Chapter 286 The Fifth District

The huge four major roads would be connected to the central district of the city, a place that Alexander intended to make his nerve center of the city.

This part was previously the marketplace, intuitively chosen, because it was at the center of the city and so people could easily come and go as they wished from all four parts of the city.

And Alexander had intended to keep it that way at first, instead placing the administrative buildings to the north of the city.

But it was Menes who raised an objection to this, citing it would be dangerous to place such important buildings so close to the gates, as in the case of a siege, these important buildings, with all the important heads of the city, alone with carrying thousands, if not tens of thousands of precious documents, everything would be vulnerable to enemy siege weapons.

And after thinking about it a while, Alexander agreed.

So, he placed all the important buildings in the middle of the city, so that even in the event that the city walls were breached, the leaders and decision-makers were not immediately in the crosshairs.

And to decrease the probability of that ever happening, Alexander placed one of the city gates, the eastern gate under the hands of the army, while the northern gate was to be protected by the city garrison.

The southern portion did not have any large gate, for it faced the ocean, while the western part was made up of steep hills that would make any attack unassailable and any attacker visible for miles.

According to plans drawn up by Alexander, the central district was to house the following buildings for the time being:

There would be the police headquarter, plus the residential quarters of the servicemen, all one thousand members, and possibly more in the future, with all their family members placed here.

In the daytime, these men would be placed all over the city, but at night they would sleep in the central district, the idea behind the decision being that these armed men would have more motivation to protect the district they lived in, thus ensuring the security of this vital part of the city.

There would be the central bank that Alexander planned to soon set up, which would be the country's first but certainly not the last one, as Alexander was sure that others would soon emulate him to set up similar financial institutions, making the central district become a financial hub for the province and possibly the country.

There would be a huge public library that would house tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands books and manuscripts.

Work was scheduled to begin as soon as Alexander found the time to invent the printing press.

There would be several state-sponsored public schools and universities here, designed to teach the younger generation the basic knowledge, who would then be expected to use and contribute to the public library.

There would be all kinds of administrative buildings that would handle all the paperwork for the entire city and slowly extend to the entire province.

Some of the buildings that came to Alexander just from the top of his mind were the usual ones anyone could come up- the agricultural building, the mining building, etc.

But some were a bit more special like the marriage registration and immigration building and two were completely new kinds of buildings called the slave management building- responsible for, as the name suggests, registering and looking after the well-being of the slaves and the citizen record building which Alexander planned to use to keep a detailed track of the population, by issuing something similar to the US social security card.

And then there were the judicial buildings, which would settle both criminal and civilian matters for individuals, businesses, and even the state.

They would not only judge and enforce their ruling but also make, study, evaluate, and interpret the law.

But what did it mean by interpreting the law?

Wasn't the law what was written on the parchment?

No, because, even the most versatile and knowledgeable lawmakers could not make a law that will be true for all eternity.

And so it was a lawmaker's job to not only read and memorize the law but also understand the appropriate context of its implementation.

Alongside these administrative and judicial buildings, Alexander also planned to make the central district the spiritual hub of the city.

There already was both the Temple of Ramuh and the Temple of Gaia here, displaying that even the people before knew of the location's convenience of travel, and Alexander planned to make many more temples in the vicinity.

And at last, there was the big one.

The single piece of building that would make all the other buildings appear secondary, casting a shadow on all of them.

The one that would legitimize the central district's title- The nerve center of the city.

A building called- The Senate.

The current senate's address was Alexander's home, more specifically the second-floor hall room.

But that place was only chosen as such because of convenience, and out of necessity.

It could never become the norm.

The setting was too informal for his liking, and Alexander did not look too kindly to so many men coming and going out of his house every day.

And in the future, there would be even more traffic as more and more people would be invited to join the meetings.

So it was soon bound to get crowded.

This was not a problem for the previous pasha as he kept only a few men around him, letting his subordinates oversee all the work.

But that was not how Alexander operated, as evidenced by his invitation of even civilians into his meetings.

He liked to be informed and in the thick of things and so the number of his advisors was bound to keep increasing in the future.

So the parliamentary building was a necessity, which he planned to design exactly like the Roman one, with a central platform to address others and give speeches, and all the lords seated on raised platforms all around like a gallery.

Alexander also contemplated moving the noble's district, which was currently to the west of the city, and one that he was transforming into the civilian residential district to the center of the city.

But he was yet to make his mind up on that one.

And the very last thing that Alexander planned to build was a triumph.

It was basically a Roman invention and it was a huge arched gate that one paraded through to celebrate military success.

And like the Romans, Alexander too planned to hold grand parades to celebrate his military successes.

And that completed Alexander's plans for the city.

Most of these plans were still in their infancy, and it would take a few years to get all the buildings up and running, but Alexander had decided to reserve the plots for those buildings from now.

For now though, Alexander was concentrating his efforts on getting the basic infrastructures going.

And his first priority were the roads.

Though even this simple plan had been met with, not opposition exactly, but some grumblings.

The complaints were as expected, his advisors felt that building such massive wide roads, capable of accommodating two double horse carriages as excessive.

Given the already small size of the city, they felt that the land could have been better used to make more productive structures such as shops, buildings, and offices.

But Alexander knew perfectly well how important the smooth flow of traffic was to a city and he was well aware of how quickly transports in a city could balloon.

And he did not want to deal with the kind of congestion that could create.

After all, traffic jams were after all not just a modern thing, but existed even in ancient times.

And many times it would be even worse.

One only needed to look at the Roman empire to know the kinds of congestion a misplanned city could create.

First, horse-drawn carts from dawn to dusk were banned in Rome, because they caused too much noise and confusion on the streets, and harnessed horses contaminated the city.

And then people were ordered to move around the city only on foot.

And at last, when even this did not totally work, women were not allowed to move with carts.

And similar traces of congestion was already beginning to show themselves in Zanzan even by now, in a city largely empty.

This was because there were only a few important streets wide enough for two carts to cross each other while most of the streets were narrow with a width of 1 to 2 meters.

This meant that horse-drawn carts carrying construction materials such as cement, bricks, and stones would face huge problems maneuvering in such small, tight spaces, especially if there were many crowds in the streets.

To remedy this, usually, the coachman would send a man forward to pave the passage or properly instruct another oncoming driver, for example, by forcing a temporary stop.

This could never be a long-term solution and so Alexander decided to build the roads as wide as possible since he had the chance to do so now.

As a matter of fact, he wanted to build the main roads 10m wide but found it difficult to do within the confines of the compact city.

So, he settled for 8m.

And he handed these plans to Uzak and told his men to get to work, tasking them with creating a road network that measured close to a hundred kilometers.

And all that for a city of just two square kilometers.