Cities

The First 6,000 Years

Monica L. Smith

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781471163654
• eBook ISBN: 9781471163678
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

A FASCINATING INVESTIGATION INTO THE HISTORY OF CITIES: WHY DID THEY OCCUR, HOW HAVE THEY EVOLVED, WHY DO SO MANY OF US CHOOSE TO LIVE IN THEM AND HOW DO THEY AFFECT US? 'Monica Smith is the person best qualified to write a book about the big problems raised by the increasing concentration of the human population into cities. She also has a gift for vivid writing that will make the science of cities come to life for the broad public. I expect thatCITIESwill be a great read and will sell well.'
Jared Diamond, author of Collapse Over half of the world's population lives in an urban area and cities around the globe are getting bigger and bigger. Love them or hate them, more and more of us are choosing to live in them. Cities investigates the following intriguing questions: why did cities start to occur around 6, 000 years ago, how have they evolved, why do so many of us choose to live in them, how do they affect us, and what does the future hold at a time when we're increasingly connected by technology? In Cities, Monica L. Smith points out that, even if you don't live in a city, your life is inevitably affected by one, whether you commute into one for work, sell coffee beans to a company that supplies urban coffee shops, or host city-dwelling tourists seeking adventure and respite from the city in your remote village. Using fascinating anecdotes and research findings from her work as an archaeologist, Smith also reveals that many of the problems that we associate with modern cities (violence, hyperconsumption, etc.) have, in fact, always existed. And, more positively, how many of the things that draw us to cities in modern times (educational and economic opportunities, social mobility, culture) are the things that have drawn us to them since they first appeared. She also makes the controversial argument that it's down to cities that the middle class exists and she examines why social movements flourish in cities in a way they rarely do in rural settings.

1

WHY CITIES?

As an archaeologist, my favorite place in Rome is not the Colosseum or the Forum. It’s the ancient trash dump of Monte Testaccio. Right in the middle of the city, it is a giant mound of broken pottery where the ancient Romans threw away the containers used to ship wine and olive oil all around the Mediterranean. Each of those vessels was about half the height of a person and made of coarse clay that would have roughed up a stevedore’s hands. Their odd shape of two handles and a pointy base made them good for packing into a ship’s hold or standing upright on a sandy shoreline but very inconvenient for much else. After a cargo of them arrived at its destination on the bustling shores of the Tiber at the very heart of the Roman world, a few were reused and a few were recycled. Mostly, people poured out the contents and threw the containers away. Over the centuries, the pile of discards grew, with the result that one of the famous hills of Rome is actually not a hill at all but a human construction—a landfill, essentially. Today Monte Testaccio is topped by trendy nightclubs and has been endlessly mined for construction, but there are still the remains of twenty-five million ancient containers poking up from the vegetation of the hillside.

Now consider a very different metropolis. My favorite part of Tokyo? The backside of the Tsukiji fish market, the part that tourists don’t visit. Tsukiji is enormous, and the passageways are crowded with plastic buckets and barrels teeming with every kind of creature that you can imagine from the briny deep. Crabs attempt to crawl their way out of baskets, little fish are piled up in ice buckets, and great slabs of tuna glisten under the klieg lights. The market is open to everyone, with chefs and restaurant owners jostling with homemakers for a clearer view of the day’s catch. It’s a world without friendly chitchat, punctuated by the dangerous darting movements of souped-up forklifts that dodge their way in and out of the building and heap up their discards out back. Behind the market is an enormous dump of plastic-foam shipping boxes used to transport the globally sourced tuna, squid, and shrimp from each morning’s auctions. The pile of containers is taller than a two-story building and so large that it is continually cleared by bulldozer. Some of the cartons are trampled and broken in the process, with bits and pieces that spill farther into the passageway. In between the endless runs of machinery, merchants and their helpers come to pick through the heaps of box fragments. Sorting through the pile to find ones that aren’t too broken, they carry them off to repack with fish or whatever else they’re selling.

Ancient Rome and modern Tokyo are literally a world apart, but if we stand back and look at them as cities, they have identical characteristics. In addition to markets and trash, there are multistory buildings, long streets, sewer pipes, water mains, public squares, and a “downtown” zone of financial institutions and government offices. There are a thousand varieties of sounds and smells, competing with the weather and daylight that frame the skyline of the built environment. There are crowds of people—rich, poor, young, old, female, male, gay, straight, trans, abled, disabled, employed, students, jobless, residents, and visitors. Production and consumption opportunities are scaled up in cities to provide not only more things but also more things per person, a completely ironic abundance given that urban residences tend to be much smaller than their rural counterparts. In the midst of so much abundance, the only solution is to cycle through possessions faster, turning everything into trash.

