Spatial order, visual order, and urban planning

Does urbanization cause social breakdown? Are cities places of chaos and crime, where values go out the window? Few people today would answer this question in the positive, although this was social science dogma in the early 20th century (Wirth 1938), until ethnographers like Oscar Lewis (1952) showed that the chaotic cities view was biased and inaccurate.

Shantytown: visual disorder

What about shantytowns and squatters settlements: are these places of chaos and crime and social breakdown? I'll bet that more people would accept this view today than would accept my first question. But like the first question, this viewpoint is a stereotype that is more often inaccurate than correct.  Again, it was ethnographers who went out and lived in these settlements who showed that the sterotypes are wrong (Mangin 1967; Schlyter and Schlyter 1979), but they still persist in the public, among government and civic authorities, and even among scholars.

I think one reason for the endurance of this kind of stereotype is a confusion between visual order and social order. Visual order refers to the kind of regularity in layout that can be perceived by urban residents as well as by those looking at maps or urban photographs. Settlements that are irregular in layout lack visual order. Social order is a deeper and more difficult concept; indeed it has been one of the key issues in sociology and social science for a century (see Hechter and Horne 2003). Briefly, social order refers to the way social groups and societies "hang together" and continue through time in ways that allow many or most people to live "normal" lives.

This diagram shows the way many people think that order works in informal or squatters settlements.

The arrows show causal relationships. In the stereotypical view, social disorder causes visual disorder; therefore when we see visual disorder, we can infer that there is or was social disorder. And central planning leads to visual order.

The second diagram shows an alternative view, more closely aligned with urban reality:

Visual disorder in Lusaka

In this view,  visual disorder is caused not by social disorder, but rather by generative processes. These are the combined actions of people working individually or together in ways that are not controlled or directed by the authorities (see Hakim 1986; 2007). Squatters settlements are a prime example of generative processes at work. People build their own houses, on their own schedule, following their own ideas and values, and this often leads to visual disorder. BUT, generative processes can also lead to visual order! The barriadas of Lima, Peru are a good example. These are squatters settlements, formed through generative processes, but they end up with straight streets and regular lots.If you want to see a technical description of how generative processes can produce visual order, see Erickson and Lloyd-Jones (1997).

Visual order without central planning (Lima)

The big difference between these two views of order is that in the second model, social order and visual order are treated as different things. The ethnographers cited above showed that social order exists within visually disordered settlements. People help their neighbors, they watch out for one another, they aren't criminals, they have jobs and lead normal lives (if poverty can be considered "normal," that is). And conversely, social disorder can exist in well-planned, visually ordered settlements; think about crime or anomie in nice planned neighborhoods

The only thing these two models share is the notion that central planning leads to visual order. But don't think that straight streets and checkerboard layouts represent the only kind of urban visual order (Smith 2007). The wide urban world contains many types of visual order, and many kinds of social order. But one does not produce the other. It's time to abandon those stereotypes.

References:

Erickson, B. and T. Lloyd-Jones
1997    Experiments with Settlement Aggregation Models. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 24:903-928.

Hakim, Besim S.
1986    Arab-Islamic Cities: Building and Planning Principles. Routledge, London.

2007    Generative Processes for Revitalizing Historic Towns or Heritage Districts. Urban Design International 12:87-99.

Hechter, Michael and Christine Horne (editors)
2003    Theories of Social Order: A Reader. Stanford University Press, Stanford.

Lewis, Oscar
1952    Urbanization Without Breakdown: A Case Study. Scientific Monthly 75:31-41.

Mangin, William
1967    Latin American Squatter Settlements: A Problem and a Solution. Latin American Research Review 2(3):65-98.

Schlyter, Ann and Thomas Schlyter
1979    George: The Development of a Squatter Settlement in Lusaka, Zambia. Swedish National Institute for Building Research, Lund.

Smith, Michael E.2007    Form and Meaning in the Earliest Cities: A New Approach to Ancient Urban Planning. Journal of Planning History 6(1):3-47.

Wirth, Louis
1938    Urbanism as a Way of Life. American Journal of Sociology 44:1-24.

Why build a city on a mountain?

