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Sprawl, Squatters and Sustainable Cities: Can Archaeological Data Shed Light on Modern Urban Issues?

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Sprawl, Squatters and Sustainable Cities: Can Archaeological Data Shed Light on Modern Urban Issues? Sprawl, Squatters, and Sustainable Cities Sprawl, Squatters and Sustainable Cities: Can Archaeological Data Shed Light on Modern Urban Issues? Michael E. Smith Ancient cities as documented by archaeologists and historians have considerable relevance for a broader understanding of modern cities and general processes of urbanization. This article reviews three themes that illustrate such relevance: sprawl, squatter settlements and urban sustainability. Archaeology’s potential for illuminating these and other topics, however, remains largely unrealized because we have failed to develop the concepts and methods required to analyse such processes in the past. The following aspects are examined for each of the three themes: the modern situation, the potential insights that archaeology could contribute, and what archaeologists would need to do to produce those insights. The author then discusses some of the benefits that would accrue from increased communication between archaeologists and other scholars of urbanism. Do archaeological studies of ancient cities have any potential can be realized. This work will not only allow relevance for understanding the processes and prob- better comparisons of ancient and modern urbanism, lems of urbanization today? The media and popular but it will also improve our understanding of some of press certainly imply that this is the case. National the social dynamics at play in the cities of the past. In Geographic News tells us that ‘Sprawling Angkor order to illustrate the reciprocal relationship between [was] brought down by overpopulation’ (Brown analyses of ancient and modern urbanism, I limit my 2007). The Environmental News Network reports that focus to three topics — sprawl, squatters or informal ‘Researchers [at Tell Brak] rewrite the origins of ancient settlements and urban sustainability. These are the urban sprawl’ (Environmental News Network 2007), targets of considerable bodies of research for modern whereas the Planetizen web site says of the same cities, but archaeologists for the most part have yet to site, ‘Ancient cities were clusters, not sprawl’ (Berg address them systematically. This is a programmatic 2007). Scientific American, on the other hand claims article, and I present only limited amounts of data to that ‘Ancient squatters [at Tell Brak] may have been support my assertion. Although I do briefly explore the world’s first suburbanites’ (Biello 2007). In his the analysis of these topics within one ancient urban bestseller, Collapse, Jared Diamond (2004) warns us tradition (Prehispanic central Mexico), that exposition about the fates that awaited non-sustainable ancient is merely for illustrative purposes; it is not a fully cities. This kind of facile ancient–modern comparison worked-out case study. Archaeologists have not yet is a staple of the media (and of university public rela- analysed our data or conceptualized our findings in tions offices), but does it signal any real significance ways that can inform research on modern urbanism for research on comparative urbanism? It is hard to in a convincing manner.1 answer this question because no one has attacked the The first question to consider is whether ancient issue with rigorous data and methods. and modern cities are actually comparable. After all, In this article I argue that archaeological research the modern world is quite different from the ancient on ancient cities has considerable potential to increase world in countless ways, and one could easily argue our understanding of modern urban issues and prob- that cities in the two settings are so radically different lems, but it will require that archaeologists undertake that serious comparisons are doomed to fail. But in conceptual and methodological work before this fact we have surprisingly little empirical evidence for Cambridge Archaeological Journal 20:2, 229–53 © 2010 McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research doi:10.1017/S0959774310000259 Received 15 Jan 2009; Revised 22 Jul 2009; 229Accepted 23 Jul 2009 Michael E. Smith the nature and extent of differences between modern Rather than seeing cities as fundamentally changed and ancient cities because the two phenomena have by the advent of the Industrial Revolution and rarely been studied together using common methods the global connections of the modern world, new and concepts. This situation presents a stark contrast anthropological research suggests that both ancient and modern cities are the result of a limited range to comparative research on state-level economies, of configurations that structure human action in where comparisons between ancient and modern concentrated populations (M.L. Smith 2003, 2). economic systems have been endlessly researched This is a reasonable hypothesis that forms the basis and debated with ample presentation of empirical for the arguments that follow. data and theoretical perspectives (see the review in Smith 2004). In my opinion, considerable comparative The problem of recentism research will be needed to evaluate the similarities and differences between ancient and modern cities Before proceeding to my analysis, it is useful to con- (Smith 2009a). Urban scholars have suggested some sider the issue of ‘recentism’, a scholarly trend that of the factors that have produced transformations in currently places limitations on comparisons between cities and urban processes in the twentieth century, ancient and modern social phenomena such as cities and these provide a starting point for comparative and urbanism. Recentism describes the situation in research. which historical scholarship on social topics focuses Most urban scholars stress advances in transport increasingly on later and later periods, ignoring and communications as major forces that shaped new earlier epochs. This phenomenon was identified urban forms and processes in the modern era (e.g. (and named) by historical geographers through the Vance 1990; Jackson 1985). Environmental historian analysis of articles in the leading journals in their field. John R. McNeill (2000, 281) notes that ‘twentieth- Whereas historical geography journals used to include century urbanization affected almost everything in a substantial number of papers on early time periods, human affairs and constituted a vast break with past scholarship today focuses almost overwhelmingly on centuries’. He cites the size of cities, the amount of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Sluyter 2005; garbage and pollution, and the extent of ecological 2010; Jones 2004). Similarly, a simple comparison footprints as the major differences between twentieth- of two benchmark ‘global’ works on historical and century cities and their predecessors. Political econo- environmental geography (Thomas 1956; Turner et mists Gordon McGranahan and David Satterthwaite al. 1990) shows the preponderant concentration on (2003) emphasize changes brought by the end of recent periods in the 1990 book compared with the colonialism in the third world (2003, 247) and by the first volume in 1956. expansion of global capitalism: ‘The most important This trend is not limited to historical geography; underpinning of urban change during the twentieth indeed my impression is that recentism may be even century was the large increase in the size of the global more rampant in other branches of historical social economy’ (2003, 246). On a smaller scale than these science. For example, a recent collection titled, Compar- grand forces, life in cities today is quite different from ative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences (Mahoney the past, in everything from expanded life expectancy, & Rueschemeyer 2003) includes almost exclusively to the prevalence of planning and zoning, to the analyses of political processes in the past two centuries growth of surveillance practices. by political scientists. The ‘Big Structures, Large Proc- On the other hand, some writers acknowledge esses, and Huge Comparisons’ in the title of a book by these differences but still argue that ancient and social historian Charles Tilly (1984) are evidently not modern cities can be considered within the same big enough to extend much earlier than the industrial frame of reference for many issues. This view is revolution. Tilly’s consideration of the field of urban expressed most frequently by scholars working on history (Tilly 1996) similarly does not extend very far the urban built environment. Amos Rapoport, in beyond the past three centuries, and in this scope it particular, urges urban scholars of the built environ- matches most of the content of the two leading urban ment to draw on all historical periods, all cultural history journals, Journal of Urban History and Urban traditions, and all kinds of buildings (Rapoport 1983, History. This kind of limited-perspective, recentistic, 250). Rapoport (1973) and other scholars (e.g. Hakim scholarship not only hinders comparisons between 2007) suggest that traditional cities hold lessons that ancient and modern cities, but it can also preclude can help architects and planners achieve more satis- our discovery of cycles, trends, and other temporal factory urban contexts today. Archaeologist Monica patterns over long periods of history. Smith states that, 230 Sprawl, Squatters, and Sustainable Cities In a paper that tries to get beyond recentism in According to Ewing (1994), most people view sprawl geographical analyses of imperialism and colonialism, in terms of one or more of four ‘archetypes’: low- Rhys Jones and Richard Phillips make the following density development,
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