The Ancient History of Gated Communities

Fig 1 - Modern gated community

Gated communities are a hot topic of research and discussion in urban studies. As summarized in a recent encyclopedia entry:

 Although gated communities are eulogized by residents, developers, and real estate agents for providing safe family spaces and secure financial investments, they have received a largely negative press from academics and the media, who perceive them as private fortresses that destroy the vibrancy of the city through their exclusivity. (Lemanski 2008)

The dominant view -- both scholarly and popular -- emphasizes security and fear. People are shutting themselves away in gated communities to keep out crime and undesirables. The spread of gated communities is said to produce alienation and anomie among residents, and a socially divided or segregated urban landscape (Blakely and Sneider 1997; Low 2001). Some research, however, challenges the security/fear interpretation of modern gated communities. Andrew Kirby and colleagues (Kirby et al. 2006), for example, report that in a sample of Phoenix gated communities, "residents are not alienated" (p.29), and the communities are not responses to a "culture of fear."

Fig 2- Informal neighborhood gate, Lima

The fear/security factor may, in fact, be more prominent in gated communities in poor neighborhoods of cities in the developing world than in modern U.S. or European cities. In Peru, enclosed areas are being established long after initial construction, by the residents themselves. Jörg Plöger (2006) studied neighborhoods in Lima, Peru, and found that most neighborhoods are "enclosed" or sealed off (with barriers and fences) by their residents for reasons of security (figure 2). These gates are installed not by developers or municipal authorities, but by the residents; they are informal, not formal, urban features. And even Dharavi, the Mumbai slum (of Slumdog Millionaire fame) where people are living in extremely close quarters, is the setting for many fenced-off residential zones. Jan Nijman (2010) explores how Dharavi challenges a number of standard notions in urban studies, a field whose models are based overwhelmingly on modern western cities.

Fig. 3- Chinese walled compound

These studies of the developing world are important for establishing a broader comparative perspective for gated communities. When we consider the past, the diversity of forms and meanings of gated communities increases even more. It turns out that gated communities have been common in Chinese cities for more than a millennium (Xu and Yang 2009), and they have been prominent in Mexico from the time of Spanish conquest until the present (Scheinbaum 2008). Figure 3 shows a traditional Chinese walled compound (i.e., a gated community). Interestingly, these features  resemble Inka walled compounds (called kancha) in Peru (figure 4). There is no historical connection at all between the Chinese and Inka examples; these are independent adaptations to what were probably similar urban forces and conditions. My guess would attribute this similarity in form to the importance of kinship and lineage in Chinese and Inka society. Several generations of families live together,

Fig 4 - Inka Kancha

 and the compound wall served as a visible marker of the close-knit social unit.


As in most premodern cities, the Chinese compounds were probably designed by their residents, and built either by the residents or by builders contracted by the residents. We know less about the construction of Inka compounds. The Inka state was strongly bureaucratic, and officials supervised and carried out many activities that were left to individual families in most early societies. Maps of Inka settlements show that these kancha units are highly standardized, perhaps because of central planning (Hyslop 1990).

Fig 5- Walled compounds in Chang'an

In some ancient cities, there is clear evidence for state planning in the construction of walled residential compounds. In Tang period Chang'an China, more than a millennium ago, the more than one million residents lived in walled-in neighborhoods. Gates closed off these neighborhoods at night, and guards made sure people stayed in their walled compounds and off the streets. A stone map from A.D. 1080 (figure 5) shows these ancient gated communities. In the following Song period, the state's power declined with a dramatic rise in commerce. In place of two enclosed markets, shops and stalls proliferated along the streets, gates were no longer guarded, and a real urban street life was generated. In this case, the gated communities were part of a state policy of control of the population, and when the policies changed to allow more freedom and self-determination, the gates came down (Heng 1999)

Fig 6- Old neighborhood gate, Jerusalem

Just the opposite process occurred in the Islamic cities of the Ottoman period in the Near East -- the neighborhood walls came down not from a loosening of state control, but from the imposition of strong control. These traditional cities had enclosed neighborhoods whose walls and gates were built by the residents (figure 6) to protect their neighborhood from outsiders; municipal and state authorities did not concern themselves with regulating life at the neighborhood or household level. But when these cities were conquered by European empires, one of the first tasks of the imperial overlords was to tear down the neighborhood gates. The new rulers were worried that people might be planning resistance in these closed neighborhoods, and the streets were opened up so that officials could begin to see what was going on in these areas (Abu-Lughod 1987).

