Intercultural Urbanism: City Planning From the Ancient World to the Modern Day 9781350220799, 9781786994097

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FIGURES

4.1 Location map of Old World cities discussed in the text. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 4.2 Location map of New World cities discussed in the text. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dean Saitta is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Urban Studies program at the University of Denver. His research interests include ancient city planning and design, comparative architectural and urban form, and North American archaeology. He is a co-author of Denver: An Archaeological History (2000).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank the editors and support staff at Zed Books, especially Kim Walker, for their patience and advice during the preparation of this book. The excellent scholarship of two fellow anthropologists, Setha Low and Michael E. Smith, has driven my interest in urban culture and materiality for many years. I am grateful to Monica Smith for sending me a copy of her just-published book about ancient cities as I was finishing the writing of my own. It was an inspiration. Nina Glick Schiller and Rita Wright were gracious hosts for a January, 2019 public lecture at the New York Academy of Sciences in which the central ideas of this book were presented. I especially thank Scott Hutson for his intellectual support and detailed critical review of the manuscript. I am grateful to Phil Wood for his invitation to attend the Council of Europe Intercultural Placemaking Seminar in Venice in June, 2012. Phil and Noha Nasser, a fellow attendee, have given me valuable insights into the theory of interculturalism and the practical challenges of producing the Intercultural City. I thank James Brasuell, Managing Editor of the public interest urban planning website Planetizen, for welcoming me as a contributing essayist to his site in July, 2014. Writing for Planetizen was formative to the writing of this book. Several University of Denver colleagues and some close friends saw me through the many months of developing and completing the book. I am especially grateful to Christina Kreps, George DeMartino, Ilene Grabel, Scott Leutenegger, Orla McInerny, Mario Lopez, Zulema Lopez, Paul Sutton, Sharolyn Anderson, Tanya Coen, David Lacy, Barbara Lacy, Phil Duke, Sean Dollard, and Kyle Cascioli. Kyle helped me launch, and continues to web host, my blog Intercultural Urbanism. I thank my colleagues at the University of Bologna, Portland State University, and the University of Denver for their contributions to a 2009– 2012 US Department of Education–European Union Atlantis grant that explored, though exchanges of students, faculty, and many ideas, the topic of Global Cities and Global Citizenship in the Urban Age. These collaborators included Franco Minganti, Elena Lamberti, Gabriele Manella, Kathi Ketchison, Roberta Waldbaum, and Linda Olson. Giovanna Franci, now deceased, was the inspiration and guiding light of this international effort.

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Rupert Jenkins made many visits on weekend mornings to watch English Premier League football, providing welcome relief from the stress of book writing. Likewise, I owe thanks to my fellow ice hockey players who, during our weekly scrimmages at the University of Denver campus rink, continually inquired about progress and offered valuable non-academic advice. These include Alex Ringsby, Dave Lyons, Jerry Covill, Boris Vilensky, Robert Bond, T.C. Oxley, James Cramer, John Zagnoli, Adam Christopher, Fletch Neeley, and many other Daves, Larrys, Mikes, and Johns. I thank my former students Shaylee Zaugg and Kassandra Neiss, both now practicing professionals, for discussions related to their thesis work that enriched this book. It is comforting to know that applied urban studies scholarship is in their capable hands. Julian Agyeman urged me to write this book and has been a steady source of inspiration and wise counsel. I am truly grateful for his friendship and support. My Park Hill neighbors, especially Matt and Melissa Bradford, Theresa and David Johnson, Richard and Linda Weiss, Christine and Tim Dea, and David Wolf helped me understand the citizen’s perspective on the physical and political changes occurring in Denver. My soul mate Martha Rooney—a trained architect and landscape architect—helped focus my thinking with her knowledge of those fields and many clarifying discussions. Martha and our son Joe have been supportive of, and patient with, my academic pursuits for many, many years. This book is dedicated to my family, neighbors, international colleagues, and citizens everywhere who care about the physical character and human quality of their communities.

1 | INTRODUCTION

It is widely proclaimed that we live in an Urban Age. Popular and scholarly commentary is full of references to humankind now being an urban species: Homo urbanis (Brugmann 2009; Gleeson 2014). We routinely hear that most of the world’s population lives in cities, that people are moving to cities at an accelerating pace, and that settlement in cities is key to a sustainable future and our best hope for survival. At the same time, it is argued that because of urbanization’s global nature something called ‘the city’ has ceased to exist. We are surrounded by dramatic metanarratives (Brenner 2019:300–333) and animated discussions about what the city is, and whether the city is the creator of the global environmental and social sustainability problems that bedevil us, or the solution. We can debate the veracity of the many claims made about cities and whether today’s urban growth is unprecedented in human history. However, it is certainly the case that we are living in a key urban moment. With their status as crucibles of innovation and engines of economic opportunity it is undeniable that cities are major attractors of human population. It is also undeniable that the urban built environment – its form and design – has a huge impact on how people live in cities. It affects their opportunities for interacting within and across social group boundaries, their ability to accumulate social capital (Putnam 2000; Westlund 2014), and their overall life chances. This impact may not be as consequential as the more direct impact of urban policies and programs, but we should not discount the built environment’s relevance to whatever possibilities the city has for improving collective life going forward. As Neil Brenner (2019:302) puts it, ‘urban spaces have become strategically essential to politicaleconomic and sociocultural life around the world, and to emergent visions of possible planetary futures’. Accompanying global urbanization is the increasing cultural diversity of metropolitan regions. By cultural diversity, I mean differences in

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individual and group-level ways of believing and living that are shaped by ethnic background, history, position in a global spatial order, and other variables. Cultural diversity, along with human biological diversity, is the traditional subject matter of anthropology: the study of the human condition across all space and time. Cultural diversity is also a hallmark of urbanity; it goes with the territory of being urban. The history of the city is the history of human diversities meeting, interacting, coexisting, and sometimes colliding. Diversity has been an inherent feature of urban life right from the beginning (Mandanipour 2014). Today, ethnic diversity is becoming ‘increasingly salient as a determinant marker in the urban world’ (Irazábal 2011). There are at least two major reasons for this increasing saliency of ethnic and cultural diversity. One is the dramatic global movement of immigrants and refugees produced by political upheaval, climate change, and the human desire to seek greater economic opportunity (Hou 2013; Çaglar and Glick Schiller 2018). The other is the impending demographic transition within open, democratic societies that will alter the ethnic and racial mix of cities; for example, the shift from a majority white to a majority non-white population in the United States. According to the United States Census Bureau, the USA will become a ‘majority minority’ nation by 2050. This transition is putting increased pressure on US metropolitan regions to accommodate differences in ways of living. It is exacerbating pressures on the form and quality of housing, on the provision and use of public space, and on the availability of social services. Of course, it is also putting pressure on ethnic groups themselves, both newcomer and resident. Depending on political and economic circumstances, encounters with diversity in human history can very easily generate anxiety, distrust, fear, and open conflict. All things being equal the ethnic and cultural diversification of cities is a positive thing. It is well-established that such diversity is part of what makes cities generators of creativity and opportunity. Much social science research indicates that cultural diversity is a boon to creating a broader-based civic prosperity (Ottaviano and Peri 2006; Mandanipour 2014; Benner and Pastor 2015). It amplifies the ‘knowledge spillover’ effect produced by dense human interaction that Jane Jacobs identified in her seminal work The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs 1961). Immigration in the United States since the 1970s has helped cities by reversing population loss,

introduction | 3

raising home values, and lowering crime rates (Myers 2007; Vigdor 2014; Sandoval-Strausz 2019:291–325). The positive effects of such immigration is the untold story of postwar urban America. The dominant narratives are about 1960s white flight followed by the 1990s return to the city of mostly white ‘cultural creatives’ (sensu Florida 2002; see Sandoval-Strausz 2014; 2019:10–11). Wood and Landry (2008) powerfully speak to the ‘diversity advantage’. The power of cultural diversity is something to be valued and harnessed, the sometimes difficult challenges of living with diversity notwithstanding. However, we live at a time when the power of diversity to create civic prosperity is being weakened. It is being weakened by deepening economic divisions between rich and poor, divisions that in the modern age have generally correlated with race and ethnicity. These divisions of class and culture have a spatial dimension, manifested as concentrated wealth and poverty and unequal access to public space, green space, and other urban amenities. When regeneration of historically impoverished areas occurs it often results in the displacement of the most economically vulnerable households and groups, pushing them to urban margins or into other urban spaces where survival is made even more difficult. Sometimes the displacement is more psychological than spatial, exacerbated by the spread of political ideologies that demonize minority populations and render them strangers in their own land. Compounding the problem is the increasing privatization of the public realm via national and foreign corporate buying of city centers (Sassen 2018; see also contributors to Low and Smith 2006). This trend has accelerated since the financial crisis of 2008, producing wealth for international elites in the form of (mostly underused) luxury housing. Today, downtown surface parking lots are being bought up for similar purposes (Acitelli 2019). These developments are not only eliminating shared public space where diversities can interact, but also producing homogenized cityscapes: a form of social gating by other means (Florida et al. 2014; Mallach 2018). All of this threatens the attainment of a broad-based civic prosperity. The cause of this state of affairs is, at least in part, neoliberal or free market economic policies. They have rendered urbanization the new means by which capital is accumulated and class position secured in the post-industrial era (Harvey 2012). But it is also an urban planning and design problem. Current approaches to planning and design are unfriendly to diversity in two main ways.

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First, they are shaped by thinking emanating from countries – and former colonial powers – located in the Global North and West. Second, they are informed by a very short history. Most official histories of urban planning and design only go back to the nineteenth century, at best to the Renaissance. These spatial and temporal constraints have produced a planning and design paradigm that, at the end of the day, is largely monocultural in character. It produces urban forms, architectures, codes, and other materialities that reflect the norms and values of Western majority cultures. This dominant paradigm is also informed by modes of knowledge that are instrumentalist, techno-scientific, and market-driven (Brenner 2009). Conse­quently, it is insensitive to the needs of diverse groups and exclusionary in its effects. These firmly established, but historically contingent, planning and design commitments are now seriously threatening the longstanding reputation of cities as places where diversity and tolerance, and innovation and creativity, can thrive (Canefe 2018). This problem is recognized by scholars and policymakers worldwide. The United Nations’ New Urban Agenda (United Nations 2017) explicitly mentions the need to better accommodate cultural diversity and heritage in urban planning and development strategies in order to make cities more inclusive and equitable. It calls for repairing the urban social fabric in a way that prioritizes inclusion and equity (Farrell and Haas 2018). The New Urban Agenda views this as a sustainability challenge just as significant as those related to population growth and climate change. Wachsmuth et al. (2016) argue in the premier scientific journal Nature that we must address social equity if we are to expand the frontiers of urban sustainability. This book is about what we can do in the area of urban planning and design to address some of these diversity and equity challenges. It explores the possibilities for making cities more congenial to cultural diversity in hope of achieving a broader civic prosperity and sustainability. By congenial, I mean built environments that allow diverse communities to exercise their ‘right to the city’ (Lefebvre 1996; Harvey 2008; Marcuse 2009). This includes their right to access existing urban resources and their right to imagine a future city; i.e., to participate in the creation of new urban spaces and forms of governance. The right to the city is today widely embraced as a call to action – a ‘cry and a demand’ (Lefebvre 1996:158) – by citizen activists and others

introduction | 5

concerned about deepening social inequality and political disenfranchisement. I am also interested in how we can create urban settings and contexts that facilitate closer connections between diverse peoples and cultures; connections that might enhance our ability to ‘live together with difference’ (Amin 2002) and create a sense of ‘relatedness among strangers’ (Sennett 2018a:105; see also Rybczynski 2010:140; Werbner 2014:307; Talen 2015; 2018). To fulfill these goals we need to broaden the urban planning and design vision (Brenner 2017a). This means doubling down on efforts made in the last decade or so to develop planning and design knowledge – new paradigms, theories, and imaginaries – that are ‘resou­ rced by a greater diversity of urban experiences’ (Robinson 2006:6), that draw from a broader ‘palette of ideas’ (Barnett and Bridge 2016) or ‘reservoir of concepts’ (Alsayyad and Roy 2006), and that are predicated on ‘thinking with elsewhere’, in Jennifer Robinson’s memorable phrase (Robinson 2016:188). The concept of imaginary looms large in this critical literature, and in this book. The urban imaginary is a cognitive and somatic image of the place where we live and dwell (Huyssen 2008). It involves a ‘distinctive image of the desirable city-to-come’ (Brenner et al. 2011:229), and makes possible the requisite changes in socio-spatial practice (Watkins 2015; Davoudi 2018). Where can we look for inspiration in creating new paradigms, theories, and urban imaginaries? In recent years important postcolonial critiques of traditional planning and design practice have directed attention to the Global South (see especially Robinson 2006; Roy 2009; also Chakrabarty 2000; Yiftachel 2006; Varley 2013; Schindler 2017). I examine some of the contributions of this ‘Southern Turn’ in theory throughout this book. New theories and imaginaries of the urban are certainly enriched by looking to other geographies such as the Global South. But in addition to looking around we also need to look back: deep into the human past, to the full 6,000 year history of city building. Goebel (2019) suggests that a historical perspective on urbanization is more critical now than ever before. But we need to go well beyond the nineteenth century, the Renaissance, and even the classical world of Greece and Rome. We need to take a much longer ‘view to elsewhere’: back to the origin of cities, to their creation in the ancient world. By at least 4000 BCE the ancient world was a world of cities (Yoffee and Terrenato 2015). We need to bring these original crucibles of urban life, such as ancient Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica,

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into the analytical fold and a comparative perspective. Following M.E. Smith (2007) my category of the ‘ancient’ also includes cities from the very recent past (as recent as 500 years ago) that, because of racial and other investigative biases, have been neglected by scholars and thus might as well be ancient (e.g., pre-colonial Africa, pre-conquest North America). Exploring this deep history of urbanism, its relevance for urban anthropology and urban studies, and its lessons for planning and design today is the unique contribution made by this book to the professional and popular literature. A vast body of archaeological research exists about ancient cities as defined here. Although there are many gaps in what we know, a clear outline of the deep history of urbanization is coming into focus. This history offers enormous possibilities for fruitful dialogue with scholars of the urban present (Carballo and Fortenberry 2015). Briefly, what we know indicates that the vast majority of ancient cities were both global (i.e., embedded in a much wider set of political and economic relationships) and multiethnic. They attracted immigrants from far afield even if some migrants, as today, were compelled to move to cities in order to make a living. Ancient cities were diverse in physical layout and in their histories of development. It is clear that cultural inclusion was a key economic driver, and central to generating city-wide prosperity. This prosperity was greatest when ethnic intermingling and integration was prioritized (Blanton 2015). Political governance of ancient cities ran the gamut from autocratic to collective. The archaeological record provides numerous examples of consensual alternatives to autocracy as a mechanism for accommodating and mixing cultural diversities (cf. Briggs 2004). Current evidence suggests that collective governance was especially effective in maintaining urban resilience under conditions of high population density. Because of the ancient city’s physical and organizational complexity it can be a ‘generative source of theoretical innovation and comparative insight’ (Brenner 2019:45) for dealing with urban problems today. Archaeologists are already moving to connect knowledge gained from the study of ancient cities to contemporary issues around housing, food production, service provision, public space use, sprawl, and sustainability (e.g., M.E. Smith 2010a; 2010b; Stanley et al. 2016). But there is more that we can do, including confronting the challenge of how cities might better accommodate and mix cultural diversities.

introduction | 7

The time has come for revealing the nature and complexity of the ancient city, extracting its lessons, importing those lessons into the field of urban studies, and sharing the lessons with planners, architects, and policymakers. Recent book-length treatments of the city in history (Reader 2004; Kotkin 2005; Lees 2015; Rose 2016; Clark 2016) devote an average of 10 percent of their pages to the roughly 80 percent of urban history that was lived in ancient cities. Only 3 percent of Carl Nightingale’s (2012) big book about the history of urban segregation is devoted to cities from that distant time period. All volumes are heavily weighted to analyzing cities in the classical and modern worlds. Consequently, we are missing much that is potentially relevant to the theory and practice of city building today. Why Intercultural Urbanism?

I frame this study of urban cultural diversity in the ancient world as an inquiry into Intercultural Urbanism. I define urbanism as the theory and practice of city building, the planning and design of urban spaces and architectures that is cognizant of the social impact of the built environment. The concept is broader than, but inclusive of, today’s popular notion of ‘placemaking’ (Project for Public Spaces 2007). As will be discussed in Chapter 2, there is no shortage of ideas about how to do good urbanism. Plenty of variants are competing for attention and influence today. Intercultural Urbanism is theory and practice that is sensitive to cultural and sub-cultural differences in how people make and use built space. It understands that planning and design decisions (about the form and character of houses, parks, public spaces, and the connections between them) are never neutral but carry cultural baggage. Intercultural planning and design looks to identify points of contact or overlap in how cultures use built space so that urban settings and contexts can be created in which stronger attachments can form across cultures; e.g., Amin’s (2002) ‘spaces of interdependencies and habitual engagement’ (see also Rybczynski 2010:140). Of course, Intercultural Urbanism also looks to outreach and interact with citizens – the coproducers of the city – in culturally literate and competent ways, and to effectively fold what is learned into planning and design practice. There is a vast literature on interculturalism and how it differs from alternative formulations, like multiculturalism (e.g., Meer et al. 2016; Antonsich 2016; Watson 2017). Leonie Sandercock (2003; 2009)

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articulates the position that informs this book in a particularly compelling way. The basic challenge for Intercultural Urbanism is neatly captured with the following passage from her book Cosmopolis II: [B]ecoming [an intercultural] society/city is more than a matter of bureaucratic management or of citizenship legislation. It also requires the active construction of new ways of living together, new forms of social and spatial belonging. It is a long-term process of building new communities, during which fears and anxieties cannot be dismissed but need to be worked through. (Sandercock 2003:136–138)

Other scholars and activists have articulated broadly similar calls for ‘new forms of social and spatial belonging’ for an intercultural society. Over fifty years ago Martin Luther King, Jr. used a very appropriate metaphor to call for a ‘radical restructuring of the architecture of American society’ (King 2010 [1967]). George Lipsitz (2011:17) re-frames this goal as the transformation of ‘Blacks and whites (and everyone else) into new kinds of humans, into people capable of creating new racial and spatial relations’. David Harvey (2014:31) speaks of cultural emancipation being part of the challenge to construct ‘new forms of sociality’. Sandercock (2009:219–220) offers several important premises about culture that must be appreciated if this project is to succeed. First, culture is dynamic and constantly changing. Cultures evolve because they are always open to outside influences (Wolf 1982); they are hybrids of necessity. Second, culture is partitive: it contains myriad differences between and among people and groups that must be constantly negotiated. Third, cultural diversity is a positive. Cultures on their own realize only a limited range of human capabilities and emotions; they represent only a part of the totality of human experience. Other cultures are needed to strengthen our collective imagination about the possibilities for human life. Fourth, at the heart of interculturalism are two rights: the right to difference and, following Henri Lefebvre (1996), the right to the city. The right to difference is the right of subaltern and minority groups to have their specific urban needs recognized and legitimized. The right to the city is the right to presence in public space, the right to participate as an equal in public affairs, and the right to change ourselves by changing the city (Harvey 2008). Sandercock urges a new ‘planning

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imagination’ (2003:228) whose project is to secure these rights for all people and to establish political community, rather than ethnocultural identity, as the basis for a sense of belonging in society. Archaeology and Urban Materiality