The Aztec-period city of Calixtlahuaca covered this mountain

Here is a photo of Cerro Tenismo, the volcanic mountain that was covered by the Aztec-period city of Calixtlahuaca. I've directed an archaeological project at this site for several years, and I am still puzzling about why the founders of this city decided to build on a mountain. Some of this post is taken from an older post (of the same name) on the Calixtlahuaca Project blog.

Calixtlahuaca  covered most of the top and sides of this mountain, plus another hilly area to the southeast (to the left, in this photo). The several thousand inhabitants built their houses on stone terraces, which were also farmed with maize and maguey plants. The city was founded ca. AD 1100, and was occupied until the first couple of decades after the Spanish conquest of Mexico in 1521.

The first place to look for comparative insights into Calixtlahuaca's hilltop location is to other Mesoamerican cities built on mountains. Monte Alban and Xochicalco are two of the largest and best known examples, both powerful capitals during their day. It has long been clear to archaeologists that these cities were built where they were for reasons of defense. Images of mountaintop cities in Mesoamerican pictorial codices (see my entry on the Calixtlahuaca blog on these) tend to show battles and defensive walls. But for several reasons, we don't think that defense was a major factor in the layout of Calixtlahuaca:

1. We did not find any defensive walls or ditches.
2. The largest civic buildings were not built in a protected location.

view down the hill from excavation unit 323

The second factor is quite striking. The royal palace was at the base of the hill, completely unprotected, as was a large unexcavated platform (Sructure 16). The two largest temples, structure 3 (circular temple, dedicated to the wind god Ehecatl) and structure 4 (rectangular temple, dedicated to the rain god Tlaloc) were built part-way up the hill, but closer to the base. Again, these were relatively unprotected. When defense is an issue, the main civic buildings are almost always built at the top of the mountain or hill (again, think Monte Alban or Xochicalco, or any one of innumerable hilltop cities in the Old World).

Well, what is so surprising about building a city on a mountain if defense was NOT a major consideration? The answer is the effort required to build the site. Every house that was built had to be accompanied by the construction (and constant maintenance) of stone terraces. Temples 3 and 4 required massive platforms and large excavations into the hillside to build level areas for these temples and their groups.

There is much flat land in the surrounding Toluca Valley, so it would not have been hard to find a level location for the city. This was rich farmland, and we don't think populations were so high that people couldn't build their settlements on the plain. One factor that comes to mind about Calixtlahuaca's mountain location is show: the city would have looked very impressive to visitors approaching from the north, with its north flank covered with houses and large temples. But how can such a hypothesis be tested?

Ephesus

In order to gain additional perspective on Calixtlahuaca's location, I have been looking for other ancient cities around the world whose residential zones were built on mountainsides, with the civic architecture at the base of the hill. Ephesus (the Roman occupation) is one example (see photo), and I am looking for others. If you have suggestions—whether examples of similar premodern cities, or ideas about how to interpret Calixtlahuaca's location—let me know!

Tent city in Sana'a, Yemen

The tent city at night

Protesters in Sana'a, the capital of Yemen, have set up a tent city where they organize their protests against their repressive president. An article in Spiegel Online International starts,

" What started as a sit-in has turned into an experment in democratic society. In the last four months, between 3,000 and 4,000 tents have been pitched in the streets of the university district in the Yemeni capital Sana'a. The tent city includes pharmacies and a makeshift hospital, four daily newspapers, auditoriums, a garden and hastily constructed cement memorials for the martyrs.

Protesters in a tent

It is a city of citizens, a taste of what Yemen could become, a concrete utopia made of tarps, pallets, satellite dishes and a hodgepodge of power cables the protesters have audaciously connected to the grid in the ancient city. There is a "diplomats' tent" and a tent for actors; there are daily poetry readings and demonstrations; there is even a prison."

This great photo is from: http://twitpic.com/43px3h. (check out the credit line: "©2011, The New Yemen, Free to be used during the revolution." The photo is by Abdulrahman H. Jaber.

