Michael E Smith writes:

All cities have neighbourhoods. This may not sound like much of an observation, but it is in fact a powerful claim for archaeologists of early cities. We now know that neighbourhoods are the only true urban universal – a feature found in every city that has ever existed, past and present. Other seemingly ‘urban’ traits, from streets and big buildings to markets and specialists, are absent from many cities and urban traditions. But neighbourhoods are playing a crucial role in the transformation of archaeological research on the earliest cities. Older views of cities focused on pyramids, tombs, greedy kings and oppressive states. In recent decades, archaeologists and others who study cities have turned to focusing on life and society in ancient cities. But now archaeologists have started to analyse these sites as cities, as urban settlements, comparable with cities in the modern world.

Neighbourhoods provide a good introduction to the different forces that shape cities. In them, we can see the ‘top-down’ forces, or the actions of governments, economies and other institutions that set the scene and circumscribe life. When planners – today and in the past – design cities from the ground up, they usually start by establishing neighbourhood units. Most neighbourhoods throughout history, on the other hand, were not planned by authorities; rather, they grew gradually or organically: what social scientists call from the ‘bottom up’ – through the daily activities of residents. It is the generative quality of these bottom-up processes that concerns most of the important scientific research on both ancient and contemporary cities today.

In their bestseller The Dawn of Everything (2021), David Wengrow and the late David Graeber claim that, by focusing on bottom-up, generative forces, they succeed in ‘overturning conventional wisdom on the origin of cities’. Early cities, they argue, could be organised by councils, using democratic methods based on egalitarian principles. Apart from the fact that such models have become rather common in archaeology over the past decade, this claim is dubious because the authors exhibit a very incomplete understanding of generative processes. They emphasise grass-roots actions, where people gather to make decisions together in small groups. But there is another type of generative process – spontaneous order – in which social change arises as the byproduct of interactions among individuals. [Continue reading…]