CityReads│What We Can Learn from 6000 Years of Urban Development

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What We Can Learn from 6,000 Years of Urban Development？

Modern cities are not that different from ancient cities.

Smith, Monica L. 2019. Cities: The First 6,000 Years. Penguin.

Source:https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/553231/cities-by-monica-l-smith/9780735223677/

Weaving together archeology, history, and contemporary observations in her book, Cities:The First 6,000 Years, American archeologist and anthropologist, MonicaSmith, explains the rise of the first urban developments and their connection to our own. She takes readers on a journey through ancient cities, starting with Tell Brak in modern-day Syria which she deems as the first city;  then Teotihuacan and Tenochtitlan in Mexico; her own digs in India; as well as the more well-known Pompeii, Rome, and Athens. Along the way, she presents the unique properties that made cities singularly responsible for the flowering of humankind: the development of networked infrastructure, the rise of an entrepreneurial middle class, and the culture of consumption that results in everything from take-out food to the tell-talesecrets of trash.

Source:https://bookpage.com/interviews/23830-monica-l-smith-history#.XUO7PugzZyw

Alabaster eye idol from Tell Brak

Smith uses archaeological perspectives to show that ancient cities are not that different from modern cities. The aspects of cities we find most irresistible(and the most annoying) have been with us since the very beginnings of urbanism itself. She also proves the rise of cities was hardly inevitable, yet it was crucial to the eventual global dominance of our species–and that cities arehere to stay. So what we can learn from 6,000 years of urban development?

Although there’s a popular impression that ancient cities were prone to collapse, the vast majority of the world’s first cities are still right underfoot in the biggest metropolitan areas today: not only Rome and Xi’an, but also London, Paris, Guangzhou, Mexico City, Tokyo, Baghdad, Cuzco, Cairo, Athens, Delhi, Istanbul . . . the list goes on. And those cities became interconnected with other cities that sprang up alongside them, growing into aglobal phenomenon that dominates the planet.

For our ancient ancestors, cities were the first internet: a way to communicate and interact with an enormous range and diversity of people, to engage in new forms of work and leisure, and to constantly be in contact with others. Just as the internet provides us with the opportunity to engage in a fundamental human need for communication and display, the city form provided something so compelling that once it was invented, people couldn’t imagine lifewithout it. But as in the case of the internet, the concept of cities had many necessary preexisting components: the human capacity for language, our ancestral history of migration, the human species’ uniquely intensive dependence on objects, and our collective drive to envision and build diverse types of architecture.

Today more than half of the world’s population now lives in cities. We may be surprised by that number, or feel as though we are entering into some entirely new frame of reference for civilization. We worry about the configuration of concentrated populations, and we worry about how high that percentage could go without causing a complete system collapse. But we needn’t worry. Archaeological evidence suggests that past eras might have had a higher proportion of population in cities than we do! During some of its long eras of urbanism, ancient Mesopotamia—the areas now mostly encompassed in Iraq, Syria, and southeastern Turkey—had more than 75 percent of its population in cities. And if we are worried about crowding and high rent and homelessness, archaeological remains provide a perspective on that, too: in Rome’s port city of Ostia, it’sestimated that 95 percent of the population was housed in shops, small flats, subdivided apartment suites, and out on the street.

Other than the accelerated rate of population growth (cities are now doubling in sizeevery 10 or 20 years as opposed to every century), modern cities have a great deal in common with their ancient counterparts.

Many of the drawcards of cities in modern times – such as educational and economic opportunities, social mobility and culture – are the same things that attracted people to cities when they first appeared 6,000 years ago.

The tendency towards hyper-consumption and the accumulation of ‘stuff’ in cities is not modern in origin – every excavated city is full of discarded items. This is down to the producer-consumer dynamic found in cities, which increases the rate of both innovation and consumption. What makes cities sustainable and resilient, and what makes them keep growing insize, is their ability to draw on a vast hinterland of resources, which means they’re not dependent on any one source to provide city residents with the things they need.

To make our own cities better, there are several lessons that we can learn from ancient cities. One is the acknowledgment that infrastructure has the inherent capacity for framing social interactions and for contributing to social justice. Ancient cities show us that the conscious melding of different social andethnic groups has a long history. At the three-thousand-year-old site of Yinxuin China, Zhichun Jing and colleagues have used texts and archaeological remains to show how the city was “intentionally and actively created to servethe needs and interests of socially and culturally differentiated groups . . . previously separate peoples who may have come fromlocal communities and/or distant territories and spoken different dialects.”