It’s the act of discard that provides the most telling evidence of urban activity, whether it’s a broken potsherd from two thousand years ago or a fragment of a plastic crate that was shattered this morning. Once you start to look for the concentrated detritus of your own urban life, it’s everywhere: in the trash cans that bear the proud logo of the downtown business improvement district; in the Dumpster parked outside a building that signals a renovation taking place inside; in the garbage truck that obstructs your commute; in the legions of sanitation workers employed to sweep the streets and subways and haul away the accumulations of discards. Trash has a familiar rhythm and concentration. Holidays bring a hangover of extra-full trash bins; parades and festivals and summer weekends in the park are witnessed through their aftermath of overflowing containers. Whether directly or by proxy, an urban obsession with trash is everywhere, and once you start to look, you won’t be able to stop seeing it. Congratulations! You’re an archaeologist.

Moving your gaze upward, or to the side, you might notice that it’s not just trash that silently tells a story of urban life. Your own metropolis, even if it’s new, has many traces that reveal its history before you moved through its streets. Maybe it’s a bolt hole in the sidewalk where a telephone booth used to stand, or an out-of-use railroad track now embedded in the asphalt of a city street. Maybe it’s a building that has been updated once or twice, resulting in the pastiche of a Victorian facade with mirrored glass windows, or a modernist concrete structure fronted by flowers and cheerful painted windowsills. And maybe it’s a newly cut ditch in the street where you can see the layered pavements of prior years right up to the present. Buildings and streets and parks serve as a living map of variable time, a collection of structures that all exist simultaneously whether they were constructed a millennium ago, in your grandparents’ time, or last week.

Your growing archaeological insights serve you well when looking not only at modern cities but also at the ancient cities that are found by the hundreds on nearly every continent, from famous ones such as Rome to not-so-famous ones with romantic names like Tikal, Tell Brak, and Xi’an. When we look beyond the rubble and ruins, what we unearth in our excavations of them rings true to the experiences that we have in our own cities: neighborhoods and streets, open plazas and grand buildings, lines of sight to the residences of the powerful, and marketplaces where people from all walks of life met their daily needs for food and fuel. When we walk through the streets of an ancient city like Pompeii, we encounter an environment where everything makes sense, from the sewer grates and the narrow passageways between apartment buildings to the food stalls and the cocky ancient graffiti scribbled on the walls. 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 a global phenomenon that dominates the planet. Today, more than 50 percent of the world’s people live in cities, and that percentage will soon be larger. It’s predicted that by 2030, more than 50 percent of Africans, 60 percent of Chinese, 87 percent of Americans, and 92 percent of the residents of the United Kingdom will live in cities.

In their layouts and constructions, ancient cities look so much like the ones we build for ourselves that it seems they should always have existed. And the growth and success of modern cities also suggest that humans thrive in urban locales. But cities are not actually the natural condition of our species, nor did we humans need to develop cities in order to survive or to successfully colonize the world. For a million years, our ancestors had lived scattered across the landscape, housed in humble huts in everyone-knows-everyone villages. By the time cities were invented six thousand years ago, our ancestors had already done a good job of filling up all of the easy places to live and many of the difficult ones, too. They had a system of pathways to get across the land, and they had developed rafts and boats to get from place to place across the trackless water. They had moved out of caves and other natural shelters into huts that they built themselves out of stone, bamboo, or brick. People had a sophisticated repertoire of language, art, music, and dance to pass the time, and they had many ways of displaying their individual identities through ornaments and tattoos and hairstyles. They already had reverence for the dead, encoded in the placement of burial goods laid to rest with the deceased. There were plenty of objects for the living, too, because people had already invented all the essentials of life. There were clothes to keep warm, plows to till the land, pottery and baskets to keep the harvest safe, and stone knives and bronze weapons to carve up food (and to keep enemies in check). There were domesticated plants for a steady supply of beer and bread, and domesticated animals as a ready source of milk, wool, transportation, and companionship. In sum, we had everything we needed for a successful life of small-scale farming that would still have allowed for population growth to cover the planet, one little village at a time.