Fig 7 - Hohokam walled compound

If there is this much variation in the social contexts of gated communities in premodern (and modern) cities, how can archaeologists begin to interpret ancient gated communities at sites where there are no written records? The Hohohkam of southern Arizona, in the final period prior to collapse and abandonment of their towns (ca 12th-15th centuries), started building walls around their neighborhoods (figure 7). Previously, their houses had been built in groups or clusters, with without walls. What does this signal? Or consider the Iron Age oppida towns in Europe (these are the towns defeated by Julius Caesar in his conquest of Gaul). Some of them had gated communities (figure 8). The walls in this reconstruction are not very high. Do they signal social exclusion, or perhaps just a way to keep the farm animals from wandering?

Fig 8 - Iron Age walled compound

These comparisons have intrigued me for a number of years. What is needed is a comprehensive comparative study of walled compounds / gated communities in the premodern world. Synthetic studies like Grant and Mittelstaedt (2004) are a good place to start. Perhaps we can figure out some of the social parameters of these features, and allow archaeologists to link the spatial layouts to social processes. Or perhaps the situation is just too messy and diverse. But until someone attacks this problem, we will never know.


References

Abu-Lughod, Janet L.
1987    The Islamic City: Historic Myth, Islamic Essence, and Contemporary Relevance. International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 19:155-176.

Blakely, Edward J. and Mary G. Snyder
1997    Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States. Brookings Institution Press, Washington, DC.

Grant, Jill and Lindsey Mittelsteadt
2004    Types of Gated Communities. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 31:913-930.

Heng, Chye Kiang
1999    Cities of Aristocrats and Bureaucrats: The Development of Medieval Chinese Cityscapes. University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu.

Hyslop, John
1990    Inka Settlement Planning. University of Texas Press, Austin.

Kirby, Andrew, Sharon L. Harlan, Larissa Larsen, Edward J. Hackett, Bob Bolin, Amy Nelson, Tom Rex, and Shapard Wolf
2006    Examining the Significance of Housing Enclaves in the Metropolitan United States of America. Housing, Theory, and Society 23:19-33.

Lemanski, Charlotte
2009    Gated Communities. In Encyclopedia of Urban Studies, edited by Ray Hutchison, pp. Article 109. Sage, New York.  http://www.sage-ereference.com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/urbanstudies/Article_n109.html.

Low, Setha M.
2001    The Edge and the Center: Gated Communities and the Discourse of Urban Fear. American Anthropologist 103:45-68.

Nijman, Jan
2010    A Study of Space in Mumbai's Slums. Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 101:4-17.

Plöger, Jörg
2006    Practices of Socio-Spatial Control in the Marginal Neighbourhoods of Lima, Peru. Trialog: A Journal for Planning and Building in the Third World 89(2):32-36.

Scheinbaum, Diana
2008    Gated Communities in Mexico City: An Historical Perspective. Urban Design International 13:241-252.

Xu, Miao and Zhen Yang
2009    Design History of China's Gated Cities and Neighbourhoods: Prototype and Evolution. Urban Design International 14:99-117.

Arrival City

Teotihuacan, Mexico

Ever since the first cities, people have been moving into town from the countryside. The earliest cities in southern Mesopotamia (Uruk) and central Mexico (Teotihuacan) grew from rural-to-urban migration. These two settlements got their start as small political capitals. Then they went through a period of explosive growth, while at the same time their hinterlands were depopulated. Although archaeologists cannot trace specific migrants from the village to the city, it's pretty clear that the people who abandoned the small rural settlements were the ones who swelled the capitals with their numbers.

Prior to the twentieth century, the level of urban disease was so high that cities were demographic sinks. That is, mortality was high, with more people dying than being born. I first read about this situation in William McNeill's 1976 book, Plagues and Peoples, a very readable book that is still valuable and fascinating today. The only way that premodern cities could maintain their population (or grow) was through migration from the countryside. Thus migration was the lifeline of premodern cities--without it, they would shrink and die.

Although urban migration has always been with us, it first came to world attention in the mid-twentieth century. Throughout the developing world, a combination of global and local economic forces led to population growth and increasing poverty in the countryside. Peasant families moved into cities in large numbers. This led to the creation of large shantytowns around most of the big cities in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. At first, governments, the media, and even scholars decried these places as settings for crime, violence, poverty, and the breakdown of families and social values. But ethnographic fieldwork by urban anthropologists (pioneered by Oscar Lewis and William Mangin) showed that these shantytowns were full of hard-working poor people who hustled to make a living while maintaining the family structure and value system (see Mangin 1970; Turner 1991).

