Did premodern cities have "urban issues"?

The basic premise of this blog is that cities and urbanism have been around for thousands of years, and that it is interesting and useful to take a broad perspective on these things. The "Wide Urban World" is the realm of cities from ancient Mesopotamia to the present. Consideration of premodern cities can provide insights into modern urban issues, and research on contemporary cities can help historians and archaeologists understand past cities. And consideration of both modern and past cities will allow us to understand the nature and variation of urbanism much more fully than a narrow focus on a single time period or place. Beyond this blog, my colleagues and I have made this point in a number of publications (see the list at the bottom).

There is an alternative understanding of the meaning of the term "urban," however, that is much more narrowly conceived. To some, "urban issues" are issues of contemporary cities (and perhaps their predecessors over a century or so). Either past cities did not have "urban issues," or else their "urban issues" are irrelevant to modern concerns, not worth considering. This is the viewpoint of the well-known policy institution, the Urban Institute, which features "nonpartisan economic and social policy research." This kind of "present-only" perspective on urbanism can be called "presentism." For critiques, see any of the papers below (particulalry Harris & Smith 2011).

Now there is another presentist institution, the new "Urban Portal" of the University of Chicago, billed as "a gateway to the latest in urban social science." I looked around the site and its resources, and much of it looks interesting and important. But I found no explicit acknowledgement that history or comparison are considered important for urban social science. Well, that is certainly not my view of the topic. Let me re-write their "about" section in a more accurate manner:

"The Urban Portal is an online hub designed to provide experts and non-experts easy access to current research and resources on CONTEMPORARY urban issues IN THE UNITED STATES. The Portal is a core project of the University of Chicago Urban Network, an emerging community of scholars and others that aims to spur innovation in the study of MODERN urban processes and to encourage interdisciplinary discourse in urban research, theory, and policy THAT EXCLUDES HISTORICAL OR COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES."

If you'd like to see a more formal scholarly argument for the kind of broad approach to urban studies I advocate, look at this White Paper some of us submitted to the program "Future Research in the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences" at the National Science Foundation, or look around our website.


REFERENCES:
 
Briggs, Xavier de Souza
2004    Civilization in Color: The Multicultural City in Three Millennia. City and Community 3:311-342.

Fletcher, Roland
2009    Low-Density, Agrarian-Based Urbanism: A Comparative View. Insights (University of Durham) 2:article 4.

Grant, Jill
2001    The Dark Side of the Grid: Power and Urban Design. Planning Perspectives 16:219-241.

2004    Sustainable Urbanism in Historical Perspective. In Towards Sustainable Cities: East Asian, North American and European Perspectives on Managing Urban Regions, edited by André Sorensen, Peter J. Marcutullio, and Jill Grant, pp. 24-37. Ashgate, Burlington, VT.

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


Harris, Richard and Michael E. Smith
2011    The History in Urban Studies: A Comment. Journal of Urban Affairs 33(1):99-105.

Smith, Michael E.
2009    Editorial: Just How Comparative is Comparative Urban Geography?: A Perspective from Archaeology. Urban Geography 30:113-117.

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

York, Abigail, Michael E. Smith, Benjamin Stanley, Barbara L. Stark, Juliana Novic, Sharon L. Harlan, George L. Cowgill, and Christopher Boone
2011    Ethnic and Class-Based Clustering Through the Ages: A Transdisciplinary Approach to Urban Social Patterns. Urban Studies 48(11):2399-2415.

The "Wide Urban World"

The phrase "wide urban world" encompasses the many manifestations of cities and urbanism on earth, from early Mesopotamia to modern Mumbai. It describes an approach to cities that is comparative and historical. A comparative perspective is necessary if one wants to draw conclusions about urban phenomena that go beyond a single city. Most comparative urban analysis in the social sciences is quite limited in scope, comparing, say Detroit and Pittsburgh, or New York and London, or perhaps Mumbai and Shanghai. But with a  historical perspective, comparisons can range back into deep history.

Does it make any sense to compare Phoenix and ancient Teotihuacan? Perhaps there are common dynamics of large cities in dry environments. How did the people (more than 100,000 of them) of Teotihuacan deal with shifting rainfall and agricultural productivity? Can this give us any ideas about the sustainability of modern Phoenix?

What about ancient Rome and modern Los Angeles? These are/were huge metropoli with great cultural and social diversity, from ethnicity to social class to occupation. Are there basic principles by which the leaders of large diverse cities have dealt with such diversity?

A broad perspective on comparison can be advantageous in several ways:

1. Information about premodern cities may help scholars, planners, and officials better understand modern cities, and it will give them a larger inventory of cases to draw on in designing solutions for modern urban problems and issues. But this requires rigorous data on premodern cities, solid knowledge that is based on historical and archaeological research and not on speculation.
2. Information about modern and many historical cities helps archaeologists understand ancient cities. Nearly all archaeological inferences about ancient society are based on analogy (inductive logic), which means comparisons with better-known cases. So a wide perspective helps archaeologists understand the ancient world and the first cities.
3. The broad historical and comparative perspective of the wide urban world is necessary to address questions about cities and urbanism as general phenomena and processes. It is not scientifically defensible to look at modern U.S. cities and make conclusions about urbanism in general. One can talk about modern U.S. cities in general, but if we want to know about cities as a form of human settlement, then we simply cannot ignore the thousands of years of urban development before the Industrial Revolution.

These points give an idea of the perspective of this blog, the "Wide urban world." We will cover themes such as urban sprawl, sustainability, neighborhoods, housing, city planning, squatters, and the urban built environment.

For a more technical description of this broad perspective on urbanism, see this White Paper, submitted to NSF by members of our urban organization project:

Smith, Michael E., Christopher Boone, George L. Cowgill, Sharon L. Harlan, Alison Kohn, Barbara L. Stark and Abigail York  (2010)  An Expanded Social Scientific Perspective on Urbanism. White Paper, Future Research in the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences. National Science Foundation, Washington, DC.

This document is posted on the project website, and its now available on the NSF website as well.