This kind of temporary settlement joins the other examples of "temporary cities" that I blogged about a while ago. These settlements usually attract attention for their main functions (protest and contentious politics in Sana'a, art festival at Burning Man, etc.). But I think we should pay more attention to their urban features, which may have much to teach us about cities and how people form and live in cities.

Media tent for the protesters

I have been interested in traditional Sana'a for some time now. It is a distinctive variation on Arabian/Islamic urbanism, particularly well studied by scholars. Its neighborhoods are fascinating, and the presence of food-producing areas within the midst of high-rise apartment buildings is a surprising feature that may have lessons for urban sustainability and livability elsewhere. You have to cover several languages to resesarch traditional Sana'a, though. For some great photos, go to photographer Abdulrahman H. Jaber's website. and click on "Old City of Sana'a." You'll see some outstanding photos.

References:

Sana'a gardens

Barcelo, Miquel (editor)  (2004)  Les jardins dans la vieille ville de Sanaa, Yémen. Université Autonome de Barcelone, Barcelona.

Bonnenfant, Paul (editor)  (1995)  Sanaa: architecture domestique et société. Editions CNRS, Paris.

Kopp, Horst and Eugen Wirth  (1990)  Beiträge zur Stadtgeographie von Sana'a. Beihefte zum u*binger Atlas des Vorderen Orients. Reihe B, Geisteswissenschaften. L. Reichert, Wiesbaden.

Kopp, Horst and Eugen Wirth  (1994)  Sana'a: développement et organisation de l’espace d’une ville arabe. Translated by Blandine Blukacz-Louisfert and François Blukacz. IREMAM and CFEY, Aix-en-Provence and Sanaa.

Lewcock, Ronald B.  (1986)  The Old Walled City of San'a'. UNESCO, Paris.

Serjeant, Robert B. and Ronald Lewcock (editors)  (1983)  San'a: An Arabian Islamic City. World of Islam Festeival Trust, London.

*** Thanks to Nate Berg''s tweet for the Spiegel story on this!!! Maybe Twitter is useful after all.....
(Nate Berg's website)

Cahokia, Native American Urban Center on the Mississippi

 The Mississippian center of Cahokia, in Illinois across the Mississippi from St. Louis, is one of the great cities of the ancient world. I have a special reason for discussing Cahokia now: there is a challenge taking place to raise funds to help preserve the site. This is the "This Place Matters Community Challenge,"  a contest presented by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.  The top three sites will receive a cash prize to help preserve their site.  The challenge hopes to "highlight the important role that historic buildings and properties play in preserving our national heritage as well as in preserving our environment." While I don't want to belittle the other historical structures and districts that are participating, in my mind none of them is anywhere close to Cahokia in its world importance. Please go to the website and cast your vote for Cahokia. And here are some reasons why you should do that.

Monk's mound, home of the chief

• Of all the known traditions of ancient urbanism around the world, the Mississippian cities are among the most poorly known. Their builders used earth instead of stone for their monuments, many of which have not survived well. There is a long-standing bias against recognizing the achievements of Native Americans and their ancestors, part of which is a common attitude that they built only ceremonial centers, not true cities. Yet Cahokia and many other Mississippian centers can easily be classified as "urban."

• 

  Arrow points from elite burials

• If one takes the demographic approach to defining urbanism, the 20,000 to 30,000 inhabitants of Cahokia and their economic and political complexity classify it as a city. And if one takes the functional definition of urbanism, the political, religious, and economic activities at the city served larger hinterlands, thus putting Cahokia into the category of a city. (See my earlier discussion of definitions of urbanism here).

• The chiefs or kings of Cahokia were powerful rulers. The size of their main palace, Monk's Mound is evidence of this, and rich burials point to an elite class as well (see the photo of hundreds of  

  

  Excavation of the palisade 

  arrow points from elite burial offerings). Warfare was common during Mississippian times, and a large palisade was built around the center of the city (photo).

•  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   

• 

  Stone drills and shell ornaments

  This was a complex economy. Imports from all over eastern North America have been excavated at Cahokia, and goods and styles from the city were found hundreds of miles away. Craft production was both an economic force and an aesthetic activity. The photo shows hundreds of chipped stone drills, used to manufacture beads and other ornaments from stone.