Today we know that ethnic differences will never be completely erased. So the idea of complete assimilation is both impractical and illogical; in addition, the retention of distinct cultural traditions has a positive spill over into urban identity for all residents. An abundance of different kinds of ethnic cuisinesserves to affirm a city’s cosmopolitan nature and the entrepreneurial promise of household advancement and collective coexistence; an abundance of peoplefrom different regions, speaking different languages and bringing their own cultural backgrounds, enhances not only cultural institutions like schools andmuseums but also the effectiveness of globalized economic out reach and business growth.

A second useful observation from ancient cities is that there are always socioeconomic hierarchies. Every city that we’ve ever dug has disparities of housing, from rulers’ palaces to merchants’ compounds to the slums of makeshift residences occupied by newly arrived migrants and vast numbers of low-incomeworkers who survived on daily wages. The “conditions of possibility” identified in the growth of urban life do not mean that class no longer matters or that all people can realistically expect to move up in the social hierarchy in the course of their or their children’s lifetimes. At the same time, the need formanual labor for manufacturing, caregiving, cleaning, maintenance, and other essential activities means that a world of only white-collar professionals would be extremely dysfunctional. Instead, what is needed are wages that enablea dignified life achieved through both brain work and brawn work.

The third observation that we can glean from the ancient world is the need to acknowledge and celebrate the spirit of consumption that has been part and parcel of every urban center ever known. The amount of goods per personincreases in cities because of the capacity for specialization and the acceleration of manufacturing to cater to urban populations’ increased diversity of social and biological needs. The pursuit of long-distance ordinary goods, some of which were cheaply available due to economies of scale and others of which were produced specifically for foreign markets, is a concept that comes straight from the archaeological past. Over three thousand years ago, the fledgling cities of the Mycenaean Bronze Age, dotted along the shorelines of Greece, pulled in trade goods from all over Europe and North Africa: ivory, tin, copper, ostrich eggshells, amber, and murex shells. But there were some also fairly mundane things, like clay wall brackets used aslamps. Puzzling over the appeal of these rather unattractive objects, the archaeologist Eric Cline has suggested that it was their very exoticism that made them of interest. He calls the phenomenon “distance value,” a factor of attraction that explains why the wall brackets turned up in both elite andnon-elite contexts.

cities are compelling and successful because they are never “finished.” Whether you look at infrastructure or parks or buildings or neighborhoods in transition, living cities are always a work in progress. cities are living canvases that combine both architectural inheritance and plenty of scope for change. Builders might need to mitigate new hazards or seize the opportunities to take advantageof new materials and technologies. For the ancient Romans, this included the invention of concrete, which suddenly made it possible to build multistory buildings; for us today, it includes the development of solar technology that can enable individual residences not only to contribute to a city’s power gridbut also to be independent of it as a factor of self-reliance and resilience.

Cities might have lost some of them in sequence, but the idea of urbanism was carried along from one place to another. Pompeii and Herculaneum were wiped out by avolcanic eruption, but the survivors had many other cities to choose from asthey relocated to other parts of the Roman Mediterranean. Systems of cities inthe ancient world meant that while individual urban centers might suffer great convulsions, they rarely disappeared altogether, or when they did, other nearbycities were the beneficiaries of a population influx.

Urbanism, once it starts, is extremely hard for people to abandon even when individual cities lose their viability or desirability. Again, the internet analogy comesin handy. We might lose our connection for a short while in the course oftravels, or collectively due to a natural disaster, yet that doesn’t mean that the concept goes away. Quite the opposite: we work to restore connectivity assoon as possible

The fact that nations don’t tend to matter for city growth is an important insight into ancient cities, too. The tenacity of Warsaw—and of other cities possessed by sequences of nations, like Malacca, Colombo, Beirut, and Asmara—speaks volumes about the durability that is the kernel of every metropolis from the first moment that people brought cities into being.

Tell Brak is located on the dusty plains of Syria and a long-lived anchor of Mesopotamia urbanism. But Tell Brak is not just the story of the first city; itis the story of every city that has ever existed. Today, from London and New York to Johannesburg and Mumbai, cities exist because of the everyday decisions of millions of people who consciously make the trade-off from rural life tourban life, creating cities through a consensus of thought and action. As aresult, we’ve inherited cities not only from the first urban dwellers in the dusty metropolis of Tell Brak but also from every urban center since then. The continual process of growth, renewal, and reinvigoration of our modern citiesalso results in an archaeology of the present. Whether we are newcomers to a metropolisor longtime residents, we can read the story of urban evolutions and revolutions in the material traces of the world around us.

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