This massive exodus from rural to urban never ceased. Now more than half of the human species lives in cities, and all over the world rural peoples continue to migrate to shantytowns and other urban settlements. In his new book, Arrival City, journalist Doug Saunders (2011) describes this migration process around the world, from Africa to China to the United States. His findings echo the results of the urban anthropologists from fifty years ago: most migrants work hard to make a living, creating vibrant and dynamic urban neighborhoods in the process. Like their cousins two generations ago, these migrants maintain contact with their villages of origin, regularly sending money back home. Like premodern cities all over the world, people can live, work and relax in their own neighborhood. If the authorities provide key services (buses most of all, but also street lighting and other infrastructural features like paved roads, sewage systems and water), these urban villages become successful and sustainable neighborhoods.

Doug Saunders has a website on the book, "Arrival City" and a nice photo essay in the magazine Foreign Policy.  There are excellent and insightful reviews in  The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian.  In the latter review, Fred Pearce says,

This may be the best popular book on cities since Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities half a century ago. Certainly it shares the same optimism about human aspiration amid overcrowded buildings and unplanned urban jungles, and the same plea for planners to help rather than stifle those dreams.

The picture painted by Saunders is vivid and contemporary, but the phenomenon of Arrival Cities -- those places where the migrants end up -- is quite ancient. If the ancient Sumerian scribes had been inclined to inscribe their cuneiform tablets with stories of urban migrants rather than accounts of the temple's herds of sheep or stories of the great deeds of kings and gods, this book might have been written five thousand years ago. Migration is absolutely crucial to urban dynamics, a regular pattern in the wide urban world.

Early Sumerian cuneiform text.

References:

Mangin, William (editor)
1970    Peasants in Cities: Readings in the Anthropology of Urbanization. Houghton Mifflin, Boston.

 McNeill, William H.
1976    Plagues and Peoples. Academic Press, New York.

Saunders, Doug
2011    Arrival City: How the Largest Migration in History is Reshaping our World.  Pantheon, New York.

Turner, John F. C.
1991    Housing by People: Towards Autonomy in Building Environments. Marion Boyars, London.

Cosmograms, Sociograms, and Cities Built as Images

Idealized Chinese Cosmogram Capital

Ten years ago a group of archaeologists published a collection of papers titled "Were Cities Built as Images?" (Carl et al. 2000). They discussed the notion that ancient urban planners laid out cities as pictorial diagrams. In some urban traditions, such as Imperial China and ancient Khmer Angkor, cities were designed explicitly as models of the cosmos ("cosmograms"). For many ancient urban traditions, however, there is little or no evidence for urban cosmograms, but this has not stopped many writers from asserting a cosmological source for urban design principles. A concept used much less frequently is the "microcosm" or "sociogram," referring to an urban design that encodes not cosmology, but features of social organization. I think this latter category may have been more common than is typically appreciated.

Imperial China: Capital Cities were Cosmograms

Feng shui masters pick new capital site

The best examples of ancient cities laid out in imitation of the cosmos are the imperial capitals of ancient Chinia (see figure above). Written sources describe a belief that the emperor had to act in harmony with heaven or else his luck would run out and the kingdom would suffer. One aspect of this belief was the idea that the emperor should build a new capital in a propitious place and that it should be built as a model of the cosmos: a symmetrical rectangle with nine gates, crossing avenues, and a royal compound in the center. The figure at left shows the imperial feng shui masters selecting the site for a new capital. For these Chinese cities, see Wheatley (1971) and Steinhardt (1990).


Ancient Mesoamerica: Cities were Not Cosmograms

There is a common "cartoon view" of ancient societies which holds that ancient peoples were obsessed with religion, death, and the afterlife, thinking about these things more than they thought about daily life. Everyone has heard this about ancient Egypt, but the belief is much more common. "Those people were not logical people like us," the cartoon view holds, "They were irrational prisoners of their religion." This view is nonsense. Ancient people were very much like you and I. Although they lived under very different cultural and social conditions, ancient people were logical and rational. Religion was important to them, but they were generally not fanatical or obsessive about it.

One expression of this cartoon view is the idea that all ancient cities were like the Chinese capitals in being cosmograms. The extent to which some writers are willing to speculate in the absence of evidence in order to uphold the cosmogram view is impressive (and depressing). I have debunked this view for the Classic Maya cities in Smith (2005). To put it simply, there is no evidence that the Maya, or the Aztecs or any other ancient Mesoamerican peoples, viewed their cities as cosmograms. Spanish writers recorded thousands of pages about the religious beliefs of the Aztecs and Mayas, providing great detail about the gods, rituals, and myths, but there is not a word about cosmograms.