Archaeology in the United States is traditionally classified as a subfield of anthropology. It is defined as the study of cultural diversity through the investigation of material remains. Archaeology’s primary goals are (1) the reconstruction of past lifeways and (2) the explanation of culture change. These tasks are much more complicated than they might seem, because we cannot do a simple reading of archaeological remains to arrive at ‘truth’. This epistemological insight was a long time in arriving. For most of archaeology’s history objects were taken as a simple, straightforward reflection of evolutionary stage (e.g., savagery, barbarism, civilization) or of adaptive state (e.g., hunting and gathering, agriculture). Previous generations of scholars read directly from the kind and quality of material objects to the nature of social organization and even to the psychological character of a culture. In contrast, it is widely understood today that material objects – including city plans, buildings, parks, and other humanly constructed landscapes – are actively and consciously used to create culture and society. Object form, and the materials from which they are made, have power and carry meaning. They are deployed in political and ideological struggles between contesting groups. They are used to challenge and misrepresent existing social relations. They have everything to do with the manipulation of mass psychology. Objects take on new trappings of power and new meanings as they move between social contexts. Objects ‘push back’, advancing and constraining human action in ways informed by local circumstances and history. Interpreting the social role and meaning of objects requires paying close attention to their social context, and working with multiple lines of archaeological evidence. In this book I take for granted that there is a reciprocal, mutually constitutive relationship – a dialectic – between the built environment and culture. Buildings and built spaces express culture, and they help create and reproduce culture. They reflect and reinforce a variety of political, economic, and cultural conditions and relationships. They foster social unity as well as promote alterity. Thus, the built environment is both a mirror and metaphor of social life. Archaeology’s

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agency theory of urban materiality is akin to ‘assemblage’ theory in critical urban studies (McFarlane 2011a; Angelo 2011). Assemblage theory holds that urban social life and its constituent power relationships are conditioned by spatial arrangements and other materialities (for recent reviews see Farías 2017; Latham 2017). In essence, what Winston Churchill said about buildings goes for cities: we make cities, and thereafter they make us. This notion has been channeled many times by urban scholars and commentators in recent years. Ancient cities can expand our understanding of how cities make people. In this book I am interested in how ancient materialities of planning and design served to accommodate ethnic and cultural difference, and how this knowledge can be used to create better physical contexts and settings for accommodating and integrating diversities today. Design Forms for the Open, Intercultural City

To accomplish this analytical task I find Richard Sennett’s vision of the ‘open city’, credited to Jane Jacobs, to be useful (Sennett 2018a). The open city is cosmopolitan. It is predicated on intellectual and aesthetic openness to different people, places, and experiences (Hannerz 1996; Noble 2013). It emphasizes empathy, toleration, and respect for other cultures and values (Werbner 2014:307). I also find great utility in Sennett’s distinction between ville and cité (Sennett 2018b). The notion of ville refers to urban built form; cité to urban lived experience. I believe that Sennett’s understanding of the relationship between ville and cité, and how they work together to create the open city, have much in common with Sandercock’s vision of the Intercultural City. Sennett (2018b) proposes five ‘open forms’ or design principles for producing the cosmopolitan city. The first principle is synchronous public spaces that accommodate many activities at once, and thereby draw people in. The second form is porous edges, or borders. Borders contrast with boundaries, which are non-porous. Depending on context, walls can be either borders or boundaries. Jane Jacobs (1961:267), drawing upon Kevin Lynch (1960), drew a similar contrast between ‘seams’ and ‘barriers’. Jacobs’ notion of seam as a ‘line of exchange along which two areas are sewn together’ has much in common with Sennett’s notion of the porous edge or border. The third form is place markers: monuments, murals, and other objects

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that punctuate the cityscape. Sennett describes them as ‘exclamation points’ that declare the importance of a space. The fourth form is the ‘shell’: material forms whose possibilities are not exhausted by a configuration imposed at the start. The final principle is ‘seed planning’: using these various forms in different ways in different contexts like a farmer uses seed in different environmental circumstances to achieve a desired outcome. Seed planning is pitched as an alternative to master planning. It works through small projects and with local community collaboration, an approach that allows maximum room for variation and innovation. The analogy with agriculture is apt for the purposes of this book, because as we will see the ancients often integrated the urban and rural in ways that ensured a wider civic prosperity and sustainability. I argue in this book that the ancients worked with all of these open forms and principles, combining them in ways that supported intercultural inclusion, mixing, and robust ‘cultures of citizenship’ (Galinsky 1992; Merrifield 2014). In other words, ancient urbanisms offer a variety of takes on the relationship between Sennett’s ville and cité. Sennett’s forms, and perhaps others still to be defined, are embedded in the built environments of ancient cities, awaiting discovery and analysis. I believe that they have something to teach us today that can inform new urban imaginaries, models, and placemaking practices. I should note that my interest in the power of material forms to accommodate cultural diversity and encourage social mixing is not to embrace a crude physical determinism. I do not hold to the belief that creation of a particular physical space will guarantee a certain social effect or outcome. The argument is subtler. It is about planning and design that enables diversity (Talen 2006); that permits expression of multiple and perhaps even unforeseeable forms of diversity (Perrone 2011); and that allows interaction to occur organically and spontaneously. Of course, much also depends on how spaces and places are programmed with events and activities that support social interaction and conviviality. A Further Note about Purpose and Approach

This exercise of interrogating the past to distill principles and lessons for the present is not undertaken in the hope of returning to an idyllic urban past that was better than today (Lefebvre 1996:148).

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Instead, the hope is that some forms and principles for intercultural planning and design can be extracted and ‘scaled up’ (AsomaniBoateng 2011) to meet contemporary challenges. But mostly I am simply looking to expand the body of urban knowledge upon which planners and designers can draw to supplement, revise, extend, or enrich their own practice. It is not up to me to establish the meaning and utility of planning and design knowledge gained from the ancients. My intention is to make scholars and citizens aware of other urban realities in the deep past, and to provide source material for inspiring new urban imaginaries. At this point, probably the most important thing that I can do is challenge, using archaeological evidence, certain popular and scholarly preconceptions about the past. For example, the notions that ancient cultures progressively evolved from simple to complex, or that ancient cities always and everywhere were predicated on racism, tribalism, sexism, and classism. As I will show in the pages that follow, physical and social complexity in urban form is apparent right at the beginning of urbanization, and cities were governed in some very different ways than might be expected given their age and historical context. Plan of the Book

The book is organized as follows. Chapter 2 positions the argument within larger debates in urban studies. It introduces two broad discourses doing battle for hearts and minds today. One is a Triumphal discourse, typified by works like Jeb Brugmann’s (2009) Welcome to the Urban Revolution and Edward Glaeser’s (2011) Triumph of the City. The other is a Critical discourse typified by Andy Merrifield’s (2014) The New Urban Question and Neil Brenner’s (2019) New Urban Spaces. I critically examine some of the urbanisms that fall under these categories. This establishes the rationale and justification for promoting Intercultural Urbanism as a body of theory and practice for city building today. Chapter 3 focuses on the Critical tradition of discourse in urban studies. It distinguishes Planetary and Provincial strands of theorizing about the city. I look at how anthropology and the sciences of human nature can strengthen these critical approaches. The chapter explores what we know about common, cross-cultural preferences for particular kinds of natural and built environments that have been produced by humankind’s shared evolutionary history. The discussion

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is motivated by the belief that theories of intercultural planning and design are placed on a stronger foundation if we can identify a substrate of human preferences and predispositions that are good for all times and places (see also Mandanipour 2014:252–253). Chapter 4 is the centerpiece of the book. It describes what we know from archaeology about city building in the ancient world. It is based on the premise that archaeological knowledge can and should make important contributions to urban anthropology and urban studies (Yoffee 2009; M.E. Smith 2010b; 2012). As noted above, we have only started to explore what knowledge of ancient urbanism can offer to contemporary practices of urban planning, design, and architecture. The sample of case material presented in Chapter 4 is necessarily selective. However, it is representative of the variation in built form and governance that archaeologists have empirically documented in the deep past. I have chosen cases for discussion that I believe have particular relevance for urbanism today. Chapter 5 identifies and evaluates some contemporary initiatives in urban placemaking that attempt to move in the directions advocated here: toward greater social inclusion, equity, and cosmopolitanism. I examine work supported by the Intercultural Cities Program in Europe, expressions of Social Urbanism in the Global South and Mexican–American Borderland, and recent applications of New Urbanism in my home city of Denver, Colorado. I identify good starts, promising directions, and alternative models for moving forward – some of which might benefit from an awareness of ancient planning values and practices. Chapter 6 summarizes what has been learned about Intercultural Urbanism – its operative forms and principles – from anthropological, evolutionary, and archaeological sources. I offer some takeaway lessons that speak to contemporary placemaking challenges, and that might be useful as a framework for generating new urban imaginaries and approaches to planning theory and practice.

2 | CO N T E M P O R A RY U R B A N I S M S : A C R I T I C A L CO N C E P T UA L A N A LY S I S

This book advocates for an urbanism that is cross-cultural and deeptime in inspiration and conception. It is one of many urbanisms competing for the hearts and minds of planners and policymakers today. An extraordinary large number, in fact. Urban studies scholarship is awash in a sea of urbanisms that promise progressive approaches to the planning, design, and governance of cities. We routinely hear about New Urbanism, Everyday Urbanism, Post Urbanism, Tactical Urbanism, Informal Urbanism, Smart Urbanism, and many others. Artibise (2010) describes an urbanism for every letter of the alphabet, and lists over 100 in his small book’s appendix. Barnett (2011) counts sixty, but he could have added more. At the more conservative end of the scale, Haas and Olsson (2014) use five in their analysis of public space, including New Urbanism, Post Urbanism, Green Urbanism, Re-Urbanism, and Everyday Urbanism. They see these as the ‘dominant ideals’ in today’s international practice and design discourse. Mandanipour (2014) describes a set of six – Connective, Regenerative, Inclusive, Ecological, Democratic, and Meaningful – in the context of advocating an ‘Open Urbanism’ that incorporates all of the others. Because of this proliferation, the concept of urbanism has, for some commentators, lost all meaning. Benfield (2012) offers a typical criticism: [Urbanism] has taken on the air of a cult, providing a verbal badge of identification. The word carries an assumption not just that adherents love and promote cities but also subscribe to a growing code of written and unwritten precepts and rules about how our built environment should be organized – starting but not ending with density, gridded streets, mixed uses, priority to pedestrians rather than drivers, and so on . . . Just as the principles of smart growth have gotten stale, so have the overlapping principles of urbanism. Overly familiar vocabulary can lead to overly familiar thinking.

contemporary urbanisms | 15 But perhaps an even bigger problem with ‘urbanism’ is that the word is ridiculously overused . . . It comes in a bewildering variety of forms – old, new, sustainable, tactical, landscape, pop-up, accidental, adaptive, emergent, Latino, recombinant, magical, integral, green, military, ‘true’, everyday, postmodern, guerilla, mobile, even an oxymoronic ‘agrarian’ strain, and more. Various versions of the label are used to justify everything from illegally spray-painting public property to development in places that no sensible person would honestly consider ‘urban’ unless they have drunk gallons of metaphorical Kool-Aid. I could define urbanism in my own way and probably be perfectly comfortable with the result. But communication is about using words in ways that are not just personal but understood in common, and this one has now splattered all over the map, including in ways that I find troubling.

I appreciate aspects of Benfield’s arguments. I agree that vocabulary is important and that we need to be precise and vigilant in our use of words. I also agree that intersubjective agreement about the meaning of words has value given that city building is a collective undertaking. Not all urbanisms have the same amount of gravitas. Some are clearly tongue-in-cheek provocations. But Benfield pushes things a little too far. His complaint appears to be with a particular kind of urbanism; i.e., New Urbanism. The word urbanism itself does not imply a single ideology or set of principles for city building. Indeed, I find the many versions of urbanism that Benfield identifies above to be quite meaningful and useful for assisting in theory building about the city. They have different emphases, features, merits, aspirations, intended outcomes, liabilities, and blind spots. They alert us to different causal powers and processes that shape the city. They implicate different structural barriers to change and improvement. In short, they vex us in useful ways. With Kim (2014), I believe that comparison of the many urbanisms competing for influence today is a spur to learning. It engenders productive discussion and debate about what is important in city building. Comparing urbanisms allows us to critically evaluate the underlying epistemologies, theories, ideologies, and practical consequences of different approaches to urban planning and design. Comparison forces the refinement and sharpening of ideas and

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concepts. Comparison has the potential to produce new ways of imagining and thinking about the city; i.e., new and potentially revolutionary urbanisms. In this chapter I position Intercultural Urbanism in relation to its major competitors. I first describe two broad Urban Age discourses, the Triumphal and the Critical. One measure of the urbanisms that exist today is the extent to which they embrace, or reject, the values of these broad discourses. Next, I describe one productive approach to comparing and contrasting different urbanisms offered by Douglas Kelbaugh. Then, I argue that culture and cultural difference is under-appreciated and under-theorized in the urbanisms considered by Kelbaugh, as well as others. Finally, I summarize the basic commitments of an alternative intercultural approach that puts human diversity center stage in the urban planning and design conversation. Urban Age Discourses: Triumphal and Critical

The Triumphal discourse sees the city as humankind’s salvation. It is the discourse that dominates popular commentary. Contributions span a continuum ranging from ‘celebrity’ to ‘scientific’ urbanology (I borrow the term urbanology from Steward 1961; see also Gleeson 2013). Edward Glaeser’s (2011) Triumph of the City is the archetype for the former; Luis Bettencourt and Geoffrey West’s (2010) ‘A Unified Theory of Urban Living’ is the archetype for the latter. The city is celebrated as a locus of innovation, an engine of economic growth, and an arena for social progress (Verrest and Pfeffer 2018:1328). Empirical study promises predictable, law-like, transhistorical understandings of the processes by which cities grow and change. Such codifiable principles are required if useful urban theory is to be generated (Storper and Scott 2016). It is hoped that such knowledge will create greater efficiencies in the way that cities are developed. Triumphal discourses are united by an optimism or ‘general air of brightness’ (Gleeson 2012:939; 2013) about the urban future. In this respect they are heirs to the mid-twentieth-century modernist movement in architecture and planning pioneered by Le Corbusier (1933) and embodied by the Athens Charter of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM). The other discourse is the Critical. Its advocates are a bit more alarmist about our current urban condition. They eschew the universalizing ambitions of scientific urbanology. In fact, they regard

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the scientific approach to planning as part of the problem, to the extent that it can lack a critical social edge; i.e., an awareness of the larger social consequences of planning and design. Critical urbanologists focus on the political and economic (class) structures that generate privatization, marginalization, exclusion, and inequality. These marginalizations and exclusions are spatially inscribed and naturalized within the built environment (Brenner et al. 2012:5). Critical urbanologists urge us to rethink theory and epistemology: the categories, methods, and geographies through which urban life is understood (Brenner and Schmid 2015). The goal of Critical urbanology is emancipatory as well as explanatory (Brenner 2009; 2019:43). Critical urbanologists imagine possibilities for alternative forms of urbanism that serve the cause of social justice and environmental sustainability. Douglas Kelbaugh on Three Urbanisms

In multiple essays over the last twenty years Douglas Kelbaugh has compared the merits and liabilities of various urbanisms (Kelbaugh 2000; 2001; 2007; 2014). He specifically targets the three paradigms of New Urbanism, Everyday Urbanism, and Post Urbanism. These are among the ‘five dominant ideals’ that Haas and Olsson (2014:63) suggest stand out in international practice and academic design discourse. Fraker (2007) likewise counts New and Everyday Urbanism among six ‘force fields’ with enough coherence to warrant scholarly and professional attention. New Urbanism is the most well-known and widely practiced of the three urbanisms. It is pre-eminent in the USA among city planners and politicians, and constitutes the default setting for urban regeneration. New Urbanism fits securely in the Triumphal camp to the extent that it articulates a singular vision of the urban as a totality, and promotes a unified theory of design (Kelbaugh 1997). Both are captured by the Congress for the New Urbanism Charter (2000). The commitment in New Urbanism is to design compact, mixed-use, transit-friendly, and walkable cities. New Urbanism seeks to cultivate ‘community’ in urban design via investments in public space and town centers. It is also distinctive in emphasizing a very particular neo-traditional aesthetic (sometimes described as ‘pitched roof and picket fence’) that has proven its appeal to a broad swath of the American population, especially the middle class. New Urbanists

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are honest in admitting that they seek to connect with this particular demographic (Duany 2011). In contrast to New Urbanism, Everyday Urbanism (e.g., Chase et al. 2008) eschews a unifying planning and design aesthetic. In so doing, it exemplifies a more critical take on the urban condition. It is more cognizant than most urbanisms of the manifold cultural differences that citizens bring to placemaking. It is keen to let differences in built form and the use of space proliferate in keeping with different cultural backgrounds and interests; i.e., in keeping with local, vernacular culture. It celebrates spontaneity in placemaking and, famously, the design elements of ephemerality, cacophony, multiplicity, and simultaneity (Kaliski 2008:102). Post Urbanism is Kelbaugh’s term for the work of urban designers and today’s star architects like Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, the late Zaha Hadid, and others. Post Urbanism can be viewed as a critique of the Triumphal and Critical discourses. Like Everyday Urbanism, Post Urbanism eschews formal design orthodoxies and principles. However, there is a shared commitment to experiment with new designs that make bold, dramatic statements within the urban fabric. These forms occupy a continuum from broken, fractal designs to sweeping arcs and curves. In contrast to New Urbanism’s traditional forms and Everyday Urbanism’s vernacular forms, Post Urbanism’s forms are sensational, and clearly designed to ‘wow’. To this extent, they lend themselves to city branding (Klingmann 2007). Kelbaugh suggests that Post Urbanism succeeds best where there is a wealthy, sophisticated consumer citizenry to support it. Kelbaugh is admirably even-handed in identifying the pros and cons of these planning and design paradigms. He likes the aesthetic unity of New Urbanism but worries about its normativity and nostalgia; i.e., the way it romanticizes a particular past. He appreciates the populism of Everyday Urbanism but is troubled by the absence of a larger, unifying design aesthetic. Everyday Urbanism risks placemaking ‘by default rather than by design’. Kelbaugh is excited by Post Urbanism’s experimentalism (it eyes the future while New Urbanism mythologizes the past and Everyday Urbanism privileges the prosaic present), but worries about its tendency to produce buildings that out-scale humans and disconnect from their surroundings. At the same time, Kelbaugh recognizes that each urbanism can have its virtues depending on geo-historical context. He suggests that

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Everyday Urbanism is the best choice for squatter cities of the Global South where immigrants and refugees struggle to create for themselves an urban identity and niche. On the other hand, Post Urbanism is the best choice for European cities where a radically new building can offer welcome relief in a mature, high-density urban fabric. New Urbanism offers the best hope for the typical American city that lacks density but has the economic capacity to achieve coherence. It represents a ‘middle road’ that is less glamorous than Post Urbanism but more ambitious than Everyday Urbanism. Kelbaugh’s approach is a useful one for guiding analysis of the many urbanisms or modes of urban design thinking (Fraker 2007) that surround us. One analytical dimension that Kelbaugh does not fully pursue is implicated by his use of the term ‘paradigm’ to describe these different approaches to urbanism. This dimension is the epistemological one: the understanding of professional design knowledge that underpins each approach. New Urbanism can be described as broadly positivist to the extent that it is informed by a codified set of ideals and principles, accumulated over time and experience, about what urbanism should look like in order to best serve the interests of human community. New Urbanists are supremely confident about the ability of their principles to produce the good city. Their can-do attitude is akin to that possessed by the mid-twentieth-century modernists who believed that a rational, universalistic approach to urban planning and architectural form would deliver social progress (Grant 2006b; Beauregard 2002; Vanderbeek and Irazábal 2007). New Urbanists also trust that alternative approaches are commensurable and that different ideas can be assimilated into a single, coherent, ascendant vision of urbanism; namely, New Urbanism (e.g., Mehaffy 2012). Post Urbanism is broadly relativist, dedicated to exploring brand new forms of architectural and design knowledge. The attitude is ‘anything goes’, which is perhaps most apparent in the famous architectural forms of Gehry and Libeskind that have been widely praised for their novelty, elegance, and ability to promote vigorous discussion and debate among professionals and citizens alike. Finally, Everyday Urbanism is broadly pragmatist. It respects different, culturally specific ideas about city building and arguably is more concerned than the others about the consequences of design acts for everyday life, for how people live.

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Kelbaugh (2000) hints at these epistemological orientations where he suggests that New Urbanists see themselves as urban design ‘experts’, Post Urbanists fancy themselves as ‘lone geniuses’, and Everyday Urbanists engage with community members as ‘co-participants’ in the design conversation. New Urbanism’s Cultural Theory Deficit

As noted, Kelbaugh’s approach is a useful way to grasp how different urbanisms approach the task of urban planning and design. Below, I build on his critique to examine how cultural diversity, as an increasingly salient factor in urban life, is theorized by different urbanisms. I show how the most popular urbanisms in play today are differentially sensitive to the difference made by culture in how people understand and cope with the built spaces of the city. The analysis demonstrates a cultural diversity deficit in our thinking about how to plan and design urban places. I begin with New Urbanism because of its preferred status and explicit commitment to sustaining cultural, historical, and ethnic diversity. This is highlighted in the very first sentence of its governing Charter: The Congress for the New Urbanism views disinvestment in central cities, the spread of placeless sprawl, increasing separation by race and income, environmental deterioration, loss of agricultural lands and wilderness, and the erosion of society’s built heritage as one interrelated community-building challenge.

Later, the Charter asserts: Within neighborhoods, a broad range of housing types and price levels can bring people of diverse ages, races, and incomes into daily interaction, strengthening the personal and civic bonds essential to an authentic community.

Advocates of New Urbanism routinely spice their essays and manifestos with talk about culture and an awareness that culture matters. For example, Michael Mehaffy (2012) alludes to the culture-bound nature of contemporary design models and the need for a ‘broad cultural assessment’ of how architects and designers approach their

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practice. But what, specifically, does this mean? What does culturally sensitive New Urbanist work look like? Might it stipulate the need for greater architectural and planning diversity than New Urbanism has heretofore been comfortable with? Might it mean making peace with automobile culture and parking lots if, as Kimmelman (2012) suggests, the latter can usefully function as city commons or public squares (as well as hard plazas where diverse entrepreneurs might gain some economic independence through their participation in informal ‘bazaar’ economies)? Might it involve abandoning some of the other foundational principles that have guided New Urbanist work over the last twenty years? A longstanding scholarly criticism of New Urbanism is that it is homogenous and monocultural in concept and execution, its expressed commitment to diversity notwithstanding (Marcuse 2000; Day 2003; Cruz and Forman 2015). Another is that it uses the rhetoric and image of ‘community’ without understanding how the concept is often conflated with dominant political and economic interests, thereby impeding progressive urban change. David Harvey’s classic statement is worth quoting at length: Community has always meant different things to different people . . . the idea attracts, drawing support from marginalized ethnic groups, impoverished and embattled working-class populations . . . as well as from middle- and upper-class nostalgics who view it as a civilized form of real estate development encompassing sidewalk cafés, pedestrian precincts, and Laura Ashley shops. The darker side of this communitarianism remains unstated: from the very earliest phases of massive urbanization through industrialization, ‘the spirit of community’ has been held as an antidote to any threat of social disorder, class war, and revolutionary violence. ‘Community’ has ever been one of the key sites of social control and surveillance, bordering on overt social repression. Well-founded communities often exclude, define themselves against others, erect all sorts of keep-out signs (if not tangible walls) . . . ‘Racism, ethnic chauvinism, and class devaluation . . . grow partly from the desire for community’ such that ‘the positive identification of some groups is often achieved by first defining other groups as the other, the devalued semihuman’. As a consequence, community has often been a barrier

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to rather than facilitator of progressive social change . . . All those things that make cities so exciting – the unexpected, the conflicts, the excitement of exploring the urban unknown – will be tightly controlled and screened out with big signs that say ‘no deviant behavior acceptable here’. (Harvey 1997:3)

A substantial literature now exists that analyzes New Urbanism’s success in producing diverse neighborhoods (Talen 1999; Cabrera and Najarian 2013; Trudeau and Kaplan 2016; see also Chapter 5). The record is quite mixed. On balance, advocates and critics alike suggest that in order to be more successful New Urbanism requires some changes in how it thinks about the nature, sources, and histories of cultural difference. Jill Grant (2006a) explicitly takes up the critique of culture in New Urbanism from a perspective informed by anthropology. She notes (Grant 2006a:13) that ‘while the anthropologist sees culture as carried in the ideas, practices, and artifacts of ordinary people, the new urbanist defines Culture as the ideas, practices, and artifacts of the elite (often of an earlier era)’. There is much truth in Grant’s analysis. For me, New Urbanism’s problems with culture were thrown into particularly high relief by an event at the twentieth annual Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU 20) held in West Palm Beach, Florida in 2012. The Congress featured a debate between Daniel Solomon and Andres Duany, two high-profile contributors to New Urbanist theory and practice. Discussion focused on the New Urbanist ‘SmartCode’: a unified, form-based (as opposed to a strictly use-based or zoning-based) land development template for achieving New Urbanist goals of mixing uses, promoting walkability, and minimizing sprawl. Solomon is an erudite critic of codes. He argued that the ‘reductive certitude’ of codes can easily produce ‘stylistic straightjackets’ and ‘architectural righthink’ that preclude the production of built forms that are compatible with local context, history, and cultural meanings and, by implication, work against the accommodation of cultural diversity. Duany essentially countered by arguing that while we cannot always live with codes, neither can we live without them. He extolled the benefits of having practice governed by known rules rather than the varying opinions of committees and bureaucrats. He insisted that the SmartCode allows freedom to calibrate plans in ways that serve

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the local and the contextual; they are open to calibration and customization. The SmartCode allows multiple ways to ‘escape’ when confronted with cultural difference. The problem lies not with codes, but with the vision (or lack thereof) of practitioners. Apropos the code’s relevance to culture, Daniel Solomon’s CNU 20 speech articulated some themes that are subsequently published in his book Housing and the City (Solomon 2018). Solomon occupies common ground with Critical urbanists in faulting grand, abstract systems of theory as frameworks for understanding and intervening in the world. Indeed, Solomon makes good use of the anthropologist James Scott’s (1998) criticism of ‘universalizing prescriptions’ of the sort that produced, in Scott’s view, the coherently planned but socially alienating modernist capital of Brasilia. He also channeled the great interpretive anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973) in calling for greater attention to the particular details of place and history, local frameworks of meaning, and the need to replace great abstractions of urban planning with a ‘feel for the subject’. The following passage from Solomon in his CNU 20 speech and recent book is especially nice in capturing this ethos: If New Urbanists care about sustainability, the sustainability of urban culture should be our first order of business. The way they cook stews and make music in New Orleans, the way they dance in Havana, the way they dress in Milano, the way they use language in London, the way they look cool in Tokyo, the way they wisecrack in New York. Those are things for us to care about. (Solomon 2018:177)

Solomon followed up by noting that his design work cannot be straightforwardly reproduced just anywhere. Rather, one needs to be inspired by a particular place and a particular history. This is all good stuff. However, there is still some reductive generalizing at work here, what I would describe as a normative anthropology. For example, who is the ‘they’ in the excerpt above? Certainly, ‘they’, in Solomon’s usage, does not include everyone who contributes to the dynamic of ‘urban culture’ in particular times and places. The makers of cities are diverse people, carrying diverse cultures. Like Solomon’s, Duany’s talk at CNU 20 demonstrated an awareness of the importance of incorporating local culture into the practice of placemaking. It revived some themes that Duany had published

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earlier in an essay about restoring New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina (Duany 2009). For Duany, accomplishing the rebuild required comprehending culture as well as producing the right physical structures. Duany was struck by how the culture of New Orleans was sustained, at least in part, by the low cost of housing. This liberated people of very modest means, mostly African American and Cajun, from debt. Families lived in communities without the constant pressure of mortgage payments, and people did not have to work frantically to subsist. In Duany’s words, There was time to create the fabulously complex Creole dishes that simmer forever; there was time to rehearse music, to play it live rather than from recordings, and time to listen to it. There was time to make costumes and to parade; there was time to party and to tell stories; there was time to spend all day marking the passing of friends . . . With a little work, a little help from the government, and a little help from family and friends – life could be good! This is a typically Caribbean social contract: not one to be dismissed as laziness or poverty, but as a way of life. (Duany 2009)

Duany’s observations about New Orleans during his post-Katrina work in the city certainly reflect a feel for the subject. But in his CNU 20 speech Duany rhapsodized about culture in a very different way that contradicts such a nuanced appreciation and is troubling for its reductionism, in this case a typological anthropology: There are two ways of being . . . a kind of Northern European way in which discipline allows the accumulation of wealth. I suppose this has to do with the harvesting of wheat for the winter. But in the South, where there’s always a mango available – at close reach – the ideal is to accumulate leisure.

Such broad distinctions are jarring and disturbing, even if only used as descriptive conveniences. They do not respect the many details of local culture and history that shape different ‘ways of being’. This comment echoes one that Duany made in 2001, in a piece defending gentrification as an antidote to the ‘monoculture’ of poverty that he saw afflicting many an American city (Duany 2001; for a response see Gonzalez and Lejano 2009). Such distinctions and conceptions lend themselves far too easily to even more unsavory

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uses. For example, Duany’s wheat/mango comment reminded me of some notorious practitioners of race-based evolutionary science (e.g., Lynn 1991) who regard Southern peoples as intellectually and culturally inferior to those of the North because of what they take to be the differing cognitive demands of food-getting in Northern and Southern environments. In other words, wheat farming produces intelligence whereas mango collecting encourages sloth. Parallels to this work exist in political science, where distinctions are sometimes drawn between ‘progressive’ and ‘static’ cultures (e.g., contributors to Harrison and Huntington 2000). Such simplistic concepts of culture date back to the nineteenth century and are widely discredited ideas within anthropology. But they still exist at society’s (and the academy’s) margins and can easily move into the mainstream depending on political and economic conditions. They can be deployed by dominant groups to essentialize and exoticize subordinate groups, rendering them more distinctive than they really are. More often they are used to disparage and demonize. Minimally, they assist in holding different ethnicities in place as the ‘Other’ (Phillips 2007). Duany is persuasive in arguing that there is no necessary contradiction between coding for conditions and ‘calibrating’ for culture. But I would add that any vision must reflect a nuanced and consistent understanding of culture and culture history. The extent to which such an understanding is evident in other urbanisms is the subject of the next section. Cultural Theory in Other Urbanisms

The previous section established that New Urbanism can suffer from under-theorized concepts of culture and culture history. This complicates efforts to design for diversity, thereby compounding social equity deficits (Agyeman 2013). Other urbanisms exhibit similar deficiencies. In his most recent contribution to the urbanisms debate Kelbaugh (2014) analyzes Landscape Urbanism (Waldheim 2006). He describes it as being like New Urbanism in some fundamental ways: a triumphal, universalizing discourse that rejects . . . the academy’s endless critiques of society’s flaws in favor of more ‘projective’, proactive theory and performative practice. Both eschew the nihilism, subjective relativism, and critical project of the late 20th century. (Kelbaugh 2014:6)

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Theoretically and practically, Landscape Urbanism moves nature to center place. Cities are seen to be parts of dynamic ecosystems. An obvious policy prescription is that planners should maximize the amount of nature in the city. Thus, Landscape Urbanism is strong on the landscape part. However, Kelbaugh sees Landscape Urbanism as weaker on the ‘urbanism’ part (see also Locke et al. 2019). He suggests that ‘Landscape Urbanism’s large open spaces promote ecological diversity, but its less granular urbanism is not as likely to induce socio-economic mixing’. As I will discuss in Chapter 3, even the landscape part can be problematic, and compound problems with the urbanism part, to the extent that ethnic groups can value and engage with their natural surroundings very differently as a function of history and socialization (Payne 2009). Then there is the latest version of New Urbanism – what founder Andres Duany calls Agrarian Urbanism (Duany and DPZ 2011). Agrarian Urbanism is keen to address problems of urban sustainability by incorporating various forms of food production into the New Urban fabric. These include, among other things, medium-sized farms (a substitute for golf course fairways) and community gardens (a substitute for front yards). But while Duany is explicit in distinguishing Agrarian Urbanism by highlighting its emphasis on food production as a societal commitment, there are some pitfalls. The most important being that society is not equivalent to culture. Choices around food – what is grown, how it is harvested and prepared, how and where it is consumed, its symbolic meaning, and so on – are choices central to how a culture defines itself. It is also striking that in early formulations of Agrarian Urbanism cultural diversity appeared only in the form of Hispanic laborers called upon to do the dirty work associated with the more labor-intensive forms of urban farming, albeit in the context of ‘a closer relationship with their employers’ (J. King 2010). Mike Soron (2011) notes that Agrarian Urbanism risks ‘repurposing an economic underclass from ornamental landscaping and golf course maintenance to productive cultivation’. Greg Lindsay (2010) suggests that if Agrarian Urbanism sticks with New Urbanist town planning and architectural principles this repurposing is likely to take place in a built setting strongly redolent of pre-1850s small-town – i.e., Anglo – America. In short, Agrarian Urbanism as currently formulated risks producing a ‘New Feudalism’ driven by a particularly narrow and potentially highly exclusive set of cultural expectations and prescriptions.

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Other urbanisms are vulnerable to the same critique. They include the great triumvirate of Smart, Creative, and Sustainable urbanisms that Goonewardena (2018) identifies as the most popular of the day. Smart Urbanism (a term that, as used here, subsumes the ‘Smart Cities’ literature) emphasizes developing transportation and information and communication technologies (ICTs) across urban areas to boost innovation, service provision, and citizen empowerment (Kasper et al. 2017). Cities are seen to be technical entities (Kitchin 2016). The movement embraces the famous Chicago School of Urban Sociology’s belief that technological development is a good thing (Konvitz et al. 1990). Smart Urbanism is powered by a broadly positivist epistemology, and instrumentalist logic. It exudes a ‘utopian confidence’ (Krieger 2019:11) that fits nicely within the Triumphal discourse. Smart Urbanism’s vision of how to solve today’s problems can be compelling and seductive, promising a green, secure city that is technically advanced, well-serviced, and administratively efficient. There is a vast literature about Smart Urbanism that is both celebratory and critical. To the extent that discussion of ‘smartness’ is rooted in the discourse of New Urbanism and Smart Growth (Vanolo 2014) we should expect Smart Urbanism to have culture theory issues akin to the ones associated with those approaches. Like Landscape Urbanism, there is too little consideration of the ‘urbanism’ part of Smart Urbanism, meaning its socio-relational and cultural qualities (Luque-Ayala and Marvin 2015; Kitchin 2016; Verrest and Pfeffer 2018; Allam and Newman 2018). Smart Urbanism ignores the well-documented historical fact that cities have never been uniform artifacts built according to a homogenous vision of urban development (Cugurullo 2018:77). It raises the specter of a splintered landscape socially divided between those with access to smart technology and governance structures, and those without (Anttiroiko 2013; Hollands 2016). In other words, Smart Urbanism can portend social and cultural gating and ghettoization by other means, contributing to the ‘racialization of space and spatialization of poverty’ (Safransky 2019). Ellard (2015) pursues this line of critique most compellingly. He warns that Smart Urbanism misses some especially important historical lessons taught by cities like Brasilia and 1960s public housing high-rises like St. Louis’ infamous Pruitt–Igoe, among thousands of other modernist housing towers (see also McFarlane and Söderström 2017). These modernist projects, predicated on machine metaphors

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and technocratic conceptions of city life, fulfilled criteria of scientific rationality, functionality, and efficiency. The high-rise towers were almost certainly appreciated by their low-income occupants at the time of move-in; viewed by some as ‘penthouses for the poor’ (Friedrichs 2011). However, ultimately they failed to meet the everyday needs of residents as a function of both institutional failures (Bristol 1991) and design flaws (Saitta 2011). The towers, and the spaces between them, became soulless, dispiriting, and dangerous places. Tactical Urbanism experiments with temporary, short-term projects that reclaim streets and parking lots for public use (Lydon et al. 2011; 2012). Its largely unsanctioned interventions include turning parking spaces into green ‘parklets’, painting bike lanes on streets, planting gardens in unauthorized places (‘guerilla gardening’), and adding seats to sidewalks (‘chair bombing’). Some of these interventions are frivolous and self-indulgent. But Tactical Urbanism has its virtues. In many cases tactical interventions are responses to neoliberal policies that promote privatization and exclusion. The interventions attract attention and spark the imagination. And where imagination is sparked, permanent changes that enhance inclusion and livability can follow. But, like other urbanisms, there is a class and culture bias in the movement. Tactical Urbanism is still promoted by middle-class actors having the time, inclination, and means to experiment. Douglas (2014:17) identifies a ‘strong sense of selfentitlement’ at the core of the movement. To the extent that Tactical Urbanism relies on the passions and preferences of a single or small group of individuals it can be implemented without regard to larger community desires (Duarte 2016), and divert from bigger issues like affordable housing, transportation equity, and access to healthy food and green space. Oli Mould (2014) evaluates Tactical Urbanism in a way that also addresses Creative Urbanism. Creative Urbanism originated with Richard Florida’s (2002) well-known, widely adopted strategy that attracting ‘cultural creatives’ (knowledge workers, artists, startup entrepreneurs) to the city will help remedy problems of social inequality and spatial segregation. Douglas (2014) notes that most tactical or DIY (do-it-yourself) urbanists also qualify as cultural creatives. Critiques by Peck (2005) and Krätke (2012) note that creative class strategies have not always had the desired effects. Florida himself has turned admirably self-critical about the limitations of creative

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class theory. Not only do issues of inequality and segregation remain, but the migrations of cultural creatives has actually created a deep divide between a small number of superstar cities and a large number of others (Florida 2017). Mould sees Tactical Urbanism as the ‘new vernacular’ of the Creative City. In both, the drivers of change are urban professionals having disposable income. Consequently, urban interventions made with the intent of boosting creative culture can too often reproduce the divide between amenity-rich and amenitypoor neighborhoods, deepen and legitimize economic inequality, and accelerate gentrification (Kohn 2016:176). Roberto Bedoya (2013; 2014) also detects in many creative placemaking strategies a blindness to the social and racial injustices at work in society. He challenges placemakers to become more aware of ‘the politics of belonging and dis-belonging’, noting that ‘before there is the vibrant street one needs an understanding of the social dynamics of that street’. Interestingly, Bedoya suggests a parallel focus on placekeeping: the preservation of existing places and physical structures along with their associated memories, stories, and people. Neeraj Mehta (2012) has also addressed this concern, asking: For whom are we trying to create benefit when implementing our creative placemaking strategies? . . . Which people do we want to gather, visit, and live in vibrant places? Is it just some people? Is it already well-off people? Is it traditionally excluded people? Is it poor people? New people? People of color? . . . We need to create an explicit pro-equity agenda to our creative placemaking efforts, be explicit about who benefits from the beginning, put it in our logical models and include it in our measurement.

In short, Tactical and Creative urbanisms, like the others, offer a vision of what is possible. But they do not significantly challenge today’s dominant neoliberal approach to urban development and sometimes can bolster it (Brenner 2017b). They offer whiffs of resistance, but are unlikely to remedy the most compelling structural problems around urban social and spatial inequality. They can easily and unwittingly reproduce what George Lipsitz (2011) describes as the ‘white spatial imaginary’, a worldview steeped in privatization, consumerism, and implicit racial superiority that serves the political, aesthetic, and placemaking interests of middle-class white urbanites

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(Zitcer and Almanzar 2019). Tactical Urbanism and other forms of experimental placemaking simply cannot address the systemic, structural conditions that produce inequalities in access to the public realm and the differential involvement of cultures and classes in the enterprise of city building. The approach is no substitute for a more substantive focus on questions around affordable housing, public education, and poverty. Finally, Sustainable Urbanism is an urbanism that aims at ‘intergenerational preservation of environmental resources and quality’ (Kasper et al. 2017). Its advocates are attentive to issues of social equity (in keeping with sustainability theory’s well-known ‘three legged stool’ of environmental, economic, and social aspects), but in practice sustainable development agendas largely serve middle-toupper-income populations at the expense of lower-income people of color, immigrants, and refugees. Even well-intentioned interventions to promote sustainable urbanism can have unintended consequences unless one is aware of cultural differences in placemaking. Julian Agyeman (2013) considers the issues especially comprehensively in his book Just Sustainabilities. Agyeman speaks of sustainability in the plural because he believes – reasonably so – that there can be no universal prescription for sustainable urban practice. Rather, policy and planning must be tuned to the increasing ethnic and class diversity of urban areas, or what Sandercock (2003) and others have called ‘cities of difference’. Agyeman usefully considers both the physical and symbolic character of the urban built environment. The ‘complete streets’ and ‘transit oriented development’ agendas spawned by New Urbanism are rooted in middle-class visions, values, and narratives. They can signal something very different to people of color, immigrants, refugees, and other urban underclasses. Newly established bike lanes and pedestrian zones, such as those promoted by Tactical Urbanists, can breed resentment when biking and walking – historically the primary transportation options for low-income people – become fashionable for people of greater means. Their appearance can increase anxiety because they often portend gentrification and displacement. The specter of social exclusion is also raised by New Urbanist infill developments designed to pedestrianize streets by concealing or eliminating surface parking lots. This effectively eliminates spaces where informal bazaar economies can develop, economies that – by

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and large – benefit minority populations. Plus, sometimes the only way for spatially disadvantaged minority groups to reach shopping centers, parks, and other public amenities is to drive. Other celebrated sustainability initiatives are similarly problematic. Community gardens and urban farms can remind non-white citizens of the oppression their ancestors experienced under plantation and share-cropping systems (Guthman 2008; 2011; contributors to Alkon and Agyeman 2011). Sometimes all that is really desired by people living in ‘food deserts’ is a full service, affordable grocery store of the kind that is available to citizens living in food oases. They do not need or want to get their hands dirty tilling the soil. Urban parks and other public spaces can signal cultural and sub-cultural inclusivity or exclusivity depending on place names, signage, amenities, and whether adequate space is available for different kinds of outdoor activities. Even the quality of park vegetation is fraught with cultural meaning and significance. Agyeman (2014) notes how the replacement of non-native short rye grass with native long grass wildflower meadows in a Bristol, England park discouraged use by Asian and African-Caribbean people because it provoked what Agyeman describes as a ‘residual fear of snakes in long grass’. Thus, hewing too closely to a sustainability agenda that prioritizes native vegetation over ‘alien imports’ can work against cultural inclusion. Agyeman (2014) nicely describes how native–alien and other binaries (culture– nature, individual–society, us–other) are problematic holdovers from the ‘transcendental’ ecological sensibility received from an earlier era. Alternatively, an intercultural ecological sensibility that rejects prevailing binaries will better serve sustainability planning for an increasingly urban and cosmopolitan twenty-first-century world. To summarize, the urbanisms offered as the next best thing for city dwellers (New, Tactical, Smart, Creative, Sustainable) tend to ‘value particular exclusive groups, spaces, and forms of urban development, particularly around well-educated elites living in residential spaces and working in high-end service economies, including in particular science, technology, research, media, finances’ (McFarlane 2011b). In so doing, they can render – if only unconsciously – existing institutional arrangements and power structures more efficient and effective. Kelbaugh (2014:13) concludes that none of the urbanisms in his analysis is transformative enough to deal with ‘world-wide cultural, economic, and socio-political stresses’. He imagines a more

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‘holistic urbanism’ that, presumably, would give equal attention to, and better mix, the sociocultural and ecological diversities that exist in cities. So too does Federico Cugurullo (2018), who cheekily describes today’s experiments in smart and sustainable city building as ‘Frankenstein’ urbanisms that are destined to fail because they work on individual bits and do not comprehend the city in its entirety. The same can be said for Tactical and Creative urbanisms. But even holistic thinking is likely to be limited without more thoroughgoing attention to the difference that culture makes in how people relate to both natural and built environments Theoretical Commitments of Intercultural Urbanism

Instead of typological or normative views of culture, we need a partitive view such as that described by Sandercock in Chapter 1. Cultures are not seamless, organic wholes. Culture is not necessarily widely shared. Community is not equivalent to neighborhood. People have multiple cultural identities, and these identities can change with time, place, and circumstance. Urban theorists must take all of this on board. Practicing planners and designers must plumb cultural differences on the ground using multiple forms of outreach, including those that are decidedly old-fashioned and low-tech (e.g., participant observations and interviews) in order to bridge any existing digital or social divides. Contributors to Everyday Urbanism (Chase et al. 2008) push in this direction and, in so doing, offer an approach that converges with Intercultural Urbanism. Both approaches hew to a pragmatist epistemology and ethos. Both see cultural difference to be the primary element and most salient fact of everyday urban life as recognized by Irazábal (2011). Both recognize the need to design or ‘script’ spaces in ways that serve diverse urban cultures and subcultures, and respect their histories and memories. The epistemological test of a pragmatic everyday or intercultural urbanist script is not whether it successfully reclaims a better era of city building (New Urbanism) or reaches new levels of ‘wow’ (Post Urbanism), but whether it succeeds in weaving together cultural differences in making and using space. How can this weaving be accomplished? Advocates of an everyday, intercultural approach are reluctant to articulate a particular design aesthetic. For good reason: we cannot design to or for diversity. Instead, as noted in Chapter 1, we must create design that

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enables diversity (Talen 2006) and permits its expression (Perrone 2011). This means providing spaces and architectures that can accommodate spontaneity, unpredictability, new opportunities, and unforeseen possibilities. These spaces and architectures must have some capacity for stability so that urban neighborhoods can stay diverse and resilient, immune to gentrifying and other homogenizing forces without becoming frozen in amber. A start would be to appreciate a distinction made by the Australian anthropologist Maree Pardy between the culturally diverse city as a site of display versus a site of dwelling (Pardy 2009). The former strategically uses cultural diversity as a branding strategy to show that the city is tolerant of cultural difference and to attract young, upwardly mobile, middle-class professionals. It trumpets diversity to create consumption opportunities and sell a lifestyle. This is all part of cosmopolitan image building. In describing diversity as display Pardy anticipated a problem addressed more completely by Miguel de Oliver (2016): cultural diversity is too often treated as a ‘middle class lifestyle amenity’ (a decorative feature or trope that serves gentrifiers) rather than a progressive, social justice ethic or ideal. Alternatively, dwelling is a serious attempt to build cities that people of different cultural backgrounds and class positions can actually inhabit and own within a right to the city paradigm. Pardy’s position is akin to that taken by Phil Wood and Charles Landry (2008) in their landmark book The Intercultural City. Following Brecknock (2006), Wood and Landry characterize the branding and display strategies evident in many British cities and other cities worldwide – e.g., ethnic-themed restaurants, combined kebab/curry/burger joints, shop signs, and other associated ‘cultural aesthetics’ – as superficial ‘cultural cross-dressing’. It poorly serves the project of intercultural placemaking even as it speaks to the resilience and adaptability of immigrant culture. Wood and Landry argue for resisting such superficial diversification efforts. Instead, they call for an increased cultural literacy among urban planners: ‘the ability to read, understand, and find the significance of diverse cultures and, as a consequence, to be able to evaluate, compare, and decode the varied cultures that are interwoven in a place’ (Wood and Landry 2008:250). Intercultural literacy is sensitive to differences in everyday practices and the implications of these practices for modifying the ‘basic building blocks of the city’. Included among these building blocks are street frontages,

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building heights, set-backs, pavement widths, turning circles, number and size of windows, sight lines, materials, color, light, and water. Wood and Landry’s concept of building blocks has some resemblance to Sennett’s concept of seed forms: both produce a list of interventions that can be combined in different ways to make for more open and inclusive urban places. Mohammad Qadeer (2009; 2015) takes a similarly nuanced view. For Qadeer, sensitivity to different cultural practices requires accom­ modations in housing, land use, transportation, and basic services. With respect to private and domestic space provisions should be made for large, multigenerational families (especially in subsidized housing), kosher kitchens, multiple kitchens, altars, particular orientations to space (e.g., towards Mecca), separations of space (e.g., for cultures with menstrual taboos), etc. With respect to public space provisions should be made for the different requirements of religious houses (e.g., their siting), sporting activities (the shape/size/quality of playing fields), community festivals (the size/quality of public gathering and parade/processional space), and various informal economies (markets, bazaars, street vendors, etc.). In Chapter 5 I add to this list by describing cross-cultural variation in water use requirements. Leonardo Vazquez (2009) describes a set of skills for ‘cultural competency’ in urban planning focused on the needs of ethnic minorities. This skill set includes awareness of the shared beliefs and behaviors that characterize different groups and knowing how to work collaboratively with minority citizens in culturally inclusive organizations and teams. Vazquez’s cultural competency has much in common with the ‘cultural literacy’ advocated by Wood and Landry. While Vazquez cogently describes a culturally competent approach to planning, he does not identify the specifics of plans that would serve a culturally diverse urban demographic. Fernando Pagés Ruiz (2009) begins to fill that gap. Playing off of the fundamental anthropological insight that space is culturally constituted, Ruiz describes some of the housing design features favored by immigrant groups that are not necessarily congruent with what is valued by mainstream planners, builders, and consumers. These include preferences for enclosed rather than open floor plans, segregated living rooms that allow men and women to socialize separately, more bedrooms rather than palatial master suites (for serving multigenerational households), cooking facilities in multiple locations like

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garages and back porches, and overall arrangements of space that reflect religious and spiritual commitments. The literature on multi- and inter-cultural planning provides other suggestions for theory and practice that can serve the inclusive city (Talen 2006; 2015). The best of this work understands that culturally sensitive planning can’t be developed from a single perspective or imposed from the top-down. Rather, it has to emerge from thoughtful consultation with community partners. The intercultural city is co-produced. Planning must not only accommodate cultural diversity in ways of living, it should also create better opportunities for spontaneous intercultural interaction, cross-fertilization, and hybridization. Flexible or adaptable public spaces allow people of diverse cultural backgrounds to ‘own’ the commons in different ways. The siting, design, and naming of everyday spaces of social interaction, like libraries, markets, community centers, and parks, should reflect local cultures and histories. As noted, even New Urbanism’s widely reviled surface parking lot has great potential as a public commons or hard plaza where informal bazaar economies with distinctly ethnic flavors can flourish. The overriding goal of these efforts is placemaking that is conducive to forms of spatial belonging that, in turn, create conditions for producing new attachments among citizens. Creating such attachments is certainly among the most urgent challenges for any twenty-first-century city that aspires to be socially equitable, inclusive, and sustainable. Environmental context and other variables will obviously rule out some forms of planning and building. There can also be strong convergences between cultural groups in terms of preferences for certain kinds and quality of housing, public space, and amenities. There are, after all, preferences and everyday practices that unite cultures rather than simply divide them. Chapter 3 dives a bit more deeply into this, from an evolutionary perspective. The point made by Qadeer (2009) and others is that up to now urban planning in most parts of the world has been reactive rather than proactive, and placemaking governed by a particular set of dominant culture values and norms. It is time to engage in more proactive cross-cultural planning in the United States given the impending demographic transition. In short, Qadeer is very persuasive in casting intercultural placemaking as less a distinct genre of planning than a pragmatic strategy of making reasonable accommodation for cultural minorities; i.e., a culturally sensitive or responsive practice.

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Summary

This chapter presented an array of urbanisms being discussed and debated today, and a way of comparing and critiquing them, courtesy of Douglas Kelbaugh. A critical analysis of New Urbanism discloses concepts of culture that are typological and normative. These concepts do not usefully serve planning and design for the open, inclusive, intercultural city. Understandings of culture in other urbanisms are similarly problematic. For an Intercultural Urbanism we need theories of culture that are partitive and sensitive to the nature, sources, and histories of cultural difference. Diversity must be framed as a social justice ethic rather than a lifestyle amenity. This chapter brought together some of the ideas percolating in urban studies that meet this need. In the next chapter I discuss some contributions that anthropology and the sciences of human nature can make to the project of intercultural city building.

3 | C U LT U R E A N D T H E C I T Y: E T H N O G R A P H I C A N D E VO LU T I O N A RY A P P R O AC H E S

This chapter explores how the critical discourse in urban studies and the imaginary of an Intercultural City can be enriched by an encounter with the distinctive knowledge and insights of anthropology and the sciences of human nature. Anthropology is the science of cultural differences and similarities – the latter often pitched as ‘universals’. Anthropology’s subject matter is culture as it is expressed across all time and all space, and the factors (environmental, historical) that shape it. Anthropology also subsumes three other subfields: ethnography (the study of cultural differences in contemporary societies), paleoanthropology (the study of human evolution), and archaeology (the study of cultural differences in the deep past). Thus, anthropology as a field is inherently holistic and comparative. My aim in this chapter is to establish a warrant for urban scholars and policymakers to consider the insights about human sociomateriality that anthropology has generated over its disciplinary history. In recent years there has been a movement in anthropology to make the discipline more relevant to contemporary issues. That is, to use our comparative understanding of lived experience across time and space to examine the possibilities for life going forward. In a sense, the field has recommitted itself to the original description of anthropology by the founding ancestor Edward Tylor as a ‘reformer’s science’ (Diamond 1964). Framed as Public Anthropology (Borofsky 2019), scholars are entering into policy conversations around issues such as homelessness, poverty, education, and development economics. Urban planning and design are other professional practices to which anthropology can speak. Given the demographic realities of contemporary urbanization the professions of urban planning, design, and architecture are well-advised to become cognizant of variation in the cultural form, aesthetics, and determinants of human settlement. In this chapter I break down the Critical Urban Age discourse into two theoretical strands: the Planetary and the Provincial. Then,

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I show how key works in urban anthropology have relevance for both. Finally, I suggest something that Critical urban studies and urban anthropology can both do better; that is, engage with work in the sciences of human nature. Evolutionary psychology and cognitive science, in conjunction with paleoanthropology, are illuminating cross-cultural commonalities, or at least some central tendencies, in preferences for particular kinds of landscapes and architectures. Such work offers a potentially deeper basis upon which to build an intercultural approach to urban planning and design. My claim is that an urbanism that is truly intercultural must appreciate the rootedness of human cognition in humankind’s shared evolutionary past. Critical Urban Discourse: The Planetary and the Provincial

In Chapter 2 I identified two prevailing discourses about the contemporary city: the Triumphal and the Critical. The Critical discourse contains two distinct theoretical strands that I call the Planetary and the Provincial. Both challenge the Triumphal discourse for its universalism and neglect of urban geographies that lie beyond the Global North and West (Roy 2009). Both strands argue for new modes of theory that are informed by the variation in urban life that exists in these other places. Planetary theory focuses on cities as elements of a global, historically evolving totality. It is inspired by Henri Lefebvre’s (2003 [1970]) provocative ‘complete urbanization of the world’ thesis. In the 1960s and 1970s Lefebvre suggested that there is an ‘urban fabric’ stretching over the entire globe. He saw this process as driven by the expansion of global capitalism, with agricultural as well as industrial production being absorbed by urban development. Lefebvre further suggested that the city can no longer be grasped as an object, a definable entity. There was no city; there was only ‘urban society’. Lefebvre predicted the privatization and homogenization of urban space, deepening social hierarchy, and the loss (in his word, the ‘annihilation’) of diversity (Lefebvre 2014). This account was impressively prescient, as much of what Lefebvre predicted has come to pass under neoliberal development agendas in the early twenty-first century. Brenner and Schmid (2015) recover these key insights of Lefebvre, framing them as a theory of ‘Planetary Urbanization’. The theory is not only intended to challenge Triumphal urbanisms, but also ‘methodological cityism’: the analytical privileging of settlement agglomeration to the exclusion of the non-city (Angelo and Wachsmuth 2015).

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Planetary Urbanization theorists argue that there has been too much historical emphasis on urban areas to the exclusion of non-urban areas. Non-urban landscapes are crucial for capitalist accumulation through large-scale industrial resource extraction, agroindustrial land use intensification and mechanization, and territorial enclosure (Brenner 2019:26). Planetarians argue that there can be no boundaries between the urban and the rural (see also Westlund 2014). They advocate for new ontologies, epistemologies, and categories of analysis that focus critical attention on the overriding ‘context of context’: global capitalism. On the other hand, Provincial theory objects to what it sees as Planetary Urbanization’s ‘totalizing’ impulses; to its ‘single unifying conception’ of the urban. Jennifer Robinson’s groundbreaking Ordinary Cities (2006) was the primary impetus to examining the diversity of cities and spaces left out by mainstream urban theories that have long privileged global cities of the West and North. Key elements of Provincial theory are synthesized by Sheppard and Leitner (2013) as a ‘manifesto’ for a different way of thinking (see also Leitner and Sheppard 2016; Parnell and Robinson 2012). Provincialists call for epistemic pluralism. They suggest that there can be no single urban theory good for all times and places. Instead, they advocate for appreciating each city in its particular historical and spatial context, and the multiple causes of urban lived experience. Provincial theory is especially concerned about Planetary Urbani­ zation’s rejection of the city as a distinct object of study. Alternatively, its advocates argue for preserving the city as a category of analysis. Davidson and Iveson (2015) make the important point that something called ‘the city’ is what people experience on the ground, in their everyday lives. Moreover, it is hard to imagine a right to the city if the city no longer exists. The city is still salient as site of practice (Wachsmuth 2014); it has both practical and political significance (Barnett and Parnell 2016). Thus, it is unwise to abandon the concept of the city, at least not until we come to fully understand urban formations that have fallen outside the scope of mainstream Northern and Western theorizing. A number of useful critical reviews and commentaries about the Planetary and the Provincial capture the strengths and weaknesses of each approach, and the give-and-take between them (Storper and Scott 2016; Rickards et al. 2016; Barnett and Bridge 2016). The most

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compelling of these interventions argue for bringing the theories together via a strategy of ‘engaged pluralism’ (Barnes and Sheppard 2010). This means putting them into conversation with each other, and working between them. It is reasonably argued that there are no irreconcilable differences between these theoretical positions. Rather, they operate at different scales of analysis (Derickson 2015; Leitner and Shepard 2016; Loftus 2018; Oswin 2018; Goonewardena 2018). Any new urban imaginary and theory must appreciate the planetary nature of urbanization while still respecting the importance of local urban configurations (Madden 2012). The historian Charles Tilly made a broadly similar point over twenty years ago when he noted that ‘cities offer privileged sites for study of the interaction between large social processes and routines of local life’ (Tilly 1996:704). Happily, the call for engaged pluralism resonates with both Planetarians and Provincialists. There are compelling arguments for the virtues of bringing the general and the particular together (Roy 2016; Brenner 2018; Schmid 2018; Brenner and Schmid 2018). Engaged pluralism provides a stronger basis for questioning received assumptions and dogmas, opening new areas of research, and developing more useful concepts and language for understanding the urban condition. Urban Anthropology: Contributions from Ethnography

Given anthropology’s holistic and comparative orientation the strategy of engaged pluralism makes good sense. We know from anthropology that human societies have always been planetary and global. Social networks in the earliest hunting and gathering societies cove­red huge distances, in some cases extending over entire continents. As we will see in Chapter 4, the earliest cities were embedded in vast trade networks that, for their time, were effectively global in scale (Friedman 2014; see also Jennings 2011). Indeed, the very first sedentary human communities likely had significant ‘planetary’ effects to the extent that settling in one place significantly disrupted the seasonal movements of hunting, gathering, herding, and other mobile peoples. It forced them to restrict movement and settle down, and even urbanize themselves. But we also need knowledge of the smaller scale, knowledge that is best generated by ‘thick description’ (Geertz 1973) of the local. The city is both a process and a thing: a thing of flows (information, capital, goods, people) and a thing of places (McDonagh 2014). Planetary theory is required to understand the causal factors that produce

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urban variation on a worldwide scale; Provincial theory is required to ascertain how people actually experience the urban on the ground. Certainly, it would be a mistake to ‘disappear’ the city before exploring urban experience in the deep past given that ancient cities have not been on the radar of either the Planetarians or the Provincialists. Urban studies has been very concerned about contemporary geographies or spatialities of urbanization. Anthropology, and especially archaeology, can contribute knowledge about urbanization’s tempo­ ralities as well as its spatialities. Although well-positioned to enhance these transdisciplinary discussions and debates, urban anthropologists have contributed to them only sporadically. Both Pardo and Prato (2012) and M.E. Smith (2011) note that anthropology has been more concerned with what their human subjects do in cities than with the city itself as a specific object of analysis. The decades prior to the 1990s were also very light on studies of urban sociomateriality (Lawrence and Low 1990). This has prevented urban anthropology from contributing to comparative urban studies, and to policy discussions around urban planning and design. Yet, there is still a history to learn from and build upon. The critical contributions came from scholars like Lewis Henry Morgan, Amos Rapoport (technically an architectural historian, but a popular muse of anthropologists), and Pierre Bourdieu. Victor Buchli (2013) reviews the various contributions of these scholars. In 1881 Lewis Henry Morgan first explored the relationship between culture and material form with his famous studies of Iroquois longhouses. Morgan clarified how principles of primitive communism were expressed in the plan of the longhouse. Beginning in the 1960s and extending into the 1990s Amos Rapaport extended Morgan’s insight that ‘primitive’ architecture is primitive in means but not concept. Rapoport analyzed the built environment for what it communicated about cultural meaning. He suggested different levels of meaning for different levels of the built environment. City plans contain highlevel meanings referencing cosmology and the supernatural. Public monuments communicate middle-level meanings and speak to societal identity, status, and power. Details of house form work with low-level meanings related to everyday processes of social interaction, around such differentiators as age and gender. In the 1970s and 1980s Pierre Bourdieu produced his famous work about the house

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and its social and architectural habitus. He contributed enormous insight into how material plans, forms, and objects reflect the organizing structures and symbolisms of society and produce constant, everyday reminders about proper ways of behaving. A particularly significant contribution of anthropology to the study of the city was the 1950s Manchester School work conducted in the African (Zambia) Copperbelt. This work is either largely unknown or now forgotten. Hannerz (1980:119) characterizes it as the most significant excursion of British social anthropology into an urban milieu. A chapter in Jennifer Robinson’s Ordinary Cities (2006:41–64) summarizes the contributions. Copperbelt anthropologists illuminated the intercultural dynamics of African urbanism. The conditions of colonial urbanization fostered great mobility. The mining towns attracted diverse peoples from many parts of the sub-continent. This created a fluid, energetic form of urban culture. In these settlement conditions people reconfigured traditional practices of association. The number of ethnically distinguishing categories was reduced and identities were revised, from tribal to urban. Cultures merged into one another. Robinson credits Copperbelt anthropologists with showing how urban life – as a range of distinctive and vibrant cultural experiences – was not captured by theory emanating from great Northern metropoli (e.g., the Chicago School of Sociology). Copperbelt anthropologists illuminated how the city could accommodate James Clifford’s (1997:36) ‘discrepant cosmopolitanisms’ – urban cultures shaped by sometimes violent diasporic displacements and transplantations – and how citizens could manage conflict and co-existence in the shared space of the multicultural city. Robinson laments the disappearance of the Copperbelt work from the canon of anthropological theory (2016:189). This work is intriguing, clearly relevant to the challenges of accommodating ethnic diversity facing cities today, and thus worth retrieving. It also sparks one’s curiosity about the extent to which different uses of the urban built environment by different cultural agents facilitated the merging and blending of cultures. The relationship between material and social life – between Sennett’s ville and cité – was not a concern for urban ethnographers of the period. Indeed, the sociomateriality of human life was not much of a concern for any ethnographers of the time period, whether working in cities, rural villages, or the bush. Thus, the Copperbelt work might contain

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something of additional relevance if re-examined with a notion of intercultural placemaking in mind. In contrast to the 1950s, the 1990s produced within the social sciences a keen interest in the spatial and other material dimensions of the city, anthropology included (Low 2014; Pellow and LawrenceZúñiga 2014). Why this interest developed when it did, at least among American academics, likely had something to do with the re-urbanization of human life after decades of urban blight, white flight, and decline. James Holston’s (1989) analysis of Brasilia (mentioned in Chapter 2) is the classic anthropological study of the modernist city. Holston’s critical ‘architectural ethnography’ examined how state-sponsored modernist planning, intended as an instrument for progressive change, had serious unintended consequences. Modernist architectural forms, insensitive to history and place, were unable to accommodate the intended effects of the designers because they were at odds with the workings of Brazilian culture and life, and antithetical to urban forms of sociability. The functionally segregated and monumentally scaled Brazilian capital, among other modernist cities, extinguished street culture in favor of car culture and architectural spectacle. Indeed, Brasilia’s buildings and spatial plan are best viewed from an airplane (a perspective that made a great impression on the modernist architect Le Corbusier) than from street level. These features combined to produce authoritarian and largely vacant public places. Around the same time Lisa Peattie (1990) sought to construct a closer relationship between anthropology and urban planning. Seeing anthropology as an untapped source of relevant knowledge, she lamented the non-use of its insights by planners. This may relate to disciplinary differences: what planners see as slums, anthropologists see as communities for low-income people. In fact, Peattie anticipated the enthusiasm for analyzing slums, barrios, and favelas in ways that highlighted the vitality and entrepreneurial spirit of these settlements without romanticizing them (Neuwirth 2005; see also Varley 2013). These marginalized and neglected urban neighborhoods can teach us something about how to do informal or ‘incremental’ housing in a way that is flexible and allows for the generation of household income. Peattie also offered a concept of ‘conviviality’ as a touchstone for evaluating the quality of public space (Peattie 1998). Following Ivan Illich, she defined conviviality as ‘autonomous and creative intercourse

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among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment’ (Peattie 1998:247). She suggested that conviviality could be encouraged by a material base – ‘the right rules, the right props, and the right places and spaces’ – and that these are squarely in the domain of urban planning. She focused specifically around sociable eating. Today’s widely popular use of food trucks to activate public spaces exemplifies the kinds of convivial atmospheres imagined by Peattie. The 1990s also produced an interest in the relationships between global processes and the routines of local life. As noted above, the urban historian Charles Tilly (1996) urged bringing the two together. At the same time, Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large (Appadurai 1996) presented the concept of ‘ethnoscape’ to describe the landscape of persons (including immigrants, refuges, exiles, guest workers, and other mobile groups and individuals) who constitute a shifting world. Their rituals of homebuilding and placemaking challenge the nation-state’s conception of localities as ‘sites for incubating and reproducing citizens through national mythologies and celebrations’ (Lawrence-Zúñiga 2011:143). They also clearly complicate the task of urban planners and designers concerned about accommodating the spatial and aesthetic preferences of diverse groups. Setha Low’s work over the last two decades has been particularly instrumental in showing the strength and relevance of urban anthropology. Low did more than almost anyone else to narrow the divide between ethnography and archaeology, in turn paving the way for this book. A 1996 essay (Low 1996) drew widely from across traditional disciplines and the field of urban studies to offer a coherent conceptual framework for the comparative analysis of cities. Low described the Ethnic City, Contested City, Fortress City, Sacred City, and Postmodern City, among others (see also Low 1999). Low has contributed empirically in a number of areas with ethnographic studies aimed at understanding the role played by the built environment in shaping urban life. Her work on Latin American plazas (Low 2000) extended our understanding beyond their aesthetic qualities and political symbolism to show how citizens use plaza space in their daily lives and as venues to express political resistance. Her analysis of gated communities in the United States (Low 2004) disclosed numerous paradoxes and ironies. It illuminated the existential fears of crime and the ‘Other’ that drive people behind gates. However, it was not clear whether gates and walls were functioning to keep

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people in or out. Certainly, gated communities have proven their effectiveness in reinforcing residential segregation and impeding access to public space. Especially relevant to an Intercultural Urbanism is Low’s work on ethnicity and urban parks. Low’s Public Space Research Group (Low et al. 2005) offers a number of lessons for planners of urban space. Public parks can be great democratizers and mixers of people and groups. However, even where access to parks and open space is relatively equal and conditions relatively safe, these places can still be unwelcoming to minority groups depending on how they are designed. Their amenities (e.g., furniture, facilities, cultural diversions) have to be designed with cultural variation in mind given that different classes and ethnic groups can use the same unit of space differently. Spatial adequacy and flexibility are crucial if diverse urban populations are to be drawn to public space for everyday activities, festivals, and other special events. In some instances, green space may be less desirable than hard space (e.g., open plazas) as a venue for social gatherings. In other words, the principles and forms conducive to developing the Green City may not be entirely commensurate with those congenial to the Intercultural City. Low’s work contributes to a significant literature in urban studies suggesting that members of minority groups experience parks and open spaces in different ways in keeping with different cultural values and needs. There are many useful studies of particular parks like Chicago’s Lincoln Park (Gobster 2002). The risks of cultural stereotyping notwithstanding, this work identifies different preferences among ethnic groups with respect to park attributes (e.g., water, trees, scenic vistas, etc.), developed vs. undeveloped (‘wild’) space, and patterns of use (as individuals vs. in larger groups, for recreation vs. relaxation, with vs. without food, etc.). It raises important questions for planners and designers concerned about the cultural inclusivity of urban parks and open spaces. Given a diverse user population, is there spatial sufficiency for different kinds of activities? Is there sufficient differentiated or bounded space for accommodating cultural groups having, say, proscriptions against genders or ages mixing in outdoor settings? Are there culturally appropriate facilities and amenities, especially around food? Is there sufficient parking for minority groups who must rely on automobile transportation to get to a desirable park? Encouraging car use in an agenda for sustainable

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urban living is problematic, but it could be the necessary price for parks that are truly culturally inclusive. The work of Low’s Public Space Research Group also establishes the need for careful thought about the physical monuments, historical markers, and other kinds of ‘exclamation points’ (Sennett 2018b:211–218) that occupy public space and declare its importance, given that the histories of user populations also differ. People easily read cues of inclusivity and exclusivity in urban landscapes; e.g., they will avoid landscapes where their group’s history is absent or erased, or where available facilities and diversions have limited appeal. Less than 3 percent of all US National Landmarks are designated for women, Latinos, African Americans, or other members of minority groups (O’Keefe 2011). This is a pretty significant historical sites deficit. The disparity takes on new relevance given the continuing debate in the United States about the social and psychological impact on African Americans of post-Civil War Confederate monuments (Kinney 2017; Carter 2018). Finally, two recent volumes position anthropology as a key contributor to imagining and planning a more inclusive city. One is Setha Low’s Spatializing Culture. It synthesizes a career’s worth of work, and reasserts the status of architecture and planning as ‘unacknowledged economic and ideological ends in the reproduction of urban inequality’ (Low 2017a:41). The other is Areil Nilson Espino’s Building the Inclusive City (2015). Espino is trained in anthropology and urban planning. He examines urban segregation in historical perspective, discussing its benefits as well as its costs. Espino discusses some of the strategies, policies, and institutional arrangements that can help deliver the Intercultural City. These include various kinds of inclusionary housing policies and land re-adjustment programs. He uses Social Urbanism in the Global South (Chapter 5) to illustrate what can be accomplished. The natural connections between work in anthropology and work in critical urban studies is coming to light for scholars in other disciplines. For example, Wortham-Galvin (2012) notes that Jane Jacobs’ methodology in The Death and Life of Great American Cities is essentially ethnographic thick description (see also Adhya 2012). Wortham-Galvin suggests that although it is not explicitly stated, Jacobs’ ‘disciplinary lens was anthropology and her subject was culture’. She suggests that an ‘anthropology of urbanism is a critical design methodology to be

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embraced in the making of places in the 21st century’. Design practice as cultural practice requires close ethnographies, a ‘participatory urbanism’ (Wortham-Galvin 2013). Wortham-Galvin identifies several low-tech approaches as useful in this regard: story-telling, oral history, design workshops, and other community events. Their application can help close the gap between urban planning and anthropology lamented by Peattie thirty years ago. Urbanism and the Sciences of Human Nature

Albert Einstein once said ‘Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better’. Evolutionary studies of nature – specifically, humankind’s place in nature – might not help us understand everything better, but they might help us identify some widely shared human preferences and predispositions that can benefit intercultural city building. In this section I focus on what evolutionary studies of human nature are suggesting about shared human preferences for both natural and built environments. The anthropological record is a record of commonalities as well as differences. Some commonalities are the result of people migrating, coming into contact, interacting, and otherwise sharing ideas over space and time. Others, however, may reflect common determination by our deep evolutionary history. Evolution, along with culture and race, is part of the great triad of central organizing concepts in anthropology. However, most anthropologists today, along with a majority of humanists and social scientists, tend to dismiss the sciences of human nature. Critiques typically conjure fears of bioreductivism, genetic determinism, and the use of those ideologies to promote racism (Lancaster 2004). There are parallel worries about the loss of free will, agency, and the ability to intervene in life. Critics suggest that it is better to make behavior all about culture; to see humans as ‘blank slates’, upon which culture writes. My view is that anyone who accepts that Homo sapiens is an evolved species should take the sciences of human nature – evolutionary psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and allied fields – seriously. There is no doubt that culture plays a role in, and complicates human behavior. Culture can also create various ‘work-arounds’ (Barkow 2003) to behaviors that are widely agreed to have at least some basis in biology. However, it is still useful to ask whether there is a substrate of human preferences or predispositions that is common to all cultures

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that originates in our shared heritage as evolved primates, or what is also described as our ‘primate nature’ (Davis 2013) and ‘biological historicity’ (Pallasmaa 2015). Natural Environments  There is a substantial literature, informed in part by paleoanthropology, about the ways in which our present-day relationship to the natural environment is influenced by the survival behavior of our ancestors (Hildebrand 1999). These works have deep roots in some classic studies of human landscape preferences from the early 1970s. Many studies of that time established the restorative powers of nature (Van den Berg 2007), and how access to nature produces greater sociability (Sullivan 2005). The studies of interest here explored preferences for specific characteristics of habitats that can have implications for the design of urban parks and other spaces. Appleton’s (1975) study of English landscape painting produced an influential theory of prospect and refuge. Prospect means having a view to the horizon. Refuge means a safe place to hide; to see but not to be seen; a place to retreat in case of danger. Orians (1980) folded Appleton’s features into a ‘savanna theory’ of habitat selection. Savannas are broken grassland habitats containing patches of forest. Paleoanthropologists have long assumed – indeed, it was an article of faith – that savanna habitat was the original environmental context for human evolution. Savannas offer long, unimpeded views and safe harbors, but also more optimal resources compared to expansive, closed forests. This is because of the edge or ecotone effect: edge environments are more resource-rich and the resources are more easily accessible than those contained in forest canopy. Occupancy of these environments would have made the survival of an otherwise poorly adapted proto-human more likely six to eight million years ago. Orians suggested that planning for city parks might benefit from such evolutionary knowledge. Balling and Falk (1982) and others put these ideas to more substantial test among Americans of different ages. Subjects were asked to select preferred landscapes out of a mix including desert, tropical forest, deciduous forest, boreal forest, and tropical savanna. Results indicate a broad preference for savanna biomes, especially among younger children under the age of twelve. This age-related pattern is critical to the evolutionary argument: it suggests that the savanna preference is the

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innate, default predisposition for humans, but one that is still subject to later modification by experience and exposure to cultural factors. Stephen and Rachel Kaplan’s studies (S. Kaplan 1987; R. Kaplan et al. 1989; S. Kaplan 1992) proposed some additional preferred attributes. Coherence is the ease with which a person can grasp the organization or layout of a scene. Legibility is how well one can find their way within a scene. Complexity is the number of different objects in a scene. The variable of mystery is especially intriguing. It refers to the promise of gaining more information if one can venture deeper into a scene; e.g., a trail that disappears around a bend, a brightly lit clearing obscured from view by intervening foliage, or anything else that causes one to wonder what is around the next corner or down the road. Mystery has evolutionary benefit if it promises new information that can aid survival (Hildebrand 1999). The Kaplans discovered that mystery is a powerful factor in, and predictor of, human landscape preference. Humans are enticed by the potential of the mysterious unknown to update and extend their cognitive maps. Getting lost is one of the best guarantees of human learning. In the 1990s the emerging field of evolutionary psychology offered the concept of Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness (EEA) to describe the conditions under which human cognition evolved (see contributors to Tooby et al. 1992). Evolutionary psychologists take care to note that the EEA is not a specific place, but a composite environment with the following attributes: •• moderately undulating (hilly) landscapes that offer vantage points for observation (e.g., spotting prey) and orientation; •• the presence of water or evidence that it exists somewhere nearby; •• places to seek refuge or protection from the elements or predators (e.g., caves, overhangs); •• open horizon in at least one direction; •• walkable surfaces (important for an evolving biped); •• forests with moderately dense canopies, open areas, and climbable trees (predator avoidance); •• a variety of green vegetation, especially flowering and fruiting plants (food). The decade also produced Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid’s People’s Choice project (Dissanayake 1998) and other surveys that

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evaluated the savanna theory from a cross-cultural perspective. The Komar and Melamid method was to show subjects paintings of different habitats and ask for the most-liked features. Surveys in nine countries – Russia, Ukraine, France, Finland, Iceland, Denmark, Turkey, China and Kenya – revealed ‘surprisingly similar preferences’ for a savanna environment. By the end of the decade such studies formed part of an emerging field within evolutionary psychology called Darwinian Aesthetics. The studies can be naïve and the results problematic, but lying within is a ‘nourishing and promising approach’ to understanding aesthetic preferences and their ancient roots (Dissanayake 1998). The most recent research increases the use of cross-cultural samples and also responds to accumulating data suggesting that the EEA may have been more complex. Human fossils such as Ardipithecus, an ancestor dating to 4.4 million years ago, are now found in a variety of environments other than savanna, including tropical forest/closed canopy woodland (Chamberlain 2000; Hartman and ApaolazaIbáñez 2010). The strong version of savanna theory is now being revised in light of these findings. However, studies still broadly confirm the model proposed in the earliest work (Domínguez-Rodrigo 2014). Falk and Balling’s (2010) testing of African populations reaffirm their earlier conclusion of an innate preference for a savanna environment. They make a stronger allowance that preferences can be modified by life experiences and enculturation. Still, Falk and Balling are struck by the affinity of younger subjects in their African samples for savanna-like settings. They describe this as a ‘vestigial preference’ and conclude that the evolutionary interpretation is still relevant. Hartman and Apaolaza-Ibáñez (2010) argue that while the original adaptive environment might not have been open savanna and that we must go beyond savannas in our thinking (see also Han 2007), they confirm preferences for ‘images of lush green landscapes with water’. They also suggest that the savanna preference might not be a human cognitive feature that was present at the dawn of humanity. It might date to a very late speciation event that produced modern Homo sapiens in Sub-Saharan Africa between 70,000 and 100,000 years ago, when global cooling greatly expanded savannalike environments (Sullivan 2005). For me the most important takeaway from this line of inquiry – gaps in knowledge notwithstanding – is that there is utility to the

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habitat preference model and the evolutionary view that informs it. The theory is just one tool in the box, but it is a distinctive one. It is informed by what we know is common to all people’s history. Homo sapiens is a very young and remarkably unified species. William Whyte’s (1980) classic study of how people actually occupy cities disclosed that features offering prospect and refuge, best found in edge environments, are characteristics of popular urban spaces. People do like to stick to edges (a phenomenon known as ‘thigmotaxis’) as a hidden, subconscious orientation strategy. The studies summarized here also support Jane Jacobs’ critique of large city parks (Jacobs 1961:257–269). For Jacobs, big parks with long edges often create what she calls ‘border vacuums’ – places devoid of activity – in addition to hiding popular amenities deep within that go unused for long periods of the day. Alternatively, many small ‘pocket parks’ can provide more edge and refuge opportunities, as well as more opportunities for socializing for more hours of the day. But even if there is an innate preference or disposition for particular kinds of natural environments, there is always room for culture and lived experience to make a difference (Bourassa 1990; Home et al. 2010). The work reviewed here is also intriguing in suggesting that humans everywhere seem to prefer landscapes that contain some element of mystery that invites exploration even at risk to life and limb (Orians and Heerwagen 1992). Homo sapiens is a knowledgeseeking, knowledge-using organism. We do not want complete predictability and legibility in our surroundings. We like features that can excite our imagination and stimulate the big brain that, at the end of the day, was the most important factor in humankind’s evolutionary success. If all this is true, it presents many implications and challenges for urban planning and design. Built Environments  The preceding deals with features of natural environment. What of the built environment? Do preferences for a particular kind of natural environment extend to architecture and other aspects of human built space? We might expect that they would (Dosen and Ostwald 2016; Coburn et al. 2017). The cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker is especially good at responding to the critique of the sciences of human nature, and framing the possibilities and potential pay-offs of an evolutionary view. His book The Blank Slate (Pinker 2002) provides a taste. There he

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notes – ever so briefly, and with reference to Brasilia and the public housing towers mentioned in Chapter 2 – the sometimes disastrous consequences of Architectural Modernism’s failure to consider human nature in its approach to architecture and urban planning. For Pinker: Authoritarian High Modernism [is] the conceit that planners could redesign society from the top down using ‘scientific’ principles. The architect Le Corbusier, for example, argued that urban planners should not be fettered by traditions and tastes, since they only perpetuated the overcrowded chaos of the cities of his day . . . He planned his cities around freeways, large buildings, and vast open plazas with no squares or crossroads . . . Homes were ‘machines for living’, free of archaic inefficiencies like gardens and ornamentation, and thus were efficiently packed together in large, rectangular housing projects . . . Le Corbusier was frustrated in his aspiration to flatten Paris, Buenos Aires, and Rio de Janeiro and rebuild them according to his scientific principles. But in the 1950s he was given carte blanche to design Chandigarh, the capital of the Punjab, and one of his disciples was given a clean tablecloth for Brasília, the capital of Brazil. Today, both cities are notorious as uninviting wastelands detested by the civil servants who live in them. Authoritarian High Modernism also led to the ‘urban renewal’ projects in many American cities during the 1960s that replaced vibrant neighborhoods with freeways, high-rises, and empty windswept plazas. (Pinker 2002:170–171)

Pinker’s critique echoes that of some good progressive anthropologists, like Holston. For Pinker the modernist project reflects a minimalist conception of human nature. It is a project that omits human aesthetic and social needs. It fails to consider that these needs might be better satisfied by providing human-scaled and appropriately ornamented buildings, and intimate public spaces where people can congregate in small groups of friends and family. Pinker’s critique can also be applied to the Post Urbanism project of Rem Koolhaas discussed in Chapter 2. Koolhaas, like the modernists, also eschews architectural ‘traditions and tastes’ and ornament in promoting the concept of a ‘generic city’ (Ellard 2015:122–124). In Koohaas’ case,

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however, the rejection is based on the belief that ‘generic’ architecture is the best option in a diverse society shaped by immigration and multiculturalism. The assumption is that culture is so powerful a determining force that it is futile to plan and design interculturally. Nikos Salingaros (2003) has called Pinker’s insights about architecture and urban planning to the attention of a wider audience. Salingaros writes: [Pinker’s argument] accuses architects, urbanists, and legislators for acting contrary to the biological nature of human beings. As such, it helps to solidify the arguments of anti-modernist critics such as Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander, and Léon Krier by providing them with a biological foundation . . . While Pinker’s book is not about architecture and urbanism, it does open the door to what is inevitable; namely, a scientific debate of what type of architecture is more in tune with biological precedent. By focusing on how the human mind reacts to form and environment, the investigation turns away from the imitation of nature, and complements those studies in an important fashion.

Charles Siegel (2014) picked up this theme and ran with it. He argues that, of all the competing urbanisms around today and discussed in Chapter 2, New Urbanism is the one that is most in tune with evolved human psychology (see also Rose 2016:18). This is because New Urbanism rests on three principles of a ‘timeless way of building’ (Alexander 1979) that comport with our innate predispositions. These principles include: •• use of a hierarchy of scales in breaking-up the built mass of a building, rather than endlessly repeating a form; •• use of a consistent style of building while allowing for variation of individual structures; •• use of symmetry in planning and design, although not to the extent that individual variations are precluded. Siegel argues that alternative urbanisms informed by modernism and ‘avant-gardism’ (e.g., Kelbaugh’s Post Urbanism) reject these principles and that is why we find their buildings dehumanizing and even physically repellent where, for example, they induce dizziness

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and nausea (Pogrebin 2007). For Siegel urban design codes should be form-based, like the ones used by New Urbanists and defended by Andres Duany (Chapter 2). Such codes ‘create an urban fabric with the same combination of individuality and general consistency that we find in traditional cities and towns’. I am not totally persuaded by Siegel’s argument, especially the New Urbanism part. Modernist high-rises and avant-garde, Post Urbanist buildings can have a certain visual and aesthetic appeal. They can even resonate with evolved sensibilities if they serve as useful focal points for locating ourselves in space and allow more confident urban navigation – although some towering, glass curtainwalled modernist buildings accomplish this function a bit too well (think Tour Montparnasse in Paris). Organically evolved urban fabrics that are palimpsests of different epochs of city-making (like the fabric of central London) can also delight the senses. They invite exploration and contain, at least for some, elements of mystery and the constant possibility that something surprising and energizing will be found just around the next corner. Moreover, we do not know very much about the traditional or vernacular built forms that humans created during most of our history. We have written or relatively unambiguous visual records of urban development going back at most 12,000 years, which is about 5 percent of the total time that Homo sapiens has been on earth. It is the premise of this book that there is too much still to learn from archaeology about architectural and urban form as it was expressed in both deep time and on a global scale. This is the subject of Chapter 4. In short, it is probably premature to declare New Urbanism’s particular neo-traditional forms as the ones that best resonate with a common human nature. A flurry of recent articles and books about human relationships to the built environment help fill out more of the picture. They exploit the accumulating findings of cognitive science indicating that certain features of architectural design resonate with our evolved sensibilities. And, that these features can be manipulated to heighten certain emotional and psychological responses (Coburn et al. 2017). Hildebrand (1999) prepared the ground with his book arguing that responses to architecture originate in the essential survivaladvantageous behaviors of distant ancestors. He explores the lessons of landscape studies for architectural application. Hildebrand finds

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that the characteristics of prospect and refuge also apply to architecture. They are perhaps best exemplified by the houses of Frank Lloyd Wright. These ‘organic’ structures are considered by UNESCO to have universal value, and in 2019 eight were listed as World Heritage sites (Schneider 2019; see also Brown and Lee 2016). Wright’s houses are embedded in their surroundings. Their open interiors visually connect to their surroundings, blurring the boundary between interior and exterior. In other words, they exemplify Sennett’s porous edges. Hildebrand also adds enticement as a quality that is analogous to mystery. This is exemplified by structures that channel movement between spaces that are alternately light and dark, with interior features only partly revealed. Like Hildebrand, Sussman and Hollander (2015) draw on Darwinian theory to argue that our evolved biology shapes our responses to both landscapes and buildings. They extoll the virtues of edges, a distinctive feature of savanna environments. The practical advice is for small blocks, abundant intersections, and many walking paths (Sussman and Hollander 2015:31). Pocket parks could be added to this list. Also recommended is the use of curves and fractals: recursive patterns that occur repetitively in smaller and smaller scales. Sussman and Hollander suggest that humans have innate preferences for fractal patterns that are not too dense and not too sparse. Trees common to the African savanna fall within this range. Fractals also occur in iconic architectures that many people know and love, such as medieval Gothic cathedrals. Interestingly, fractals also characterize some of the Post Urban architectures described in Chapter 2. This suggests that while Post Urbanists might be misguided in abandoning the hope that we can produce intercultural designs for architecture, they might be on to something with their production of forms that resonate with evolved psychology. This prompts the question: is there a sweet spot for architectural design that lies at the intersection of culture and biology, one that is still largely unexplored? Especially key for Sussmann and Hollander is the notion that Homo sapiens is a story-telling animal. Many are the physical and behavioral criteria that anthropologists have proposed to distinguish humans from apes, including bipedal movement, tool use, and language. However, story-telling (the ability to communicate about past, present, and future) might be the single most important

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behavioral capacity that ensured humankind’s evolutionary success. The human fascination with narrative can be expressed in the spatial sequencing of elements in a plan; e.g., the differential orientation, size, and sequencing of rooms and connecting passageways. Again, Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses are used as an example of buildings with embedded narratives. Others include Gothic cathedrals and Italian piazzas (Filep et al. 2014). Narrative can also be recognized at larger scales, in the relationships between buildings and built space; e.g., the monumental ‘Grand Manner’ of European and American capitals (Kostof 1991; see also Childs 2008). Robinson and Pallasmaa’s (2015) edited collection offers a multiplicity of voices speaking to the evolutionary roots, or biological historicity of human design. A central theme is the idea of ‘embodiment’: that spaces and structures are extensions of bodies, and transmit meaning. They have agency and a mediating quality. In so doing they help stabilize human psychology. The plans and designs of indigenous cultures and peoples are invoked throughout the volume. These cultures often produced architecture that embodied a sense of the world as a massive interior. Houses were designed as the cosmos in miniature (see Buchli 2013:145 on the work of Pierre Bourdieu). So it was with the ancients: Egyptian pyramids served as a ‘defense against the terror of time’ (Harries 1982) by scaling endless time down to the limits of human experience. Other forms of ancient wisdom (e.g., Hindu Vaastu Veda and Chinese Feng Shui) provide storehouses of knowledge that can help architects design in a manner that more fully engages and supports human minds and bodies. Finally, Sarah Williams Goldhagen (2017) brings selected aspects of cognitive science and evolutionary psychology together in contemplating the built environment generally. She also works with the notion of embodied cognition. Her book (especially Chapter 6 on ‘Designing for Humans’) is a brief for how the human mind responds to ‘patterned complexity’: symmetry balanced with asymmetry. The human brain functions between poles of familiarity and novelty. Patterned complexity meets the visual brain’s demand for both (see also Albright 2015). Goldhagen uses a favorite and much-heralded architectural composition from the classical world to illustrate: the Acropolis in Athens. This set piece is done to human scale, providing a place for both monumental prospect and refuge. The Parthenon’s straight lines and subtle curves create optical refinements that put in

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motion what at first glance is a static building, something that resonates with our evolved sensibilities. I am not sure that there is anything in evolutionary psychology or the other sciences of human nature that can specifically inform intercultural approaches to urban placemaking. Dosen and Ostwald (2016) offer a strong critique of the studies discussed here. There are gaps in our knowledge that need filling, and the experimental work on landscape and building preferences may suffer from insufficient sampling of subjects cross-culturally. But at the very least this work provides a useful counterpoint to the hard social constructivists and extreme relativists whose claims about all life being determined by culture are just as problematic. By embracing blank slate-ism we miss an opportunity to create the kind of ‘sticky’ places (Goldhagen quoted in Hurley 2017) that engage human sensory and motor systems as well as appeal to different cultural identities and sensibilities. Thus, in the spirit of Barnes and Sheppard’s (2010) engaged pluralism I think we are best served by being open to a conversation; to the possibilities that the cognitive sciences can add something to the mix. We do not have to choose between universalism and relativism. Both the biological and cultural must be taken on board if we are to generate plans and designs that are truly human-centered. I am persuaded that sufficient evidence exists to embrace evolutionary principles in the project to design and build interculturally. Whatever one thinks of this work, Salingaros (2003) is right to conclude: We need further research to reveal the biological basis for architecture. That is a monumental task, yet an important first step has now been made. When the job is finally accomplished, and we understand how architecture depends on the structure of our own mind, we will be in a better position to tie together many of today’s non-mainstream movements in architecture and urbanism.

Summary

Anthropology’s commitment to integrating studies of the global and the local aligns with the commitments of both Planetary and Provincial strands of Critical urban theory. The discipline has a long but only sporadically consequential history of engagement with studies of urban materiality. Nonetheless, anthropology’s knowledge of the cultural and biological evolution of humankind positions it

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to make distinctive contributions to urban planning and design, as imagined by Lisa Peattie nearly thirty years ago. Reflecting on her own long career advocating for urban anthropology, Setha Low (2017b:360) describes how the field should move forward, implicating the relevance of Critical urban theory: I think that we might take our cue from the work in urban studies that is producing a literature on new kinds of cities and the processes that characterize them. Anthropologists could contribute a lot to these discussions whether it be about cities of the global south or the ‘Asian city’ or the ‘insurgent’ city’ . . . Our insights about the social and cultural underpinnings of these urban ‘types’ and futures can already be found in our literature – for instance, on housing policy, or on changing political/affective relations – but I do not yet see our work influencing the non-anthropological urbanists in a significant way. Even [anthropological volumes] on the global city do not engage in the broader conversations about other kinds of emerging cities and contest their claims. To be in this conversation I think urban anthropologists need to be more outspoken about what they think, and more pointed in their claims.

Ethnography and evolutionary science can make important contributions, as argued above. But these fields do not exhaust anthropology’s potential. As noted above, references to the ancient world are prominent in popular discussions about what needs to happen to improve urban built environments. The Pyramids and the Parthenon are nice examples, but they do not exhaust the potential to learn from the ancients. It is interesting that Colin Ellard (2015), a psychologist and champion of a transdisciplinary approach to solving the problems of built design, begins and ends his book about the utility of cognitive science with another archaeological site from the deep past that is rather more enigmatic but, so far as we know, was not embedded in an urban landscape: the well-known and iconic monument of Stonehenge. In the next chapter, I examine what else we learn from anthropological archaeology that can benefit the theory and practice of intercultural city building.

4 | I N T E R C U LT U R A L U R B A N I S M : A D E E P T I M E PERSPECTIVE

[E]very society . . . produces a space, its own space . . . The city of the ancient world cannot be understood as a collection of people and things in space; nor can it be visualized solely on the basis of a number of texts and treatises on the subject of space even though some of these . . . may be irreplaceable sources of knowledge. For the ancient city had its own spatial practice: it forged its own . . . space. (Lefebvre 1991 [1974]:31)

Lefebvre is speaking here about cities of the classical world. However, what he says certainly applies to the cities of deep antiquity. No written texts or treatises authored by citizens exist for most of these cities, at least not in forms that are currently decipherable by us. Still, the ancient world can give us insight into urban society in various forms, and serve as a potentially powerful source of new imaginaries and practices for planning and ‘forging’ urban space. This chapter describes what we know from archaeology about the planning and design of cities in humankind’s deep past that is potentially relevant to the theory and practice of urbanism today. Information is presented about the characteristics of urban form, including the distribution and quality of housing, public space, open space, and other civic amenities. My review is also attuned to what material patterns imply about political governance and cosmology. The case studies (see Figures 4.1 and 4.2) cover a huge swath of space and time. They include the earliest expressions of urbanism in the Old World (Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley), and much more recent but still poorly known expressions of urbanism in pre-colonial Africa and Native North America. The latter areas are typically left out of global histories of urbanization. My goal is to provide examples of ancient urbanism that can spark the imagination, and perhaps spur theory building about what can be done to make the contemporary city more congenial to cultural

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difference. I hope to provide a basis for distilling forms and principles of urban planning, design, and governance that reflect the primary concerns of an Intercultural Urbanism: accommodating ethnic difference, creating settings or contexts for positive encounters between diversities; and facilitating development of a more inclusive culture of citizenship. Our understanding of the ancient world is limited by the availability of archaeological data and shaped by the particular theoretical and methodological commitments of individual scholars. It is also affected by all sorts of unconscious cultural biases, hopes, and desires. Thus, scholarly interpretations of the physical form and meaning of ancient cities are not always commensurable. Historically the scholarly focus has been on the big stuff: pyramids, palaces, and royal tombs. Residential areas and dwellings have been relatively neglected, although that situation is changing. We are certainly stymied by archaeological research designs that ignore the open spaces in-between great public monuments and established neighborhoods (where gardens, parks, and insubstantial structures may have existed), or the edges of a city where we might expect radical experiments in urbanism to have occurred. Thus, our knowledge of ancient urbanisms and urbanizations must always be held open to revision. That said, and as noted in Chapter 1, the bigger obstacle might be scholarly and popular preconceptions about the earliest cities. Unsupported preconceptions pose a greater risk to interpretation than missing or incomplete archaeological data. Too often the stories that historians and anthropologists tell about the past draw stark contrasts between pre-modern and modern cities. The historian Alan Gilbert (2013:686) states that pre-modern cities consisted of a rich elite and a vast impoverished working population, with no significant middle class. Anthropologists sometimes reinforce the story. Pellow and Lawrence-Zúñiga (2014:86) assert that pre-modern cities were characterized by a ‘pronounced inequality’, spatially and materially expressed by the location of rich housing and high status institutions in the city center, moderate housing in intermediate areas, and poor housing on the outskirts. Friedman (2014) asserts that cities in the past were characterized by segregated ethnic enclaves. As we will see below, such accounts are not supported by accumulating evidence. They can also promote an unwarranted fatalism. For example, Graeber and Wengrow (2018) note that ancient urbanization

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is sometimes characterized as a development that forever doomed us to live in unequal, divided societies. Such beliefs universalize urban inequality and naturalize tribalism. Writing recently about the Maya living at the ancient city of Tikal, David Webster (2018:88) pushes back: [W]e have absolutely no idea whether Classic Maya commoners generally felt oppressed by Maya kings and nobles, whether they negotiated much of anything, including power relations and access to resources, or whether they unduly fretted about identity.

