing that. That also isn't atypical, zoning has never been used to pad uses away from each other like you see in Simcity.

You should have said something sooner. You could have prevented this whole mess where the government in Seattle mistakenly thought that zoning rules prevented shops from being opened in the middle of places zoned as residential. https://www.axios.com/local/seattle/2025/02/10/neighborhood-...

Maybe you've got a different definition of zoning laws, but I'm talking about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning_laws the history of which is entirely based on "separating uses" and "padding uses away from each other"

From the wiki: "The origins of zoning districts can be traced back to antiquity.[7] The ancient walled city was the predecessor for classifying and regulating land, based on use. Outside the city walls were the undesirable functions, which were usually based on noise and smell. The space between the walls is where unsanitary and dangerous activities occurred such as butchering, waste disposal, and brick-firing. Within the walls were civic and religious places, and where the majority of people lived."

> Zoning also doesn't limit damage or impact earthquake survivability at all.

It isn't just me who thinks it does. For example, the Earthquake Hazards Reduction Act of 1977 provided states with grants and assistance to "update building and zoning codes and ordinances to enhance seismic safety" (https://www.nehrp.gov/about/PL108-360.htm)

As they say, "earthquakes don't kill people, buildings do." The Alquist-Priolo Earthquake Fault Zoning Act came after the 1971 San Fernando earthquake and prevented the building of new structures on fault lines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alquist_Priolo_Special_Studies...) but earthquakes also cause problems beyond shaking buildings apart and making them fall onto each other and zoning can help with those other hazards too "Large water waves, such as produced by tsunamis, seiches, and dam failure or overtopping, can be anticipated in many places. Their effects can be lessened by land-use regulations similar to flood-plain zoning, restrictions on location of critical structures, and appropriate warning systems." (Seismic hazards and land-use planning - https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/cir690)

> Seeing the sky and getting sunlight are also very suspect reasoning. It is darn near impossible to find real problems there that zoning prevents.

It's harder to find examples in the US where this has gone horribly wrong because people tend to be very opposed to these situations whenever they arise. Many places have already placed restrictions to prevent worst cases.

"A number of states have enacted zoning statutes which allow municipalities to consider solar access a legitimate public purpose.56 The statutes tend to employ conventional zoning techniques, such as building height limitations, lot size restrictions and set-back requirements." (https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/cjel/article...)

Cities tend to talk about the problem in terms of skyline preservation and residents tend to talk more about access to the sky as "their view" being obstructed but folks really do care about it when a tall building takes their sun away. Recently the problem of dense urban housing and tall structures impacting access to sun and sky have gotten a boost as interest in solar power has risen.

Here's some additional info on the problem if you're interested:

https://www.groundreport.in/environment/cloud-cover-and-urba...

https://skyscrapersworld.com/skyscraper-shadows

https://nationalpost.com/news/world/architects-claim-no-shad...

https://www.architectmagazine.com/technology/this-week-in-te...

by autoexec

5/30/2026 at 2:49:28 AM

Are you interested in learning something? I know about everything you've sent here, but my points are still true. I'm happy to talk about it.

by Schiendelman

5/29/2026 at 8:37:03 PM

For thousands of years, high-density living meant a 3 or 4 story apartment building. Certainly not sky-scrapers, they weren't even possible to build until the last century or two.

What you state as "urban sprawl" would be "mostly normal" living density for a city like Rome. When I walk the streets of larger cities, its not like the downtown core has acres of land per house, or even a 1/4 acre.

Now of course, there are some differences over time. But my point is that it's not as if the car has caused urban sprawl, in fact, downtown cities are far more dense than 500 years ago. Or 2000, or whatever. One 40 story apartment building, which is common not even just in downtown cores, is a lot more dense than anything 1000 years ago, land use would be 10x or 20x or even 40x.

I know there's this fad to pretend the car caused every problem ever, but it's just not true.

by b112

5/29/2026 at 10:29:10 PM

You are mixing up a lot of different factors.

3-4 story apartment buildings gives a net residential density of 30-100 units per acre. Typical 20th century urban development is 3-10 units per acre, with suburban "urban sprawl" at the low end of that. See [1] for examples.

Yes towers exist now, and downtown areas have much more intensity and square footage. But outside of NYC (861 of the top 1000 densest census tracts) and a very short list of other parts of other US cities[2], residential density is much lower almost everywhere than it was in 1950, including in cities. Units per acre and especially people per unit have steadily and dramatically dropped. The drop in NYC population density is dramatic even as built square footage has increased[3].

But for every 40 story tower out there, there are hundreds of square miles of car-centric suburban development.

[1] https://mrsc.org/stay-informed/mrsc-insight/april-2017/visua... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFB5YooSo5M&t=936s [3] https://urbanomnibus.net/2014/10/the-rise-and-fall-of-manhat...

by pchristensen

5/29/2026 at 9:43:47 PM

Modern cities have a lot of buildings that are sparsely populated. 500 years ago, major Italian cities had ~15k people / square km, which is similar to Brooklyn. Paris had 35k to 50k people / square km, making it more densely populated than Manhattan.