The central district of Moundville

Microcosms and Sociograms

The absence of cosmograms does not mean that for form and design of ancient cities were arbitrary or devoid of social meaning. Vernon Knight (1998) used the concept of "sociogram" to describe a model in which aspects of social organization were expressed in the arrangement of public platforms at Mississippian chiefdom capital Moundville (see figure). A series of temple mounds and residential mounds were arranged around a plaza in a form similar to the way that clan buildings were arranged around plazas in Chickasaw villages as described by European observers. Kate Spielmann (2008) adds several archaeological examples of such sociograms, mostly for the village and town layouts of small-scale societies.

Monte Alban, main plaza

Although Knight limited his definition of sociogram to ranked clans in pre-state societies, it can be generalized to urban state societies. For example, three decades ago Richard Blanton (1978) made a similar interpretation of the structures that line the plaza at the Classic-period capital Monte Alban in Oaxaca, Mexico (see map at left). Blanton argued that Monte Alban was created by a series of formerly competing chiefdoms in the Valley of Oaxaca who came together to built the impressive mountaintop city. If correct, then the main plaza at Monte Alban was a sociogram in which each of the structures lining the east and west sides of the plaza represented one of the original chiefdoms. In 1988, Olivier de Montmollin provided a parallel interpretation of the highland Maya city of Tenam Rosario, arguing that rural social groups were represented in the arrangements of plazas and structures in the capital city.

Cosmograms Today?

Burley's plan of Canberra

Urban cosmograms like the ancient Chinese capitals no longer exist in the modern world. Although some specialized religious compounds may be designed as cosmograms, whole cities are not. In the account of Amos Rapoport (1993), modern capital (and other) cities have lost the high-level symbolism and meaning of many ancient cities.Cities are more secular in layout today. But this has not stopped conspiracy enthusiasts from claiming that esoteric knowledge has been used to create secret cosmograms of some modern cities and buildings. Peter Proudfoot (1994), for example, claims that planner Walter Burley Griffin used esoteric symbols from the field of Theosophy to design the layout of Canberra in the early twentieth century. Burley's wife was a follower of Theosophy, and according to Proudfoot this led Burley to design Canberra as a secret Theosophical cosmogram. It is a fascinating book that reveals far more about the author than about the city of Canberra.

The basic message of this discussion is that not all ancient cities in the wide urban world were alike. Chinese and Khmer capitals were built as cosmograms, but Aztec and Maya capitals were not. Smaller Chinese cities were probably not cosmograms either. But the idea of encoding social meaning in city layout may have been broader and more widespread than the cosmogram concept. Are modern cities, or perhaps parts of them, laid out as sociograms? I'll have to think more about that; if you have examples or suggestions, please pass them on.


References:

Blanton, Richard E.
1978    Monte Alban: Settlement Patterns at the Ancient Zapotec Capitol. Academic Press, New York.

Carl, Peter, Barry Kemp, Ray Laurance, Robin Coningham, Charles Highan, and George L. Cowgill
2000    Viewpoint: Were Cities Built as Images? Cambridge Archaeological Journal 10:327-365.

de Montmollin, Olivier
1988    Tenam Rosario: A Political Microcosm. American Antiquity 53:351-370.

Knight, Vernon J., Jr.
1998    Moundville as a Diagrammatic Ceremonial Center. In Archaeology of the Moundville Chiefdom, edited by Vernon J. Knight, Jr. and Vincas P. Steponaitis, pp. 44-62. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC.

Proudfoot, Peter R.
1994    The Secret Plan of Canberra. University of New South Wales Press, Kensington, NSW, Australia.

Rapoport, Amos
1993    On the Nature of Capitals and Their Physical Expression. In Capital Cities, Les Capitales: Perspectives Internationales, International Perspectives, edited by John Taylor, Jean G. Lengellé, and Caroline Andrew, pp. 31-67. Carleton University Press, Ottawa.
 

Smith, Michael E.
2005    Did the Maya Build Architectural Cosmograms? Latin American Antiquity 16:217-224.

Spielmann, Katherine A.
2008    Crafting the Sacred: Ritual Places and Paraphernalia in Small-Scale Societies. In Dimensions of Ritual Economy, edited by E. Christian Wells and Patricia A. McAnany, pp. 37-72. Research in Economic Anthropology, vol. 27. Greenwich, CT, JAI Press.