• 

  The Birger figurine

• The people of Cahokia had a rich religious life, with many family-level and city-level ceremonies. One important find was this stone figure of a woman cultivating crops, with a squash vine running up her back. It is known as the "Birger figurine" after the owner of the property where it wasexcavated. It is from the "BBB Motors site" just east of Cahokia proper, a village associated with Cahokia. This is a special site to me, since this is where I had my archaeological fieldschool with Chuck Bareis back in the 1970s. We didn't find the figurine, though. We excavated a bunch of test pits, and later the plow zone was stripped off with heavy machinery (and they found the figurine).

• 

  The "woodhenge"

   
• Another type of ceremony focused on astronomical observations. Cahokia's priest-scientists built the "woodhenge", a circular arrangement of poles used for sighting sunrise and sunset on important annual dates. Like so many intellectual activities in ancient cultures, this was part science, part ritual, and part politics.
  

From the perspective of the Wide Urban World, Cahokia presents an important addition to the roster of urban forms around the world. It was a city by any definition, but a distinctive city from a tradition of urbanism that is not widely known or appreciated. The site needs better preservation today, and you can help by following the links to the contest.

 

Finally, here is what the Cahokia Mounds people have to say about why you should vote for Cahokia:

This place matters to our community because it is a place that preserves the cultural and historical remains of this 1000 year-old economic, residential, and religious center of Mississippian culture. Cahokia was the center of a large metropolitan complex that included four other major mound centers, a number of single-mound local centers, and numerous small villages, hamlets and farmsteads.  Evidence of Cahokia's influence has been found as far away as Minnesota, Florida, Oklahoma, and Georgia.  The state property preserves the central portion of the site, but about 1/3 of the original city lies outside of this boundary and is threatened by contemporary activities.  Funds are needed to acquire and preserve these threatened areas.   Our community stands to lose much information about America's first city if 1/3 of the site is destroyed.  Not only does this site preserve and interpret Mississippian culture for our community, the nation, and the world, but it also fosters a sense of preservation and prehistoric appreciation, educates on the science of archaeology, and the achievements of ancient Native Americans. This place matters to all Americans, and is a pivotal point in American History that deserves to be shared.
Again, click here for the link to the contest. 

To read more about Cahokia, try some of these works:

Emerson, Thomas E.
1997    Cahokia and the Archaeology of Power. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa.

Fowler, Melvin L.
1989    The Cahokia Atlas: A Historical Atlas of Cahokia Archaeology. Studies in Illinois Archaeology. Illinois Historical Preservation Agency, Springfield.

Iseminger, William R.
1996    Mighty Cahokia. Archaeology 49(3):30-37.

Milner, George R.
1998    The Cahokia Chiefdom. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC.

Pauketat, Timothy R.
2009    Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi. Viking, New York.

Young, Biloine Whiting and Melvin L. Fowler
2000    Cahokia: The Great Native American Metropolis. University of Illinois Press, Urbana.

Also, check out the website for Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site.
_________________________

I want to thank Elyse Butler, a Graduate Research Assistant at Cahokia Mounds, for bringing the contest to my attention, and for supplying the text quoted above.

Evolutionary biology and cooperation in urban neighborhoods

Binghamton, NY

I have just come across some current research by evolutionary biologists and anthropologists on social life and cooperation in urban neighborhoods. I first ran into the Binghamton Neighborhood Project: Science-Based Solutions to Real-World Problems in Our Community  by accident on the internet. This seems at first a strange project: the website mostly talks about community involvement issues: liveable communities, designing parks, relations with city hall and the like. But on their publications page, the articles consist of applications of evolutionary biology to neighborhood organization. David Sloan Wilson, a prominent biologist at Binghamton, is the author of some of the papers. Here are some examples: 

O'Brien, Daniel Tumminelli
2009    Sociality in the City: Using Biological Principles to Explore the Relationship Between High Population Density and Social Behavior. In Advances in Sociology Research, edited by Jared A. Jaworski, pp. 1-14, vol. 8. Nova Science Publishers.  http://bnp.binghamton.edu/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/OBrien-2010-Sociality-and-the-City-Proofs.pdf.