Clearly, that simple and straightforward village life wasn’t enough for our urban ancestors. Despite having everything that members of our species needed to survive, people wanted plenty of intangible things that they couldn’t get out there in the countryside: the thrill of a crowd, the excitement of new inventions and novel foods, and the tantalizing allure of meeting a romantic partner from beyond the confines of the village. Before there were cities, such experiences could be found only in ritual spaces that people might visit once or twice in a lifetime. Located far away from settlements, ritual places like Stonehenge provided the only escape from village life where people from different areas could gather together for the purpose of celebrating a festival or honoring a deity. Drawn to those places by some distinctive point of topography, people often added special ritual architecture meant to be the focus of collective attention and to serve as a proof of collective action.

By bringing people together for a shared purpose, ritual places made it possible for people to develop and practice the skills of communication and interaction that enabled them to deal with so many strangers. Yet places like Stonehenge, however appealing, were only temporary: people were not meant to stay there beyond a few days of feasting and worship. Only cities could make that opportunity for intense interaction permanent and for a much greater range of purposes—social, economic, political—than could ever have been envisioned for a ritual space. Summed up in a phrase, it’s “bright lights, big city” with all of the connotations of enticements and activity that we continue to experience in our own urban centers today. Cities were the homes of human creativity, manifested not only in culture, fashion, and fine arts but also in small things like clothing, ornaments, housewares, food, and hairstyles. Through the acquisition of a constantly changing array of objects, people living in cities proclaimed new alliances and new senses of self; even if they could not purchase stylish new goods regularly, they could talk about what was fashionable in a vicarious and free appropriation of urban style.

Before cities, there was only a landscape of villages in which every family was more or less the same, consisting of farmers and herders who experienced very little ethnic or social diversity. Every house was the same, too, except for the chief’s house or the shaman’s house, which might have been a little larger or that had a few different artifacts that enabled their occupants to do the special jobs of leadership and curing the sick. And the shamans kept their secrets to themselves: those objects weren’t for everyone to touch, or see, or know about. Everyone else did the same work, day in and day out, and everyone had the same basic repertoire of food and objects. Those objects were solid and sober, with styles and decorations that had stood the test of time. Social interactions were solid and sober, too. People might have had a little fun when they were young or when they went on an occasional trip to a distant wedding or on a once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage. The majority of their days, however, were spent in an atmosphere where they knew everyone else. In the modest farming settlements that people built all over the globe, there was very little movement in or out of the community. People spent their entire lives in the company of the same people, and almost everyone was related. New faces appeared only at the time of marriage or when itinerant peddlers came with their wares. Familiarity was the constant measure of human relations, and strangers were regarded with wariness and misgiving.

Places like Rome and Xi’an and every other ancient metropolis represent a spectacular change in the way that humans related to their environments and to one another. In urban settlements, unfa miliarity became the measure of human relations. The first cities were larger than the largest family-like village, and the people who moved into those settlements had to suppress a suspicion of others from the very first day. People had to adapt to densely crowded neighborhoods full of people they had never seen before; they had to negotiate ritual and political relationships with other newcomers; and they had to accept the near-constant dissonance of interacting with people representing different cultures, languages, and customs. Encounters with strangers were no longer limited to the occasional addition of a newlywed to the collective hearth, but constituted a recurring condition of daily life. People moved in and out of the city, coming and leaving as new opportunities opened up. As they worked, played, and shopped, urban residents had to constantly update their roster of relationships.

Urban social life and the entrepreneurial spirit associated with migration constituted a feedback loop that enticed more and more people who were looking to better their circumstances. Before cities, there wasn’t a middle class as a group of people who have income that can support activities beyond the range of basic life and who can make some investments in housing and objects and education. Before cities, there wasn’t infrastructure—all of those pipes and highways and drains that suddenly became necessary as a way to logistically connect large groups of people. And before cities, there wasn’t even take-out food! All of those were invented only as cities came into existence, and they all come together: the middle class, the objects, the physical networks of connectivity, and the trash. It’s as though there was a pent-up capacity for all of those things that had somehow been encoded into our collective conscious, just waiting for an opportunity to burst forth.

When scientists want to understand a phenomenon, they first have to define it. Astronomers first ask themselves “What is a planet?” as a basis for classifying not only things that they want to compare as planets but also all of the other celestial phenomena that need names too, like moons and meteors and black holes. They can’t see the big bang or the birth of any individual planet, but instead extrapolate from the celestial bodies that are with us now in their quest to understand how the universe works. Biologists query themselves about what a species is and carefully scrutinize the variability that they see before they assess the way that species are related to one another in space and time, deducing the pace and effects of evolution from the staccato appearance of extinct species that are often represented only by stray fossils and fragmentary skeletons. And chemists first ask “What is an atom?” before they can identify the ways in which those atoms can be combined in novel ways to make new substances like plastics and aerogels or divided for explosive effect.