While the ‘no idea’ part might be a bit exaggerated, Webster’s point is well taken. In fact, accumulating evidence seems to suggest that ancient cities were much more egalitarian than traditionally assumed (Sinopoli et al. 2015), and spatial segregation by ethnicity does not seem to have been the norm. Norman Yoffee (2016) suggests that political power was extraordinarily tenuous in just about all of the cities that existed before the modern era, including those cities discussed here. Even if there was significant economic inequality (and there was), it may have been experienced very differently; e.g., in ways that did not completely disenfranchise citizens from other political and cultural realms of life. In short, our knowledge of ancient cities offers wide latitude for standing traditional reconstructions on their heads, and invites new narratives of urban life and change (Kohler and Smith 2018:314). Planning History and the Ancient City: Engagements and Misconceptions

Western scholars and professional planners have selectively drawn upon our knowledge of ancient cities to deal with design challenges since the origins of modern planning in the mid-nineteenth century (Smith and Hein 2018). Nearly all of this interest focused on cities of the classical world; i.e., Greek and Roman. Such was the case with British town planners in the early part of the twentieth century (reviewed by Laurence 1994). They often promoted binaries of urban/ planned and non-urban/unplanned that were assumed to materially reflect the difference between civilized and barbarian societies. In the mid-twentieth century urbanists broadened the scope to include older case material. The modernist architect Le Corbusier engaged with Egypt and Sumer (the cities of Babylon, Khorsabad)

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to advocate the naturalness of orthogonal planning. Others involved with the modernist project looked to the irregularity of medieval cities and spaces. Camillo Sitte (2013) appealed to the medieval as a way to introduce a greater artistic sensibility to late nineteenthcentury urban planning. Smith and Hein (2018) discuss Rowe and Koetter’s (2013) use of Hadrian’s Villa to propose an accretional approach to city building using multiple designs rather than a single grand design. The result was their book Collage City. In many cases, the ancient world was examined with clear political and ideological interests in mind. To the extent that ancient cities were assumed to be associated with rulership, politics, and cosmic glory, they were mined for design ideas that could be used to support and legitimize nationalist political goals and identities (Smith and Hein 2018:109). Of much less concern was investigating the ancient city for how its planning and design might be used to improve the lives of citizens, especially those of immigrant and lower class status. The 1960s was a busy decade for writing urban history, including deep history. The decade was formative in the development of urban studies as a field of scholarship (Harris and Smith 2011). It produced several comprehensive works that offered comparative insights. Abbot (2006) identifies some of these key works. Foremost among them is Lewis Mumford’s (1961) magisterial The City in History. Mumford proposed a model for urban origins that grew out of the union of two traditions, that of agriculturalists and that of the ‘hunter king’. This fusion created the distinct experience and dynamic of urban life. Mumford also made some comparisons with respect to urban form, contrasting ‘enclosed’ and ‘open’ forms. In keeping with mid-twentiethcentury tendencies to read directly from materiality to society, these forms correlated with totalitarian and democratic political regimes, respectively. Mesopotamia, with its city walls, exemplified the totalitarian, and Egypt, with its boundaries provided by nature (i.e., the Nile Valley), exemplified the more democratic. As this chapter will later demonstrate, this formulation is problematic in a number of ways, among them the idea that walls are an indicator of totalitarian rule. At roughly the same time, Gideon Sjoberg published The Prein­ dustrial City (1960). It is widely cited as a go-to text for insight into pre-modern urban forms. Sjoberg argued that pre-industrial cities conformed to a spatial organization that was very different from Western industrial cities as theorized by the Chicago School

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of Urban Sociology. Chicago School theory stipulated the natural dividing of industrial cities into a core business and industry district, an inner ring of working-class homes and tenements for the poor, and an outer ring of elite residences. Sjoberg argued that the preindustrial city inverted this plan. The center was occupied by elite residences, markets, administrative buildings, and religious architecture. Surrounding the center was a commoner zone, including artisans (masons, carpenters, smiths, jewelers, potters) and others who served the elite. The commoner zone was also organized into relatively well-defined, ethnically segregated neighborhoods or ethnically distinctive streets. Finally, Sjoberg theorized a peripheral ‘outcaste’ zone containing the poorest people and farmers. Sjoberg’s characterizations work as a rough approximation for some ancient cities (M.E. Smith 2010a). However, subsequent research has disclosed tremendous variation in urban layout, life, and developmental history (Fisher and Creekmore 2014). Status differences can cross-cut neighborhoods, there is no necessary ethnic clustering by occupation, rich and poor can live cheek by jowl, and elites can be found in the periphery of the city as well as in the center. At the end of the decade Jane Jacobs used Mesopotamian archaeological data in The Economy of Cities (Jacobs 1969) to make a much more radical claim about urban history. Jacobs was keen to investigate the city’s role in generating economic revolutions – specifically, the origins of agriculture – and other aspects of civilization. Her work on the city and agricultural origins was ignored by archaeologists because it contradicted what they already knew about temporal sequencing; specifically, that agriculture developed well before cities. However, Edward Soja picked up on Jacobs’ ‘Cities First’ thesis to usher in a new concern with the dynamism of the ancient city. His Postmetropolis (Soja 2000) uses Jacobs as a muse to identify three sequential urban revolutions. The first was characterized by what Soja calls synekism: ‘the economic and ecological interdependencies and both positive and negative synergies that arise from the purposeful clustering and collective co-habitation of people in space’ (Soja 2003:27–28). It was this first revolution that generated agricultural economies. The second revolution was urban expansion that produced territorial forms of social control. The third urban revolution was marked by the rise of industrial metropoli like Manchester and Chicago. I will return to Jacobs’ and Soja’s accounts of Mesopotamian urbanism below.

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Scholarship in the first two decades of the twenty-first century focused on narrowing the gap between modern and ancient cities by highlighting commonalities or shared tendencies. An edited volume by Marcuse and Van Kempen (2002) offers glimpses into what the editors take to be the deep history of social segregation. Marcuse’s contribution (Marcuse 2002) provides a brief history of the ‘partitioned city’ going back to the ancient Egyptian imperial capital of Amarna (1340 BCE) and the pyramid town of Kahun (1850 BCE), focusing on the segregated neighborhoods of workers. Marcuse sees partitions as actively created by political regimes rather than being organically evolved, although today empirical data confirm that both occur (M.E. Smith 2010a). Around the same time Jill Grant (2001) used archaeological data to demonstrate how the grid, as a form of planned settlement design, has complex meanings and political effects that are congenial to both egalitarian and autocratic regimes. Along the way she also urged urbanists to go much deeper into the historical record before concluding that one or another physical form is best for accomplishing whatever social objective is at hand. John Reader (2004) deals a bit more comprehensively with the archaeological data from early Mesopotamia, especially the ancient city of Ur as known through the work of the famous British archaeologist Leonard Woolley. Although Woolley went to Iraq in search of royal tombs, he deserves credit for offering insight into the lives of ordinary people, among them merchants, scribes, artisans, and shopkeepers. Reader summarizes some of this information, and provides tidbits about Ur’s urban plan. The description he provides is well documented by other Mesopotamian archaeologists: informal planning, organically evolved residential areas, and the fitting of structures into whatever space was available. Three much shorter books appear next, at five year intervals. All put the city in a global, comparative perspective. Joel Kotkin’s (2005) The City: A Global History explores the confluence in all cities of what he takes to be three fundamental ‘ancient’ concerns: sanctity (the role of religion as ordering force), security, and economy (the role of markets). He provides very brief snapshots of cities in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, and China. Andrew Lees’ The City: A World History (2015) offers one chapter covering 3,000 years of urbanization in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, China, Mesoamerica, and the Andes. His account contains hits and misses. Lees is right that the

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earliest cities were marked by variation in form and functions (trade, religion, political administration). His more questionable claims are that all of them were characterized by high degrees of inequality, and that Indus Valley cities (considered more below) were designed at the behest of a single ruler (Lees 2015:11). Greg Clark’s Global Cities (2016) appreciates, with anthropologists, that cities have always been embedded in long-distance networks of exchange and interaction (see especially Jennings 2011). Globalization is not a uniquely modern phenomenon but goes back to the dawn of urbanism. Clark sees trade as an imperative of urban development; in fact, it is the common thread that links cities in the past and present. Urban success was dependent on location vis-à-vis trade routes, and qualities of investment in infrastructure. He also frames a question that is right in the crosshairs of this book: ‘What light can global cities of times past shed on the likely character and duration of future global cities?’ (Clark 2016:33). Case material includes Mesopotamia and the Indus, with a bit of attention to Mesoamerica. But then Clark jumps quickly to Rome and the modern world. Finally, Jonathan Rose’s (2016) The Well-Tempered City reflects a set of interests that also converge with those of this book. This is captured by the subtitle: What Modern Science, Ancient Civilizations, and Human Nature Teach Us about the Future of Urban Life. There are engagements with China, Central America, and Egypt. But the similarity ends there. Rose’s book is firmly rooted in a Triumphal urbanology: the answer to our problems is the city, and New Urbanism is the approach that can best save us because of its appeal to human nature (see Chapter 2) and adaptability to variations of place, culture, and environment (Rose 2016:18). Like Kotkin, Rose frames a set of themes to organize his study: the ‘Nine Cs’ of Cognition, Cooperation, Culture, Calories, Connections, Commerce, Control, Complexity, Concentration. Rose defines culture as the ‘collective operating software’ of a group. He also embraces the questionable assertions of Harrison and Huntington (2000) that geography is a guide to cultural character and worth; e.g., social trust in communities decreases as one moves from North to South. In so doing Rose, like other New Urbanists, tacks between normative and typological anthropologies. These histories are good at identifying general patterns of urban development and distilling common themes. The rub is that the

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books barely scratch the surface of what is known about ancient cities, and they do not address the variability that exists within urban cultures. They do not dive into how the sociomaterial functioning of ancient cities might have implications for planning or re-imagining the city today. They reproduce the geographical blind spots of SubSaharan Africa and North America. We fill in these gaps below. Urban Science and the Ancient City

Scientific urbanologists pay less attention to historical particularities, pushing for general knowledge of the city that can have transhistorical predictive value. Foremost among them are researchers and collaborators associated with the Santa Fe Institute (SFI). SFI scholars argue that ancient and modern cities can be usefully analyzed from a rigorously empirical and comparative perspective, promising contributions to contemporary urban planning and policy. They seek well-founded laws of urban development. Their view of the city is largely Triumphal. Ortman, Cabaniss, Sturm, and Bettencourt (2015) exemplify the approach. These authors argue that all cities follow essentially the same rules of development as a function of ‘general network effects typical of human social networks embedded in space’. That is, as urban populations increase in size and density, per capita productivity and efficiency also increase. Archaeological data from the pre-Hispanic Basin of Mexico, including the great metropolis of Teotihuacan (occupied roughly 100 BCE–600 CE, and comprehensively described by Cowgill 2015), are used to make the case. With increases in settlement size Teotihuacan’s public monuments got bigger and more voluminous, as did its residential dwellings. These trends are used as proxy variables for social productivity (i.e., Gross Domestic Product) and personal productivity, respectively. Also increasing, however, are disparities of wealth. Over time, the top 10 percent of Basin households come to encompass 40–50 percent of the total housing area. Thus, like modern cities, the benefits of increasing urban size are not widely shared across the resident population. The city’s status as a ‘social reactor’ is enhanced with scalar increases in size, but this comes at a social cost. The authors see their work as having general predictive value that can help shape contemporary urban policy. In keeping with a Triumphalist ethos they pitch their findings as a basis for steering

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cities to an optimal point for maximizing productivity of interactions and efficiency of development. In multiple news reports following publication, lead author Scott Ortman described the findings as ‘shocking and unbelievable’. In The Christian Science Monitor (Gannon 2015) he suggests that it would be ‘astounding’ if the results are confirmed by other archaeological data sets. Archaeologist M.E. Smith suggests in the Monitor that the study’s findings are ‘remarkable’: they reveal ‘something really fundamental about human interactions – and human interactions in cities – that transcends modern economies’. The Basin study is excellent archaeological work. However, the exuberance about the findings might be a bit over the top. We should not be surprised that there would be strong, compelling parallels between ancient and modern cities, however variable their political economies. We have known for a while that non-capitalist societies can generate scalar efficiencies of production as well as great social inequality. Another, perhaps more fundamental reason is that we are dealing with the social networks of Homo sapiens, a species united by its big brain and commitment to life in groups. Indeed, Ortman et al.’s argument dovetails with an earlier one by Bettencourt and his SFI colleague Geoffrey West (Bettencourt and West 2010; see also Lehrer 2010) that trades on analogies from mammalian biology to argue that all cities are 85 percent alike in the way they look, work, and evolve as a function of size. For Bettencourt and West, cities are scaled up versions of each other in much the same way that ‘a whale is a blown up elephant, which is a scaled up giraffe, all the way down to a mouse and shrew’ (G. West quoted in A. West 2011). Like Ortman and collaborators, Bettencourt and West argue that the key to understanding cities, and solving their contemporary problems, depends on understanding these universal properties and not the 15 percent of contextual stuff – local geography, history, culture – that make cities individually unique. Given that an interest of this book is evolutionary science’s relevance to urban theory building, Bettencourt and West’s argument from animal biology can be compared to another evolutionary analysis that produced identical numerical results. This is Richard Lewontin’s famous 1972 study of human ‘racial’ variation (summarized in Lewontin 2006). Lewontin concluded that 85 percent of all human genetic variation is contained within local populations and

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that no more than 15 percent is attributable to variables like local ecology, ancestry, ethnicity, etc. In other words, traditional human racial groupings are much more alike than they are different. For Lewontin, the physical characteristics of shape and form widely used to distinguish Africans, Asians, and Europeans are trivial; literally only skin deep. West and Bettencourt argue much the same for what we take to be the defining formal characteristics of cities like Lagos, Tokyo, and Paris. But Lewontin’s conclusion also potentially overstates the significance of 85 percent similarity. It seems that we can embrace the fundamental sameness of human beings – as well as their urban settlements – and still see the important number as being the contingent 15 percent rather than the universal 85 percent. This is especially crucial if we are concerned about the health and well-being of individual citizens. Lewontin’s critics argue, with some justification, that the 15 percent racial difference is vital for understanding the differential susceptibility of human populations to disease and the likely success of alternative treatments even if we accept his larger insight that the human species is a remarkably unified biological entity and that racism has absolutely no scientific justification. That is, how we regard the small percentage of difference among humans (whether with a concept of race or some other analytical construct) has significant implications for medical diagnosis and, thus, can in some instances be a matter of life and death for individuals (Leroi 2005; cf. Lewontin 2006). The same importance might be attached to the small number of historically and culturally contingent factors that produce differences between and among modern and ancient cities. Ed Blakely, an urban planner at the University of Sydney, is quoted in a Sydney Morning Herald story about the work (A. West 2011) as someone who sees the 15 percent difference as critical even as he appreciates the generalizing significance of Bettencourt and West’s study. For Blakely the 15 percent of urban form that can be manipulated by human beings provides ‘plenty of scope for good planning [human agency] to make a difference’ in how cities work and adapt to changing circumstances. I would add that there is plenty of room for the social sciences to also contribute something useful (Gleeson 2013; Mehaffy 2014),

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and that such contributions can make a big difference in the lives of individual citizens, especially those who do not reap the benefits of urban scaling (i.e., the urban poor and other historically marginalized groups). West and Bettencourt appreciate Jane Jacobs’ insight that the enormous creativity of cities – their status as social reactors – derives from spontaneous and serendipitous interactions between human beings. Indeed, West believes that SFI researchers have scientifically confirmed Jacobs’ conjectures about the vitality of urban interactions (Lehrer 2010). Ortman and his collaborators would almost certainly agree. All would likely acknowledge the positive role that urban planning can play in facilitating such interactions. But they still seem to assume – unlike Jacobs – that the built environment is little more than a passive container for human interactions rather than an active determinant of the quality of those interactions. If we assume the latter, then urban planning and placemaking is better served by attending to the specifics of culture, history, and their relationship to design rather than to general laws of urban development. In other words, it is better served by adopting a more Provincial or ‘ordinary cities’ theoretical approach that more fully respects the role of history, locality, and human agency in how cities are governed (Jennings and Earle 2016:487). There is surely room for the scientific and the humanistic, the nomothetic and the ideographic, to work together. Still, an indisputable virtue of studies like Ortman et al.’s is that they make archaeology relevant to the modern world. They break down the opposition we tend to create between past and present. Ortman suggests that a comparative urbanism encourages us to see ancient and modern cities as lying on a continuum. This is all to the good. However, we should also be alert to the particular ways in which ancient cities were irreducibly or qualitatively different from those in the modern world, as the quote from Lefebvre at the beginning of this chapter suggests. David Carballo, another archaeologist quoted in the Christian Science Monitor article, suggests that the archaeological record ‘contains a treasure chest of experiments in human social life’ that might shed light on such differences in ways that can also inform contemporary planning practice. It is interesting that the notion of the past as ‘experiment’ is being increasingly used by scholars as we learn more about social and material variation

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in the archaeological record (Wright 2006; Wengrow and Graeber 2015; McAnany 2019). Archaeologies of Urbanism

The first truly influential study of urbanism in archaeology was that of the great Australian archaeologist V. Gordon Childe (Childe 1950; M.E. Smith 2009b). Childe offered an account of the ‘urban revolution’ by identifying ten abstract criteria that define the city and illustrating a comparative approach to understanding the city’s origins. Notable is the fact that Childe published this account in an urban studies journal, the Town Planning Review. Robert McC. Adams (1966) was an important interlocutor of Childe who brought his work to the attention of other archaeologists. Adams advocated comparative urban research and conducted his own archaeological fieldwork in Mesopotamia. One of the stronger intellectual heirs to this line of empirically based comparative work is Michael E. Smith. Smith has been a leader for many years in subjecting ancient cities to scientific analysis, developing typologies for classifying and comparing them, and demonstrating their potential to illuminate the role that cities play in contemporary life (M.E. Smith 2009a; 2010a; 2010b; 2012; 2019). Smith justifies the relevance of archaeological work as well as anyone by invoking another quote from Winston Churchill: ‘The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see’. Smith is also a leader in that, like Childe, he goes outside of his home discipline to publish in urban studies journals. He also writes an excellent blog, Wide Urban World, that broadcasts archaeological knowledge to a popular audience. With colleagues at Arizona State University, Smith has researched the ancient city for insight into neighborhood organization, housing quality, residential segregation by class and ethnicity, access to urban services and wealth inequality, use of open spaces, and urban sprawl (Dennehy et al. 2016; Stanley et al. 2016; Smith et al. 2015; York et al. 2011). The most important overall message of this work is its systematic and empirical substantiation of significant variation in every dimension of urban life analyzed. There is no ‘typical’ pattern that defines the city in any of the cultural traditions considered. Contrary to Marcuse (2002) and the urban anthropologists discussed in Chapter 3, patterns of segregation and ethnic clustering

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are enormously variable across history, along with the quality of housing, and the form and function of open space. Informal housing was discovered to be ubiquitous in the ancient city. This finding is especially interesting given today’s policy turn toward better accommodating informality in many cities, especially in the Global South. Wealth inequality (as measured by the Gini Index, a statistical measure of income and wealth where 1.0 indicates the highest level of inequality and 0 indicates the lowest level) in some cities could be very substantial. However, structures of inequality very often did not deprive most citizens of access to basic services. Privileged access to services, and the presence or absence of elites in neighborhoods, did not seem to guarantee anything about whether service provision overall was high or low. Another Smith – Monica Smith – also has a long professional history investigating cities of the ancient world. She recently brought a vast amount of knowledge together in Cities: The First 6000 Years (M.L. Smith 2019). Like Michael Smith, Monica Smith seeks to put ancient and modern cities into comparative perspective. And, with other popularizers of urban history (most notably Joel Kotkin and Jonathan Rose), she emphasizes the contemporary city’s deep roots in the ancient world. Her concern is with the common patterns and continuities in transportation, sanitation, and resource provisioning that define the urban experience across time and space. Smith is optimistic about the urban future as long as three general findings about urban history are kept in mind: (1) infrastructure matters, especially where it services the needs and interests of diverse cultural groups; (2) socioeconomic hierarchies are inevitable; and (3) consumption is ubiquitous – including the generation of ‘bling’ to establish social statuses and identities of various sorts. In Killing Civilization: A Reassessment of Early Urbanism and Its Consequences, Justin Jennings (2016) offers a similarly sweeping view of ancient cities contextualized within a broader critique of the concept of ‘civilization’. He challenges the popular conception that the bundle of characteristics traditionally used to define civilization evolved as a coherent package, essentially through a linear, step-like process that produces, in turn, the state, the city, social complexity, writing, high art, and class stratification. Jennings argues that this tidy reconstruction does not satisfactorily explain the variation in early urbanism that is coming to light. Instead, he argues for generating

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new theories about the origins of the state and the city that unbundle these characteristics and allow for what I would call the ‘relative autonomy’ of processes. This unbundling accommodates the possibility that the state and other forms of political complexity follow the city rather than precede it. In fact, the early city may have been associated with bottom-up, non-hierarchical, decentralized forms of complexity that impeded the development of the state and class stratification. In contrast to Michael Smith and Monica Smith, Jennings is concerned to expose the radical ‘otherness’ of the past. Many other scholars have joined together to produce volumes of papers about the early city. Yoffee’s (2009) review of the three most important recent books (M.L. Smith 2003a; Storey 2006; and Marcus and Sabloff 2008; see also Creekmore and Fisher 2014) is striking in its two major recommendations. First, the need for archaeologists to engage with modern urban theory. Second, the need for archaeologists to make cities more ‘plausible’; i.e., to give the people living in them some flesh and blood. This means explicating the tensions, struggles, successes, and ‘everydayness’ of life. Archaeology is positioned to nicely accomplish both. The first recommendation is met by the intersection of archaeology’s complex theory of objects as both mirror and metaphor with urban studies’ assemblage theory as described in Chapter 1. Both are committed to the proposition that materials have power and agency, and that there is a mutually intereffective relationship between people and things (McFarlane 2011a). The second recommendation is met by embracing ‘thick description’ (detailed explication of local context) as an interpretive methodology, something that is also, to my understanding, embraced by assemblage theory (McFarlane 2011a:221). This book heeds both of these recommendations and also intersects with assemblage theory around a third emphasis: its interest in using urban knowledge to produce an imaginary of ‘progressive cosmopolitanism that can be used to carve out strategies for alternative urbanisms’ (McFarlane 2011a:222). Ancient Experiments in Intercultural Urbanism

In this section I detail some of the novel experiments in urban social life referenced by David Carballo with a focus on how they dealt, socially and materially, with cultural diversity. I consider a number of urban configurations from Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley of India and Pakistan, East and West Africa, and the Americas.

