Thus, one of Alexander's youngest generals, afterwards Seleucus I, sometimes styled Nicator, founded several towns called Seleucia, at least three called Apamea, and others named Laodicea and Antiochia, thereby recording himself, his Iranian wife Apama, his mother Laodice and his father Antiochus, and his successors seem to have added other towns bearing the same name.
Indeed, two-thirds of the town-names which are prominent in the later history of Asia Minor and Syria, date from the age of Alexander and his Macedonians.
Many discoveries show that these towns were laid out with a regular 'chess-board' street-plan.

That method of town-planning now made definite entry into the European world.

No architect or statesman is recorded to have invented or systematically encouraged it.

Alexander himself and his architect, one Dinocrates of Rhodes or perhaps of Macedonia, seem to have employed it at Alexandria in Egypt, and this may have set the fashion.

Seven years after Alexander's death it recurs at Nicaea in Bithynia, which was refounded by one of Alexander's successors in 323 B.C.and was laid out on this fashion.
But no ancient writer credits either the founder or the architect of Alexandria or the founder of Nicaea with any particular theory on the subject.