Inventing Urban Public Space: Morphogenesis and Energized Crowding in Mohenjo-Daro

The earliest of ancient cities developed an urban morphology with a capacity to sustain intensive urban public life for dense and heterogeneous populations. The Indus city of Mohenjo- Daro (2600–1900 bc) is one of the earliest cities for which we have detailed evidence of the street and laneway morphologies of everyday urban life. Merging archaeology with urban design theory, an innovative mapping reveals the spatial logic and generative forces that produced this public access network and its ‘commons’. While often regarded as a ‘planned’ city, this was an informal, adaptive, and experimental process of inventing an urban morphology that could enable and sustain the energized crowding at the heart of urban life, yet also manage the stresses of everyday face-to-face encounter with strangers. This contributes to debates about relations between planned and unplanned cities, between cities and states, and between cities and urbanity.