 
Steinhardt, Nancy S.
1990    Chinese Imperial City Planning. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu.

Wheatley, Paul
1971    The Pivot of the Four Quarters: A Preliminary Enquiry into the Origins and the Character of the Ancient Chinese City. Aldine, Chicago.

Arcosanti: Paolo Soleri's futuristic vision of urbanism

Fig. 1 - view of Arcosanti

The other day my wife and I visited Arcosanti, the futuristic urban development in the desert an hour north of Phoenix (fig. 1). This is the brianchild, and life's work, of visionary architect Paolo Soleri. In the 1960s Soleri developed ideas about sustainable and livable cities for the future. At first glance, his idealized drawings and plans (figure 2) seem like unrealistic fantasies, disconnected from reality. But Arcosanti, still very much a work in progress, shows how Soleri's vision is starting to be expressed on the landscape. "Arcology" is Soleri's term for his cities (from ARChitecture and eCOLOGY).

Fig. 2 - One of Soleri's plans for a future city

Soleri advocates recycling of materials, waste reduction, energy conservation, and renewable energy sources. Cities should be dense, not sprawling. Expansion, through construction, should move upward, not outward (fig. 2), in order to reduce the impact on the landscape and keep people close together. Surrounding areas should remain as green or natural landscapes. People should be able to live, work, and shop within a relatively small area, without need for cars. Some of these ideas were later taken up by the new urbanism.

In 1961 Soleri worked out an interesting construction technique called "earth casting" for the production of dome roofs. In one variant, sand and silt are piled up into a mound, and cement is poured on top to make a dome. Spaces are left on the sides for doors and windows. Then the dirt is dug out, leaving the dome roof in place. In other variants, wood frames are used instead of earth mounds.Figure 1 shows some of the cement dome roofs at Arcosanti.

Fig. 3 - The extent of Arcosanti today

The construction of Arcosanti has been in process for four decades, and it falls far short of Soleri's original plan. Instead of the planned 5,000 residents, there are fewer than 100 people living there today. Figure 3 shows its extent today. In addition to the urban site, there is considerable land surrounding it, with gardens and orchards. Soleri refuses to take corporate donations, instead financing work through the sale of bronze and ceramic wind bells. These bells are quite nice, visually attractive with very nice sound (figure 4); we have two in our patio, where they tell us the strength of the wind. The bells are forged on site, using a casting method similar to earth casting, but on a much smaller scale. Bells are also made in Cosanti, Soleri's residence/workshop/foundry/shop in Paradise Valley (much closer to Phoenix). Much of the labor to construct Arcosanti is done by volunteers who attend month-long workshops to learn Soleri's construction methods by apprenticeship.

Fig. 4 - Bronze bells forged at Arcosanti

Arcosanti is a kind of utopian community. It is staffed by true believers in Soleri's vision. There are periodic workshops were students and volunteers contribute labor and learn to build using Soleri's methods and materials. The tour guide, clearly a follower of his ideas, told us that living space is apportioned on the basis of need: large families get larger quarters and smaller families get smaller lodgings. I asked what would happen if someone wanted a bigger apartment just to have a big place; I was told that things did not work that way in Arcosanti.

Fig. 5 - Small evaporative cooling pool.

My wife and I found Arcosanti to be a pleasant and very livable place. There are trees and vegetation and the construction is aesthetically pleasing. Soleri's positive construction methods are clearly in evidence, including passive solar heating methods for the winter, and evaporative cooling ponds (fig. 5) for the summer. But Arcosanti is not a city yet, and perhaps it will never be one. At the current construction rate, it will take decades, perhaps centuries, to complete.

Ultimately I was frustrated from the tour - I want to see a city with people, not a pleasant construction site with  some finished buildings. Can Soleri's ideas work in practice? What would life be like in such a settlement? I am fascinated by his vision and by the parts of Arcosanti that have already been built, but even after four decades it seems too soon to get an idea of what an "arcology" would be like.

Arcosanti has a nice website with lots of information about its history, construction, ideals, as well as volunteer opportunities, tours, and the like. Paolo Soleri has a number of books that explain his ideas and work; several are listed below. David Grierson has done a study of Arcosanti and has several papers available on the Internet. His work, like most things available on Arcosanti, are strongly positive and supportive of Soleri's vision. I did find one negative scholarly voice, however. In an interesting and insightful article in the University of Michigan journal Agora, urban planner Catherine Gaines Sanders states,

"Arcosanti, like many experiments in sustainable living, has been successful; however, it is not a city. ... These numbers [100 residents, not the planned 5,000] do not constitute the 'urban effect'. As an urban experiment, Arcosanti is a failure." (Sanders 2008:21)

While that sounds like a harsh judgment, I must agree with it. Soleri's ideas and vision are positive and inspiring, but they have yet to be put into practice. While I respect his insistence on independence from commercial or corporate funding, the result is an unfinished settlement in the desert. Perhaps he has valuable advice for the future of urbanism, but until someone builds an "arcology", the jury is still out.

REFERENCES

Grierson, David
2001    The Architecture of Communal Living: Lessons from Arcosanti in Arizona. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Communal Studies Conference: Communal Living on the threshold of a New Millennium: Lessons and Perspectives, pp. 215-228. International Communal Studies Association, Israel.

2003    Arcology and Arcosanti: Towards a Sustainable Built Environment. Electronic Green Journal 18:(published online).  .

2003    Arcosanti. In Encyclopedia of Community: From the Village to the Virtual World, edited by Karen Christensen and David Levinson, pp. (published online). Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA. 


Sanders, Catherine Gaines
    2008    Paolo Soleri: Another Urban Utopian. Agora 2:18-22.

Soleri, Paolo
1973    Arcology : the city in the image of man. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.

1987    Arcosanti : an urban laboratory? 2nd ed. VTI Press, Santa Monica, CA.

Are shantytowns a normal form of urban residence?

People’s views of shantytowns—areas of informal settlement, often by squatters—have varied greatly over the years. Squatters settlements appeared almost overnight around many cities in the developing world in the mid-twentieth century, due to population growth, poverty, and inadequate construction industries. The early reactions were negative: these were seen as chaotic places of high crime and social breakdown. Then fieldwork by anthropologists who lived in these settlements painted a different story: people built their own houses and they worked hard in order to get ahead in the world; crime was low, and family organization remained strong. Although poverty and employment were and are real problems, many scholars and observers came to have a more positive view of shantytowns (Turner 1991).

Although a more positive or tolerant view of shantytowns and their inhabitants became common, many observers still saw the informal and unplanned nature of these settlements as an aberration. In Latin America, for example, Spanish colonial cities had highly planned, rigid, grid layouts, and these created the urban structure for modern city form and expansion. But then came the messy shantytowns. These were seen as a modern development whose lack of planning and organization was attributed to poverty and other forces of the modern world. Traditional cities are well planned, according to the orthodox view, and shantytowns are a chaotic deviation from that pattern.

Some urban scholars, however, pointed out that shantytowns are actually quite an ancient form of urban settlement. The great Argentine urban historian Jorge Hardoy (1982) was the first to suggest this idea, which was then taken up by architectural historians Peter Kellett and Mark Napier (1995), who noted that “The phenomenon of informal urban housing is  not new. Throughout history, the poor have constructed their dwellings around the urban centers of the rich and powerful” (p.8). In his book  Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, Robert Neuwirth (2004) goes even further: “the history of cities teaches that squatters have always been around, that squatting was the way poor built homes, that it is a form of urban development (p.179).

Hattusas, Turkey: informal housing next to a temple.

My research on ancient cities bears these ideas out. Some ancient cities did have carefully planned orthogonal layouts of their residential zones (particularly Greek and Roman cities, or places like Teotihuacan), but in many more cities, housing was uneven and informal. Here are four examples of this, two from the Old World and two from the New World. The ancient Hittite capital Hattusas (in Turkey) was laid out on a mountainside. Next to a temple compound are a series of irregular house foundations (in the area circled in red in the photo). The contrast with the much more regular layout of the temple is striking. (Bryce 2002; Neve 1996).

Tell Asmar, and early Mesopotamian city

Moving back in time to ancient Mesopotamia, the birthplace of the Urban Revolution, most commoner housing at these cities is densely packed and irregular in size and layout. Tell Asmar is fairly typical. It looks like individual families built their own houses without much planning or direction from city authorities. (Hill 1967; Ur n.d.)

Chan Chan, Peru.

This kind of urban informal housing is the dominant form at most of the ancient cities in the New World. Chan Chan, the huge capital of the pre-Inka Chimor Empire on the coast of Peru, contains ten large walled royal compounds. Outside of these, informal housing was thrown up, often against the outer wall of the compound. (Moseley and Mackey 1974; Topic 1982)

And finally, the scattered nature of housing at Classic Maya cities provides a strong contrast to the carefully planned pyramids and palaces of the city centers. At Copan in Honduras, the huge Acropolis was the center of government and state ritual, and the nearby housing shows an informal pattern. Now some of my Mayanist colleagues may object to calling Maya cities shantytowns. After all, the Mayas were the "Greeks of the New World," a people with advanced intellectual and aesthetic abilities. That may be, but these were self-built, unplanned and informal neighborhoods, clustered around the city center. This sounds like a

Copan: informal housing adjacent to the royal acropolis.

shantytown to me. (Andrews and Fash 2005; Webster et al. 2000).

Unfortunately, archaeologists have been slow to analyze ancient urban housing, and comparisons with modern shantytowns are in their infancy; I discuss the situation in Smith (2010). But it is clear to me that Hardoy and the other scholars quoted above are correct that shantytowns or squatters settlements were important parts of the urban landscape in ancient times. They pre-dated the carefully planned orthogonal housing of the Greeks and Romans, and so perhaps we can call shantytowns "a normal form of urban residence." They are certainly a big part of the wide urban world.

References:

Andrews, E. Wyllys IV and William L. Fash (editors)

2005    Copán: The History of an Ancient Maya Kingdom. SAR Press, Santa Fe.

Bryce, Trevor R.

2002    Life and Society in the Hittite World. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Hardoy, Jorge E.

1982    The Building of Latin American Cities. In Urbanisation in Contemporary Latin America: Critical Approaches to the Analysis of Urban Issues, edited by Alan G. Gilbert, pp. 19-34. Wiley, London.

Hill, Harold P.

1967    Tell Asmar: The Private Home Area. In Private Houses and Graves in the Diyala Region, edited by Pinhas Delougaz, Harold P. Hill, and Seton Lloyd, pp. 143-181. Oriental Institute Publication, vol. 88. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Kellett, Peter and Mark Napier

1995    Squatter Architecture? A Critical Examination of Vernacular Theory and Spontaneous Settlement with Reference to South America and South Africa. Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 6(2):7-24.

Moseley, Michael E. and Carol J. Mackey

1974    Twenty-four Architectural Plans of Chan Chan, Peru: Structure and Form at the Capital of Chimor. Peabody Museum Press, Cambridge.

Neuwirth, Robert

2004    Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World. Routledge, New York.

Neve, Peter

1996    Housing in Hattusa, the Capital of the Hittite Kingdom. In Tarihten Günümüze Anadolu'da Konut ve Yerlesme / Housing and Settlement in Anatolia: A Historical Perspective, edited by Yildiz Sey, pp. 99-121. Tarih Vakfi, Istanbul.

Smith, Michael E.

2010    Sprawl, Squatters, and Sustainable Cities: Can Archaeological Data Shed Light on Modern Urban Issues? Cambridge Archaeological Journal 20:229-253.

Topic, John

1982    Lower-Class Social and Economic Organization at Chan Chan. In Chan Chan: Andean Desert City, edited by Michael E. Moseley and Kent C. Day, pp. 145-175. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.

Turner, John F. C.

1991    Housing by People: Towards Autonomy in Building Environments. Marion Boyars, London.

Ur, Jason

n.d.      Bronze Age Cities of Southern Mesopotamia. In Blackwell Companion to the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East, edited by D. T. Potts, pp. _____ (in press). Blackwell, Oxford

Webster, David, AnnCorinne Freter, and Nancy Gonlin

2000    Copán: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Maya Kingdom. Case Studies in Archaeology. Harcourt College Publishers, New York.

Temporary Cities: Burning Man, Quartzsite, and Chalma

“Black Rock City” exists as a human settlement for only eight days each year. The rest of the time, it is an empty patch of arid desert. Chalma is a small Mexican village (less than 2,000 inhabitants) that swells to 50,000 inhabitants for a few days each year. The town of Quartzite in the Arizona desert is a bustling town of tens of thousands for half the year, but a sleepy village of hundreds the other half. Should we call these places “cities”? They clearly violate one of the four points in Louis Wirth’s influential definition of urbanism—permanence. But they share enough characteristics with other urban settlements to warrant the label “temporary cities.” This view is shared by Nate Berg, who has written about Black Rock City and Quartzite.

Black Rock City, of course, is the name of the temporary settlement that houses the annual Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert. Thousands of people gather each summer for several days of artistic expression, parties, and semi-communal living. When the festival is over, everything is cleaned up and the desert put back to pristine shape. For comparative urbanism, there are many interesting things about Burning Man and Black Rock City. There are lots of books, articles, blogs, etc. on the festival. A sociologist has written a book about how the festival is organized (Chen 2009). Nate Berg’s article on the Places website explores some of the urban issues, and his conclusion is worth quoting:

And as Burning Man has grown from a small gathering into a temporary city, attendees have become more intimately involved in the community around them, empowered to enact the changes on whatever scale is necessary to improve their quality of life during their eight days in the desert. It's city-making at the individual level…. People realize that they can do things — maybe small things — that improve how they experience and interact with their fellow citizens. To create power in that way doesn't require a political office or city budget, only the desire to make life better. Community improvement through community participation is not difficult to achieve. It happens every year at Burning Man. And possibly beyond.

One of the things I find interesting about Black Rock City is the relationship between city growth on the one hand, and centralized planning and organization on the other. The early years had few rules or established plans. People began to form neighborhoods informally based on interests and year-to-year friendships. But in 1997 the festival grew too large for informal organization; people were shooting off guns, driving cars too fast through campsites, and some participants were injured. So the organizers stepped up the formal regulation and planning of the settlement, creating the circular plan and a number of rules and regulations (including rules about neighborhood structure). 

 Quartzsite is a temporary city for a very different social clientele. The city becomes a mecca for “snowbirds” in their RV’s each winter (snowbirds are the northerners who flock to Arizona each winter). A city springs up in the desert, but a months-long city of RV’s, not a days-long city of tents as in Black Rock City. The mobile retirees form neighborhoods and enjoy urban life. Nate Berg’s article in High Country News gives a good picture of Quartzsite as a temporary city, although many questions remain. Because of our project on comparative urban neighborhoods, I am particularly curious about how the neighborhoods form at Quartzsite: is the composition consistent year to year? Why are some groupings large and others small? Just how close are social relationships within these spatial clusters of RV vehicles? How much planning or organization is provided by authorities in Quartzsite? Ethnographers and planners have studied the RV lifestyle (Counts and Counts 1996; Simpson 2007), but like Black Rock City, this and other RV destinations cry out for more attention from urban scholars.

Lest one think that temporary cities are a contemporary innovation, consider pilgrimage destinations. Chalma is a sleepy rural village in the mountains west of Mexico City. But there are important relics in the local shrine, and millions of pilgrims come to Chalma each year. It is the second-largest pilgrimage destination in Mexico, after the Guadalupe Basilica in Mexico City. During the annual festival, the village swells to over 50,000 residents. These people have to be fed and sheltered, and order has to be maintained somehow. For over four hundred years Chalma has been the setting of a temporary city (Benuzzi and Fay 1981; Rodríguez-Shadow and Shadow 2000).

I hope you did not miss my use of the term “mecca” to describe Quartzsite above. The city of Mecca, of course, is the largest pilgrimage destination in the world. For centuries, each year has seen millions of pilgrims make the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. Mecca is a large city all year round, and has been for many centuries. But when its ranks swell by many millions of residents for the main festival, the urban issues (food, water, shelter, sanitation, crowd control) multiply accordingly. Chalma, however, is more typical of temporary pilgrimage cities around the world in the past and present. I haven’t heard of anyone studying these places for their urban insights, but such a study would make a fascinating and important contribution to urban studies. Temporary cities are part of the wide urban world, and they have much to teach us about cities, urbanization, and human life in cities.

References:

Benuzzi, Silvia and George E. Fay (editors)

1981    A Pilgramage to Chalma: The Analysis of Religious Change. Museum of Anthropology, University of Northern Colorado, Greeley, CO.

Berg, Nate2010    Mobile Nation: A Motorhome Metropolis Blooms Each Year in the Arizona Desert. High Country News March 15, 2010:12-17.  .

Berg, Nate2011    Essay: Burning Man and the Metropolis. In Design Observer Group, pp. (posted online). Vol. January 10, 2011.

Chen, Katherine K.

2009    Enabling Creative Chaos: The Organization Behind the Burning Man Event. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Counts, Dorothy A. and David R. Counts

1996    Over the Next Hill: An Ethnography of RVing Seniors in North America. Broadview, Peterborough, Ontario.

Rodríguez-Shadow, María J. and Robert D. Shadow

2000    El pubelo del Señor: Las fiestas y peregrinaciones de Chalma. Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México, Toluca.

Simpson, Deane

2007    RV Urbanism: Nomadic Network Settlements of the Senior Recreational Vehicle Community in the US. Paper presented at the Conference, Temporary Urbanism: Between the Permanent and the Transitory.  http://www.holcimfoundation.org/Portals/1/docs/F07/WK-Temp/F07-WK-Temp-simpson02.pdf.