Wilson, David Sloan and Daniel Tumminelli O’Brien
2009    Evolutionary Theory and Cooperation in Everyday Life. In Games, Groups, and the Global Good, edited by Simon A. Levin, pp. 155-168. Springer, New York.

Wilson, David Sloan, Daniel Tumminelli O'Brien, and Artura Sesma
2009    Human Prosociality from an Evolutionary Perspective: Variation and Correlations at a City-Wide Scale. Evolution and Human Behavior 30(3):190-200.

Low income housing in Newcastle

Next, I found an ad for a talk at Binghamton in April 2011, by evolutionary anthropologist Daniel Nettle (of Newcastle University, UK), on a similar topic: "The Tyneside Neighbournood Project: Investigating the Behavioural Ecology of a British City." I rooted around a bit to see if Nettle had published his work, but this is a current project that hasn't come out yet in print. But, Nettle's talk was recorded, and is available on the internet here. 

This is a fascinating talk. Nettle works in the field of behavioral ecology and evolutionary anthropology, and he applies these perspectives to differences in cooperation and social life in two neighborhoods in Newcastle. He describes the settings (a poor and a wealthy neighborhood) and investigates how three methodological approaches to cooperation and social behavior relate to one another: economic games, social capital surveys, and observation of behavior.

I have not read the Binghamton papers yet, but Nettle has got me thinking about how research on cooperation (one of the BIG TOPICS in both the social and biological sciences right now) relates to urban neighborhoods. What can neighborhoods tell us about human processes of cooperation? And what can cooperation within neighborhoods tell us about the Wide Urban World?

The city as a practical machine

Egyptian workers village

This phrase, "the city as a practical machine," is taken from Kevin Lynch's important book, A Theory of Good City Form (MIT Press, 1981). Lynch talks about temporary constructions like military camps, cities built for protection, and colonial cities. These are settlements built quickly in order to address particular practical concerns.

I am working on a new analysis of this kind of settlement. So far I have a provisional classification, and in the fall a group of students will refine this and carry out analyses and comparisons of various types of practical settlements that fit Lynch's overall category. This is part of the research project, "Urban Organization Through the Ages: Neighborhoods, Open Spaces, and Urban Life."

Here are some of the types:

Pullman, IL: the original company town

• Settlements for workers. These include modern company towns, mining camps, and ancient Egyptian workers villages. The idea was to keep workers clustered near their jobs, and isolated from the surrounding society.

Roman military camp

• Military settlements, including temporary camps and more permanent forts.

Japanese-American internment camp

• Prisons and internment camps. I refer here to large prison complexes, and internment camps such as the European death camps, or internment camps for Japanese-Americans, during World War II.

Civil War refugee camp

• Refugee camps, including both planned and unplanned examples.

 

• Disaster camps, from Haiti to ancient examples.
  

Church revival camp

• Voluntary assemblies. These include religious revival camps, and perhaps festivals like the Burning Man festival (I discussed these previously under "temporary cities").

In addition there are some other settlements and architectural types that may fit here:

• Colonial or imperial cities (e.g., Greek colonies, or Spanish grid towns in Latin America).
• Urban institutional facilities (e.g., prisons, state storage facilities, inner-city public housing).

 So what do these various settlements have in common? As pointed out by Lynch, they are practical settlements, built for a specific purposes, often in haste and often as a temporary settlement. They tend to have some common spatial attributes, including highly planned layouts and physical separation from other settlements.

What can they tell us about urbanization in general? Well, this is a major question for our research project next fall. Stay tuned for more information.

But Aren't Modern Cities Very Different from Premodern Cities ?

This post is a kind of reply to my previous post, "Why are Premodern Cities Important Today?" If cities today are completely different from those that came before, then it is hard to make the argument that premodern cities have anything to tell us about urbanization today. I am playing devil's advocate with myself here. These are the main arguments I have found in the literature on how modern cities are very different from earlier cities. They come mostly from environmental historians.

