Landscapes of Distinction

How did increasing wealth and inequality transform cities and communities in the Roman Empire in the last centuries before the common era?

This project explores the social history of inequality in the Roman world. It studies the development and impact of inequality in Roman Italy in the last two centuries BCE. This was a period of sharply increasing economic differentiation, and my project investigates how this transformed the cities of the Italian peninsula. It does so by analysing the urban houses of this period, and by assessing how increasing housing inequality changed the urban built environment. By mapping the emerging urban ‘landscapes of distinction’, the project develops a new way of looking at the changing role of wealth and poverty in Roman society in this period: how did increasing inequality affect the urban community?