In light of how much cities mean to us today, the archaeological definition of urbanism takes on a special weight and meaning. It’s only after we define what a city is that we can agree on which site can be seen as the first of its kind or that we can compare the ones that have sprung up ever since. But before we define ancient cities, we might want to look at our own urban definitions, which can be quite surprising compared with our expectations of how an “urban” place looks and feels. In Cuba today, the minimum number of people to qualify a location as a city is two thousand; in the American state of Ohio, a city is defined as any place that has five thousand or more registered voters; and in Senegal, the minimum number of inhabitants needed for a place to earn urban status is ten thousand. Those government statistics are principally related to the fact that places defined as cities can access certain types of government funding and support because of their perceived importance in the landscape.

If we can’t agree on a working definition of what a city is according to an arbitrary threshold number, and even when we can see living examples right in front of us, how can we make a definition of cities that serves us for both the past and the present? Should we instead fall back on something more qualitative—like that old quip about pornography being difficult to define but that we know it when we see it? We could start our search for an urban definition with some flippant responses that nonetheless reveal the kernel of a useful approach. In the modern world, we might argue, a “real” city is one that has an Apple Store or a Mercedes-Benz dealership. This is not because people in the countryside lack the capacity to own the latest smartphone or drive an expensive automobile but because cities are the only places that have a large enough population of potential consumers to justify the expense of maintaining brick-and-mortar premises. And beyond the actual customers, there are other ways that urban consumption reflects economies of scale. Specialty stores are in cities because there are enough people to highlight the brand, like those who come into the store for the product experience in a way that affirms an item’s popularity or who simply pass by the store with an acknowledgment of its presence as a marker of the status of an entire neighborhood. A physical store is the consumer tip of the iceberg that assures us there is in fact an entire diverse, vibrant economic underpinning to a densely occupied space.

Cities are not just about economic opportunities. Other potential definitions of urbanism focus on qualitative components such as the presence of government offices or significant administrative services like judicial courts or other bureaucracies. Researchers who emphasize these bureaucratic components always do so within a framework of relative population density to avoid ascribing urban status to lonely outposts or skewing a subsequent analysis among places that can’t truly be compared. Thus, the anthropologist Richard Fox suggested that a city be defined as “a center of population concentration and/or a site for the performance of prestige,” while the social theorist V. Gordon Childe suggested that the first cities, even if they were relatively small, were places that had “truly monumental public buildings” and that were ten times bigger than any village.

By defining what a city is through what it has in it, we can approach the archaeological record in order to answer our real question, which is “Why did cities come about at all?” Yet like all definitions, there’s a little slippage between what we think we see and its realities that make it hard to be perfectly precise 100 percent of the time. We can return to the analogy of other scientific disciplines. Remember the continuing argument about Pluto and whether it’s really a planet? Although schoolkids now have some interesting conversations with their grandparents about whether Pluto “counts” for their solar-system science projects, the challenge comes about not because the concept of defining things is wrong, or that scientists can’t decide what to call things. In fact, the interstices of definitions are exactly where the most interesting revelations take place. When it comes to cities, we know there was a time when there weren’t any cities at all. The definition of what afterward made something “urban” is a key to understanding just how different they were from everything that had come before them.

For the purposes of this book, a city is defined as a place that has some or all of the following characteristics: a dense population, multiple ethnicities, and a diverse economy with goods found in an abundance and variety beyond what is available in the surrounding rural spaces. A city’s structures often include ritual buildings like temples, mosques, or churches, but there are other large buildings beyond those religious ones. In keeping with a multifunctional economy and an intensity of habitation, there is a landscape of verticality that includes residential units, courts, government offices, and schools. There are formal ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Epigraph
• 1. Why Cities?
• 2. City Life, Past and Present
• 3. How to Dig an Ancient City
• 4. Before Cities, There Was . . .
• 5. Urban Building Blocks
• 6. Infrastructure Holds Things Up
• 7. The Harmony of Consumption
• 8. The Mojo of The Middle Class
• 9. Anxiety, Risk, and Middle-Class Life
• 10. A World of Cities
• 11. The Next 6,000 Years
• Acknowledgments
• About Monica L. Smith
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright