Wide Urban World

My book, Urban Life in the Distant Past: The Prehistory of Energized Crowding, will be published in February/March, 2023, by Cambridge University Press. This provides one reason to re-start this blog. Another reason is to explore some of the issues in early and comparative urbanism that I have been working on for the past few years. The Covid-19 pandemic coincided with a general decline in blogs and an increase in the use of twitter, and I followed along with these trends. But twitter threads are a pain to put together and they have little or no staying power. I had been intending to get this blog going again for a few years now, so here we are.

I am going to start off here with some of my publications from the past few years. I last posted here in early 2019, so I'll start with that year. Once I've gone over a bunch of my papers, I'll start blogging on the themes and content of my new book.

Publications, 2019

Smith, ME  (2019)  Energized Crowding and the Generative Role of Settlement Aggregation and Urbanization. In Coming Together: Comparative Approaches to Population Aggregation and Early Urbanization, edited by Attila Gyucha, pp. 37-58. State University of New York Press, Albany.  Available Here

Members of the Social Reactors Project
at Teotihuacan, 2019

This paper is a kind of rehearsal for my book. I wrote this as my attempt to explore the theoretical and comparative foundation of the work we were doing on settlement scaling. See this past post on energized crowding. The project website has lots of information, including all of our papers:   https://www.colorado.edu/socialreactors/ Here we are on top of the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan in 2019. Great place for a workshop on urban science!!

Teotihuacan map.

Smith, ME, A Chatterjee, S Stewart, A Huster and M Forest  (2019)  Apartment Compounds, Households, and Population at Teotihuacan. Ancient Mesoamerica 30(3):399-418.  Available Here. 

This paper makes several major advances in our understanding of urbanism at ancient Teotihuacan.

First, we create a new population estimate for Teotihuacan at its height. This is the most rigorous population figure ever calculated for the city. Past estimates, even those by Millon and Cowgill, were quite subjective and impressionistic. Our best estimate:  100,000 inhabitants.

Second, we confirm, extend, and built on the residential classification of the Teotihuacan Mapping Project. Millon's categories of low-status, intermediate-status, and high-status residences have withstood the test of time.

Third, and perhaps most exciting, we present a new method for determining how many households likely lived in each of the excavated apartment compounds. We use network methods, often called "space syntax" by archaeologists. While others have analyzed Teotihuacan residences using space syntax methods, we offer the most systematic and rigorous analysis. This was worked out primarily by Abishek Chatterjee, an electrical engineer at Intel and an online anthropology major at ASU. When I first explained what we needed to Abishek, and showed him the plans, he said "This is a network problem, and I can solve it." Well, he did! An important component was a set of new systematic plan maps of the excavated residences, made by Sierra Stewart.

Network analysis of Zacuala

In the example here, the compound known as Zacuala, there were four dwellings (that is, four housing areas, each with one household), plus a common area around the large central patio and platform.

This paper not only contributed to advances in understanding demography, housing and social organization, but it also forms the basis for continuing analysis of spatial patterns at Teotihuacan. We are hot on the trail of a new analysis of urban density, using concepts and methods from urban economics. If you compare 20th century cities studied by economists, do you think Teotihuacan was more like U.S. cities, or Soviet-block socialist cities? We will tell you.

Smith, ME and J Lobo  (2019)  Cities through the Ages: One Thing or Many? Frontiers in Digital Humanities, 6 (Special issue: Where to Cities Come From and Where are They Going to? Modelling Past and Present Agglomerations to Understand Urban Ways of Life):Article 12.  Click here.

This is another paper oriented toward providing a context for the work in settlement scaling. Whether one considers cities--across history and around the world--as one thing or as many things depends on what kinds of questions one asks, or what kinds of attributes one is examining. If you focus on political context, technology, energy use, or transport, then ancient cities were radically different from cities today. But, on the other hand, if you focus on the ways that people interact socially within the built environment--how that relates to population size and density, and on the positive outcomes from social interactions--then there seems to be only one type of city. These social interactions are fundamental for the dynamics and operation of cities and settlements through history, today and in the past.

I love this image! It is from the Social Reactors Project website:
https://www.colorado.edu/socialreactors/publications

Stay tuned for information on my urban publications since 2019.