2000 years ago, Rome had similar population density to Paris 500 years ago.

Historically, urban people wanted to live inside city walls, if possible. When the population grew, most of the growth turned into higher density inside the walls. There was always some urban sprawl outside the walls, but that was mostly poor people and those who didn't have the right to live in the city proper. Major cities occasionally built a new set of walls surrounding a wider area, but that didn't happen every century.

by jltsiren

5/29/2026 at 7:46:36 PM

People lived in cities because they couldn't find a farm. Anyone who had a farm didn't leave because you controlled your survival. 95% of the people (numbers varied but this is good enough) lived on a farm. Cities were full of diseases and they didn't have good jobs.

Of course what you read in history is from the rich point of view. If you had wealth (slaves back on the farm) city life was really good.

by bluGill

5/29/2026 at 8:00:19 PM

You have it the wrong way round: In the US the slave owners lived on the farms. The bustling cities were in the free states.

by taffer

5/29/2026 at 8:05:44 PM

By the time the US started the industrial revolution was starting and the rules were changing.

by bluGill

5/29/2026 at 10:08:11 PM

that seems like a reductive truth in the other direction, i'd even say it's largely false.

the wealth explosion in the high middle ages and significant rise in standard of living was fully accompanied by (and maybe precisely because of) the flourishing of urbanity as well. there were great jobs in the city. proto industry and cottage industry, specialized trades, guilds, ... would you rather be a farmer, subject to the whims of your lord and the weather, or instead weave cloth at a more individualized pace, as a band of brothers?

that city was also a much more calm and verdant atmosphere than we now image as well. gardens, high intensity cultivation, markets, plazzas, all within city walls, not to mention a very accessible country side outside in walking distance ... no noise pollution from cars. i think people tend to forget this aspect a lot more, because they imagine the crowded industrial city. that machine-environment wasnt the norm for the hundreds of years preceding it. we should image bruges in 1370 here as the norm, not manchester in 1870.

sure, the city could be filthy, but farmlife was miserable in its own ways. and sanitation was bad in the city, it was just as bad as on the farmstead.

by trgn

5/29/2026 at 8:00:48 PM

Serfdom existed to prevent peasants from leaving those farms, people wanted to move to cities were wages and jobs were better but nobility wanted to force them to stay on those farms.

by Jensson

5/29/2026 at 8:08:11 PM

Serfdom existed as a step above slavery. The city may have been better for serfs but for the free farmer (if any) the farm was better. There is a lot of 'grass is greener' in the idea that the city was better for many farmers and so they may not have liked what the city was really like.

by bluGill

5/29/2026 at 8:16:07 PM

Before the modern era, people died like flies in cities; they were population sinks.

by jollyllama

5/29/2026 at 11:29:38 PM

[flagged]

by Am4TIfIsER0ppos

5/29/2026 at 4:22:13 PM

I really really wish, there was a VR game/app where I can transport myself to different places/times in the past and just walk around to get the texture and feel for what it felt like living in that time.

Walking around a Roman town, hearing what people talked like, what they wore, what technology was around, what did they do most of the day.

Someone please make it real.

by romanzubenko

5/29/2026 at 4:36:44 PM

The Assassin’s Creed Odyssey game, set in classical Greece, has a feature like this. It works really well as a teaching tool, and the immersion is excellent. Even today, the overall quality of the graphics and the game still holds up.

The “education mode” is officially called Discovery Tour: Ancient Greece. It removes all combat, enemies, and time pressure from the game and turns it into a large, interactive, open-air virtual museum.

https://www.ubisoft.com/en-us/game/assassins-creed/discovery...

My kids have actually used this (without any prompting from me) in middle school history classes.

There’s also a Story Mode, which lets players build their own narratives and share them. It can be quite a lot of fun.

https://assassinscreed.ubisoft.com/story-creator-mode/en-us

by devnulll

5/29/2026 at 5:34:24 PM

There are discovery tours for the other modern AC games too included if you own the base game.

by satvikpendem

5/29/2026 at 6:41:58 PM

I don’t understand why folks mention AC games first when this kind of thing is brought up, KCD is not perfect but much better for historical accuracy.

by bwv848

5/30/2026 at 5:10:22 AM

To be clear, they're taking about an "edutainment mode" feature, and not the standard game with its narrative about templar-aliens.

by thunderfork

5/29/2026 at 4:43:20 PM

I wish there was a "camping mode" for Breath of the Wild. Would be fun just to fish and hunt and camp.

by soperj

5/29/2026 at 6:17:43 PM

It's coming. I actually imagine it will seem trivial in a few years. "Better Than Life" from Red Dwarf is the next tier of computer games I guess. They wrote that episode back in the late 80s or early 90s and here we are with Google Genie 3 and the models that will supersede it.

by wonkyfruit

5/29/2026 at 4:39:13 PM

Assassin's Creed Brotherhood is kind of like that for the architecture and period it covers.

