Urban planning is not a recent invention. People have designed their settlements from the earliest times. Despite differences based on geography, culture, and the needs of the population, the various planners had many things in common, as this essay will describe.
There is evidence of deliberate planning as far back as the third millennium BCE in the Indus Valley. In the city of Harappa, now in modern Pakistan, there were water tanks, a system of urban sanitation, and the streets were paved and laid out in a regular grid.
Similarly, in the first millennium BCE, the ancient Greeks were laying out their cities in an organized and regular manner. Alexandria and Miletus are two of the most famous examples of this urban planning. These cities also provided their inhabitants with public facilities such as marketplaces and fresh water supplies.
Islamic cities too provided their citizens with public facilities. They are further credited with developing a totally new idea of urban planning known as zoning. This is a system where different areas of a city are assigned different functions such as religious, administrative, or commercial. The idea of zoning spread to many parts of Europe.