(1) The Industrial Revolution

Environmental anthropologist Emilio Moran talks about how cities after 1800 (I assume he refers to  Europe and North America) differed greatly from earlier cities. He presents a common technological and demographic argument:

Prior to the eighteenth century, urbanization was a limited phenomenon and cities had a coupled relationship to their surrounding rural areas. Provisioning cities back then depended on a relatively proximate rural zone near the city. Cities recycled their ‘night soil’ and other urban wastes in the nearby rural areas, making them bad smelling but ecologically virtuous (Guillerme 1988; Harvey 1996). These same processes also made cities a locus of disease, pestilence, and plagues that decimated urban populations until the implementation of drainage systems, potable water supplies, and public health services. Before 1800 the ecological footprint of cities was light because they were embedded bioregionally and their size permitted provisioning by the immediate surrounding hinterland. (Moran 2008: 310).

(2) Cities and the Environment

(A)  Environmental historian John McNeill focuses on urban changes in the twentieth century:

Twentieth-century urbanization affected almost everything in human affairs and constituted a vast break with past centuries (McNeill 2000:281).

McNeill points to changes in the sizes of cities, the nature and extent of garbage and pollution, and the size of ecological footprints.

(B) In the broader sustainability literature, the great social changes of the recent period are sometimes referred to as the "Great Acceleration" and the epoch is sometimes referred to as "the Anthropocene" (Steffen et al 2007).

These and many other changes demonstrate a distinct increase in the rates of change in many human-environment interactions as a result of amplified human impact on the environment after World War II—a period that we term the “Great Acceleration. (Hibbard et al 2007).

For an up-to-date review of the environmental focus on contemporary urbanization, see Seto et al. (2010).

(3) The World Picture

For twentieth century changes in cities, urban scholars Gordon McGranahan and David Satterthwaite stress globalization and the expansion of the world capitalist economy over the strictly environmental factors discussed above:

The most important underpinning of urban change during the twentieth century was the large increase in the size of the global economy. In general, the nations with the largest cities and with the most rapid increase in their levels of urbanization are the nations with the largest increases in their economies. (McGranahan and Satterthwaite 2003: 246).

Unlike many urban scholars who rarely think beyond the modern western world, these two are clearly concerned with urbanization all over the world today (as their many fine publications indicate).

(4) An Archaeological Response

While not disagreeing with any of the observations listed above,  I think that there are still non-trivial continuities, similarities and parallels between modern and ancient cities. Indeed, this whole blog is based on this premise. But just how far can the similarities be pushed? We still need considerable comparative research to answer this question. Many of my posts in this blog illustrate my own exploration of this theme. But I am not the only archaeologist who feels this way. A number of years ago, Monica Smith (no relation!) made this observation:

Rather than seeing cities as fundamentally changed by the advent of the Industrial Revolution and the global connections of the modern world, new anthropological research suggests that both ancient and modern cities are the result of a limited range of configurations that structure human action in concentrated populations (Monica Smith 2003:2).

I heartily agree!! What do you think? I'd be interested in other opinions on this matter.

References:

Hibbard, Kathy A., Paul J. Crutzen, Eric F. Lambin, Diana M. Liverman, Nathan J. Mantua, John R. McNeill, Bruno Messerli, and Will Steffen

2007    Group Report: Dacadal-scale Interactions of Humans and the Environment. In Sustainability or Collapse? An Integrated History and Future of People on Earth, edited by Robert Costanza, Lisa J. Graumlich, and Will Steffen, pp. 341-375. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

McGranahan, Gordon and David Satterthwaite

2003    Urban Centers: An Assessment of Sustainability. Annual Review of Environment and Resources 28:243-274.

McNeill, John R.

2000    Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World. Norton, New York.

Moran, Emilio F.

2008    Human Adaptability: An Introduction to Ecological Anthropology. 3rd ed. Westview, Boulder.

Seto, Karen C., Roberto Sánchez-Rodríguez, and Michail Fragkias

2010    The New Geography of Contemporary Urbanization and the Environment. Annual Review of Environment and Resources 35:167-194.

Smith, Monica L.

2003    Introduction: The Social Construction of Ancient Cities. In The Social Construction of Ancient Cities, edited by Monica L. Smith, pp. 1-36. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC.

Steffen, Will, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill

2007    The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature? Ambio 36:614-621.