There's an interesting small YT channel that did a series on ACB + History

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hebq-fObdhY

by michaelbuckbee

5/29/2026 at 5:20:24 PM

For ancient Rome there is The Forgotten City.

by satvikpendem

5/29/2026 at 1:54:18 PM

I really enjoyed the film Fellini Satyricon because it shows a couple of regular guys on a crazy adventure after their apartment building in Rome collapses in an earthquake. Most other stuff about Rome/Romans follows leaders, generals, aristocrats, etc. so it was refreshing to see regular people.

And completely not based on reality, I also liked the British comedy series Plebs that also follows regular people living Rome. But it's just a way to show modern issues satirically, not really historical.

by comrade1234

5/29/2026 at 4:23:14 PM

The only thing that has changed is the technology and the gods. Humans in particular their behavior in most things are the same unfortunately…

by Danox

5/29/2026 at 3:06:27 PM

“ Most other stuff about Rome/Romans follows leaders, generals, aristocrats, etc. so it was refreshing to see regular people”

A lot of history focuses too much on leaders and elites. I would like to see much more information about how regular people lived. Or for example, when a some king “built” something, maybe we should know how life was for the workers there.

by vjvjvjvjghv

5/29/2026 at 4:06:34 PM

It's not as widely promoted, but if you're genuinely interested, there are more of those histories written then you'll ever have time to read yourself.

There's a classic five volume series "A History of Private Life" that works through a breadth-first survey over time. It can make for a great starting point, and is a bit like an encylopedia in the way you can engage with it as essays on certain times and topics instead of being expected to read it through serially.

by swatcoder

5/29/2026 at 7:48:08 PM

That is what the source material is. We have to read between the lines to figure anything else out. That means we often have to guess.

by bluGill

5/29/2026 at 2:01:04 PM

Plebs felt to me like the Inbetweeners set two thousand years earlier.

by nephihaha

5/29/2026 at 2:06:06 PM

They called them insulae meaning "islands". They had no concept of fire escapes, and barely any plumbing (despite this image of Roman engineering). They really were the harris end of Roman architecture.

by nephihaha

5/29/2026 at 5:56:53 PM

> barely any plumbing (despite this image of Roman engineering)

Nobody in their right mind would have even wanted plumbing in their home at the time.

Plumbing of the time was not airtight - this was before cheap metal and S-traps. So any drainage would be a highway for noxious odors and gasses right into your home. Bringing in fresh water would only be marginally useful without some sort of drainage.

Outbuildings persisted in the West for a while after modern plumbing because unless you are acclimated to it, the very idea of bringing refuse facilities into the home goes against every natural human instinct.

by legitster

5/29/2026 at 8:19:34 PM

> bringing refuse facilities into the home

Well spotted. India is apparently going through that, and they have a joke - older people complain that new generations are lost: "They dine outside and shit inside!"

by B1FF_PSUVM

5/29/2026 at 2:50:32 PM

> the harris end

I guess that's the rear (or arse) end, if anyone else is puzzled and doesn't have a couple of spare minutes to chase it down ...

>> top floors were the least desirable. Poorer residents occupied the upper story.

Some writers placed Julius Caesar's aristocratic but down at the heel family in the lower floors of a Subura tenement, but apparently it really was a house.

by ableal

5/29/2026 at 4:57:02 PM

> top floors were the least desirable. Poorer residents occupied the upper story.

This remained true in Western cities until elevators became widespread in the late 1800s. In New York city, for example, buildings didn't reach above 6 floors because even the poorest people would not walk up more stairs. Street level was frequently retail space, next floor up might be office space, everything higher was residential. Until Otis showed how to make a safety brake.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisha_Otis

by Tangurena2

5/29/2026 at 8:46:33 PM

In order to reach density living you need three things: space, water and food. The first was possible through the Roman cement, the second through the monumental Roman aqueducts and third due to the large share of slaves in relation to free people (it might be 10:1)

by tsoukase

5/29/2026 at 4:13:23 PM

One of Mary Beard's documentaries ('Meet the Romans' I think) touches on Roman insulae. Literal death traps, and seemingly miserably uncomfortable at the best of times. At least you're out of the rain (except on the top floors).

And someone below mentioned 'Plebs', which is the humorous take on all this. Recommended.

by kjs3

5/30/2026 at 2:41:45 AM

It’s a shame the book is priced so ridiculously high for an ebook.

by MagicMoonlight

5/30/2026 at 4:20:47 AM

I dont think $15 is ridiculously high.

by cpncrunch

5/29/2026 at 4:51:16 PM

Another article written by Al

by totetsu

5/30/2026 at 4:17:24 AM

No, its an excerpt from his book.

by cpncrunch

5/31/2026 at 10:11:39 AM

Him being a man named AL

by totetsu