Urbanisation in Roman Spain and Portugal : Routledge : 9780367900779 : 0367900777 : 04 Mar 2021 : "The principal aims of the book Urbanisation in Roman Spain and Portugal: Civitates Hispaniae in the Early Empire are to provide a comprehensive reconstruction of the urban systems of the Iberian Peninsula during the Early Empire and to explain why thesesystems looked the way they did. While some chapters focus on settlements that were cities or towns from a juridical point of view, the implications of using a purely functional definition of towns are also explored. Key themes include continuities and discontinuities between pre-Roman and Roman settlement patterns, the geographical distribution of cities belonging to various size brackets, economic relationships between self-governing cities and their territories, and the role of cities as nodes in roadsystems and maritime networks. In addition, it is argued that a considerable number of self-governing communities in Roman Spain and Portug