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All qualify as multiethnic, multicultural cities. None should be taken as ‘typical’ of their time period or their cultural context. I discuss them in a way that highlights forms and principles that Richard Sennett, as discussed in Chapter 1, sees as conducive to inclusive, intercultural placemaking. Mesopotamia  Ancient Mesopotamia is generally regarded as the birthplace of cities. Almost certainly it was the birthplace of the multiethnic city. Bahrani (2006) suggests that physical features were not a basis for making ethnic distinctions in ancient Mesopotamia. Textual and visual representations of citizens evident in carved stone slabs on Assyrian palace walls from the first millennium BCE seem to mark human differences with clothes and headdresses rather than with physical features (Bahrani 2006:55–57). Thus, when people saw human difference they saw culture, not biology. Beyond that, Emberling (2015) notes that our picture of the Mesopotamian city is, as a consequence of deficiencies and gaps in archaeological data, a ‘pastiche’ stitched together from different cities and different time periods. He argues that the prevailing model is a largely static one that misses variation and nuance. Cities First  I begin with a place that has been central to debates about the first city, the World Heritage site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey (7500–6000 BCE). An early ‘megasite’ (a term used by archaeologists when a settlement’s urban status is in doubt), Çatalhöyük was first brought to the attention of planners and urban historians by Jane Jacobs. As noted above, after Mumford (1961) Jacobs was the next great urbanist to seriously engage with archaeological data. In the Economy of Cities (1969) Jacobs challenged the longstanding scholarly consensus that cities developed only after agriculture appeared in both the Old and New Worlds. Alternatively, Jacobs argued that cities arose first among hunting and gathering people as craft and trade centers. Then, the growing density of these urban agglomerations produced the creative innovations that led to agriculture. Jacobs called the original (and still mythical) dense settlement of preagricultural peoples ‘New Obsidian’. Çatalhöyük was Jacobs’ muse for New Obsidian and the inspiration for the ‘Cities First’ argument. The site is a closely packed settlement of contiguous dwellings and ritual structures that contained 5,000–8,000 people which, for some

NINEVEH MOHENJO-DARO

KHORSABAD

1000

2000 miles

0 1000 2000 kilometers

0

SONGO MNARA

CATALHOYUK

4.1  Location map of Old World cities discussed in the text

JENNÉ-JENO

NEBELIVKA

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scholars, meets the demographic requirement for city status. Scholars have recognized neighborhood organization at Çatalhöyük and identified open spaces and alleys that may have served to differentiate neighborhoods (Hodder and Pels 2010; Düring 2013). Çatalhöyük has abundant evidence of long-distance trade and craft activities. It also contains hoards of obsidian (a prized volcanic glass) and finished obsidian artifacts – the key commodity that established Çatalhöyük’s significance in a global system of exchange. In Jacobs’ view: [E]very city has a direct economic ancestry, a literal economic parentage, in a still older city or cities. New cities do not arise by spontaneous generation. The spark of city economic life is passed on from older cities to younger. It lives on today in cities whose ancestors have long since gone to dust . . . These links of life may extend – perilously tenuous at times but unbroken – backward through the cities of Crete, Phoenicia, Egypt, the Indus, Babylonia, Sumeria, Mesopotamia, back to Catal Hoyuk itself and beyond, to the unknown ancestors of Catal Hoyuk. (Jacobs 1969:178–179)

The prevailing archaeological consensus about urban origins did not crumble in the wake of Jacobs’ theorizing. Indeed, it went unnoticed or was completely ignored by many scholars in archaeology. Her formulation had better luck in urban studies and historical geography. The urban theorist and planner Edward Soja ran with Jacobs’ provocative inversion in his 2000 book Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions, and in a subsequent book chapter (Soja 2003). Soja does not suggest that the consensus view be discarded. In fact, he notes that available archaeological evidence contradicts Jacobs’ claim. But he does suggest that ‘another course of originating events may also have been involved, unrecognized by scholars who have overly narrowed the definition of the city’ (Soja 2003:28). The geographer Peter Taylor is not so restrained. In 2012 he enthusiastically endorsed the originality and utility of Jacobs’ idea (Taylor 2012). Taylor appealed to the inconclusive nature of Çatalhöyük’s archaeological record, and to the uncertainty among archaeologists about what to call Çatalhöyük. Is it a city? A town? A large village? Or, is it just a ‘very, very large village’ (Hodder 2006a:98)? Taylor

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also appealed to uncertainty around the specific dating of agriculture’s origins, and to the rumored existence of megasites earlier than Çatalhöyük. But perhaps more importantly, he saw ‘city-ness’ as a process rather than a concrete thing. This allows the city to exist around the time that agricultural economies were developing. Professional archaeologists have been unsparing in criticizing these revived Jacobsian perspectives. M.E. Smith et al. (2014) respond to Taylor by reaffirming the prevailing archaeological consensus and the evidence that supports it. They vigorously argue that Jacobs was flat out wrong about urban origins. They note that Çatalhöyük’s appearance post-dates the initial stages of cultivation by a thousand years or so. In a post on his Wide Urban World blog, M.E. Smith (2014) editorializes a bit by suggesting that the perpetuation of Jacobs’ wrong idea does speak eloquently about the decline in scholarly rigor today, and about the lack of respect for archaeology by some writers. People who ought to know better have been willing to accept interpretations about archaeology without consulting archaeologists or works, but solely on the authority of Jane Jacobs, who had no archaeological training or knowledge.

This is why, M.E. Smith (2008) suggests, archaeologists need to publish outside of archaeology. His is an opinion with which I wholeheartedly agree, and partly explains why I wrote this book. Other professional scholars and archaeologists, however, are a little more charitable than Smith toward Jacobs’ Cities First idea. In fact, they are inclined to preserve room for continuing to work with Cities First in some form. In his book The Ancient Mesopotamian City, Marc Van De Mieroop (1997:256) suggests that despite the ‘total fallacy’ of Jacobs’ statement that cities came first, she had a valid point when she stated that agricultural development benefited from urban stimuli. Monica Smith (M.L. Smith 2014:314) also notes that the Cities First model ‘requires modifications but still contains an element of truth in that cities provide significant boosts to rural productivity’ by promoting certain efficiencies of cultivation (see also M.L. Smith 2019:269–270). Finally, Justin Jennings (2016:87–113) is skeptical of much early thinking about Çatalhöyük’s urban status, but he does admit that the settlement was huge by standards of the Neolithic Near East. And, Jennings does not completely break with

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a view of Çatalhöyük as urban where he describes it as an ‘aborted city’. This qualification is a bit puzzling, because acknowledging Çatalhöyük’s urban status would be completely consistent with Jennings’ strong desire to rethink traditional concepts of civilization and prevailing narratives of urbanization. All that said, I support, with M.E. Smith, the current archaeological consensus on the relationship between agriculture and urban origins. But this should be kept open to revision, because of all the ambiguities that still bedevil interpretation of Çatalhöyük archaeology. Plus, we are finding other settlements around the world at the end of the Ice Age that problematize traditional archaeological narratives about the sequencing of cultural developments. For example, Göbekli Tepe (Schmidt 2011) is a hill-top temple complex in southeastern Turkey that dates even earlier than Çatalhöyük (dating to 9130 BCE). It features monumental enclosures and architecture in the form of monolithic pillars, some weighing up to 15 tons. Göbekli Tepe is not a one-off in terms of its unexpected age and monumentality. We see similar developments in the Americas, for example at a site called Tulan 52 in Chile dating to 3450 BCE (Núñez and Perlès 2018). As with Göbekli Tepe, Tulan 52 features significant investments by hunter-gatherers in massive, monumental stone architecture. Both phenomena suggest the existence of extensive and complex social networks that united culturally diverse peoples in complex ways. Wengrow and Graeber (2015) usefully frame the implications of sites like these. They suggest that, in contrast to conventional linear/progressive accounts of social evolution, human societies manifest forms of social and political complexity right from the get-go, and thereafter routinely alternate between relative simplicity and complexity, social equality and inequality. Given this and other evidence for early complexity it is not so farfetched to see Çatalhöyük as urban. It might even be prudent to see agriculture and cities co-evolving in a modified version of Cities First that stipulates a mutually causal and symbiotic relationship between the two. Certainly, there’s something to the idea of Çatalhöyük as urban if we focus on cities as processes as well as things. Peter Taylor (2015) outlines exactly this position in a published response to the formal critique of his work by M.E. Smith et al. (2014). Alexander Thomas (2010) takes a broadly similar position. Thomas argues that if we understand urbanization as the development of a trade network

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that allowed for urban production, then ‘urbanization predated the city by thousands of years’. There is no question that Çatalhöyük was embedded in a long-distance, effectively global trade network. Ian Hodder summarizes: Date-palm phytoliths at the site indicate that storage baskets were brought to Çatalhöyük from Mesopotamia or the Levant; shells suggest trade from the Red Sea and the Mediterranean; obsidian undoubtedly came from Cappadocia, a region about ninety miles [145 kilometers] to the northeast; oak and other timber must have come from at least as far as the nearest upland, six miles [10 kilometers] away. (Hodder 2006b)

Finally, Neil Brenner (2013:101), in keeping with his Planetary urbanization thesis and the recommendations of scholars like Jennings, proposes that the concept of urbanization requires ‘systematic reinvention’: it must be reclaimed from ‘city-centric, methodologically territorialist, and predominantly demographic traditions that have to date monopolized its deployment’ (see also Pauketat 2020:10). Liberating the concepts of ‘city’ and ‘urbanization’ from traditional definitions, and exploring perspectives that are more fluid and relational, just might open up useful new ways of interpreting historical processes in both the past and present. Even if critics of Cities First are right and Çatalhöyük arose on an agricultural base, things were happening there that speak to the evolution of something original. If that something was not the ‘city’ as traditionally understood, then perhaps it was the first stirrings of what Richard Florida (2002) has called the urban creative class. All scholars agree that Çatalhöyük remains unique for the sheer amount of art, imagery, and symbolism that is found at the site. The symbolism is everywhere, and is repeatedly elaborated in the frequent rebuilding and re-surfacing of houses and walls. This intense creative activity speaks to the cultivation of human identities at Çatalhöyük that parallels the community’s cultivation of plants and animals. These human identities likely played important roles in maintaining social order and fueling cultural innovation. In some of his early writing, Ian Hodder referred to this dynamic as the ‘domestication of society’. He very reasonably argued that building social cohesion and community in early

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aggregated settlements required the taming of humans as well as ‘the wild’; i.e., the ancestors of domesticated plants and animals. In such a dynamic and volatile context of high density living, formalizing identities of at least three different kinds would be helpful. One would be self-identity. Highly polished mirrors made from obsidian is an obvious class of artifacts that reflects this concern at Çatalhöyük. The second would be social identity. Beads are the earliest form of body ornamentation in human history, useful for communicating group affiliation, status, and other social meanings. Bead production is well-documented at Çatalhöyük. The third would be civic identity. Among Çatalhöyük’s famous wall imagery is a scene that has often been identified as the first landscape painting, cityscape, or map in human history. It shows a geometric representation of the city in its lower half with an erupting volcano in the upper half representing the nearby mountain of Hasan Dağı, a potential obsidian source for Çatalhöyük’s craftspeople. Although these claims are debatable (e.g., see Meece 2006 for an alternative interpretation of the landscape painting) there were social and cultural changes occurring at Çatalhöyük that had not been seen before and can very reasonably be interpreted as efforts to navigate cultural diversity given the settlement’s documented embeddedness in long-distance exchange relationships. This creative class preoccupation with identity-making was an outgrowth of the ‘energized crowding’ that Spiro Kostof (1991) sees as indispensable to the definition of a city. Çatalhöyük is nothing if not an exemplar of energized crowding. Jennings (2016:21) nicely captures the dynamic: ‘Creating a city from a collection of people is an alternately terrifying, intoxicating, exhausting, and mind-bending experience. It takes time to figure things out, especially when no one has done this before’. This view is echoed by John Reader (2004:19–24), who sees Çatalhöyük as suggesting a ‘psychological shift . . . a radical change in outlook’ amounting to a ‘cultural revolution’ that would eventually lead to the founding of cities. Thus, I don’t believe that Jacobs was entirely wrong about Cities First. The idea has merit if we see urbanization as process as well as product, and if we consider the concept’s demonstrated utility for spurring new thought about the history of cities. And therein lies an explanation for why I have spent so much time talking about Çatalhöyük. The concept answers Emberling’s (2015) indictment of

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urban reconstructions that are overly ‘static’, fits with Jennings’ critique of traditional urbanization narratives, and responds to Yoffee’s (2009) plea that we make ancient cities more ‘plausible’. Perhaps the best conclusion to draw about Çatalhöyük is that of Der and Issavi (2017), to whom I give the last word: In many ways, Çatalhöyük conforms to conventional expectations of an urban settlement . . . If a characteristic of urbanism is the presence of ‘high intensity social practices relative to contemporary and previous sites’ . . . then Çatalhöyük more than qualifies . . . Rather than situate Çatalhöyük within the ‘oldest town’ [or, ‘First Cities’] debate we see it as a unique opportunity to gain insight into the complexities of early urban expression . . . We opt to view it as a permanent settlement with qualities of urbanism . . . the archaeological record shows urbanism to be a culturally-particular process rather than a rigidly bound one . . . Urbanism need not be taken as a static concept but may be more productive for archaeologists as a flexible one, with a multiplicity of meanings, adaptable to a diversity of settlements and trajectories of growth and decline. We see the most fruitful insights to be gained from . . . a focus less on definitions and more on understandings of processes of community building and socialization. (Der and Issavi 2017:201–202)

Cities Next  Urban developments after Çatalhöyük are much less ambiguous and controversial. Scholars now recognize that ground zero for urban origins was in Northern Mesopotamia, beginning with Tell Brak in Syria around 3850 BCE (McMahon 2013a). Urban growth was largely organic for the first several millennia, as several small settlements coalesced (via Soja’s process of synekism) into larger entities containing streets, walls, and monumental architecture. After that, cities developed in fits and starts with occasional population declines and resurgences. This comports with what anthropologists know about the tenacity of mobile peoples to resist sedentism, and with our understanding of how just a few groups of hunter-gatherers settling down can have a significant ramifying impact on the settlement behavior of other groups. Interestingly, this process of urban growth seems to be governed by the normal mode of agricultural people provisioning households

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along kinship lines. M.L. Smith (2003b:21) notes that the average size of a residential neighborhood in early Mesopotamian cities (one hectare) approximates the size of a small agricultural village. This suggests the persistence in early cities of an organizing social structure predicated on face-to-face, kin-based relationships. Jason Ur (2014:264) argues that Mesopotamian cities acted like overgrown villages, and notes that the Mesopotamians themselves used the same word to describe settlements of any size, scale, or internal structure (see also McMahon 2013a:33). Ur (2014:262; 2016:144) also notes the architectural similarity between buildings in these cities. What we see as temples and palaces were, to Mesopotamians, recognizable as traditional houses writ large. Thus, the city and its monuments originated as a metaphorical, ‘scaled-up’ version of kinship relations. Jason Jennings (2016; 2018) makes the interesting point that early cities in Mesopotamia were characterized by moral economies (M.L. Smith 2019:219 uses the phrase ‘moral codes’) that linked the city’s prosperity with one’s own. Studies of later cities affirm that they were magnets for ethnic and cultural diversity (Otto 2015; Emberling 2015). Population sizes varied between 30,000 and 120,000 (Otto 2015). Uruk (3500 BCE) was a city of 2.5 square kilometers that pulled up to 80 percent of the population out of the surrounding countryside, effectively ruralizing it. Thus, urbanization in Mesopotamia must have seemed ‘planetary’ to the participants. Leick (2001:37) describes well-planned public spaces and ‘permeable’ buildings that were designed for maximum accessibility, with care taken to ensure easy pedestrian circulation. Only with much later Assyrian cities in the second and first millennia BCE do we see more concerted investments in urban planning, including the construction of walls, gates, processional ways, and well-ordered ceremonial precincts. However, these cities still exhibit a lot of variation and hybrid combinations of planned and unplanned areas. Plus, where informality exists it does not mean that there was an absence of central planning. Adam Smith (2003:225–226) puts it well: too strict of an adherence to the ‘organic’ vs. ‘planned’ binary risks mistaking cultural variation in aesthetics (borne of history and context) for decentralized urban planning. Juxtaposed houses of different sizes suggest social mixing. However, Keith (2003) urges caution: smaller houses could be the in-town apartments of elites who had larger villas outside the city. The diversity of these cities

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invites theory about what motivated their design and how people lived in them (Otto 2015). The sequence of cities in Assyria illustrates a few important points about urban form and function (Otto 2015). Studies of ancient Nimrud (822–723 BCE) suggest that there was lots of latitude for citizens to create and evolve their cities (Ur 2013). Informal housing was a ubiquitous feature of Mesopotamian cities. It may have even put pressure on imperial planners to make temporary interventions permanent with walls, pavements, cul-de-sacs, and other material features (Creekmore 2014). This is the great hope of tactical urbanists today: that city planners will embrace and formalize planning innovations by engaged citizens at the local, neighborhood level. Later designed capitals display some audacious exercises in city building that provide insight into unusual planning principles (Otto 2015). Khorsabad (Dur-Sharrakun) is one of them. Between 717 and 706 BCE King Sargon II constructed his visually prominent citadels directly astride city walls. In so doing Sargon worked the edge rather than the center, dramatically employing the monumental palace as an ‘exclamation point’ to mark urban space. This was clearly an exercise in projecting political power. But from the inside, the palace had a certain openness and permeability (Novak 2004; McMahon 2013b). Here, Sargon eschewed architectural symmetries – and the visual images of order and power that they communicate – in favor of asymmetries. The resulting complex plays of light and shadow produced desired sensory effects on visitors as they moved through buildings and courtyard spaces (McMahon 2013b). Indeed, the palace at Khorsabad seems as good an example as the Greek Acropolis for illustrating Hildebrand’s (1999) ideas about enticement and mystery, best exemplified by structures that channel movement between spaces that are alternately light and dark. It also supports Goldhagen’s (2017) ideas about the resonance for the human mind of patterned complexity and narrative. In any case, there is important planning and design knowledge embedded here that might be worth retrieving (Martinho 2017; Thomason 2016; Van De Mieroop 2003). Mesopotamia’s most compelling example of central planning and urban experimentation is arguably Nineveh in the reign of Sennacherib, 704–681 BCE. The city’s resident population numbered up to 75,000 people (Otto 2015). Leick (2001:231) suggests

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that Sennacherib’s ‘restless experimentation’ with innovative technical solutions to urban problems and his use of ‘flexible strategies’ in urban design make him an unusual Assyrian ruler and, for sure, a pioneering urbanist. At the time a small and run-down city, Sennacherib undertook at Nineveh a program of historic preservation, restoring dilapidated temples to previous glory. He also widened Nineveh’s public squares and plazas and straightened its streets to bring in more light. However, Sennacherib writes: If ever (anyone of) the people who dwell in that city tears down his old house and builds a new one, and the foundations of his house encroach upon the royal road, they shall impale him upon a stake on his own house. (Van De Mieroop 1997:78–79)

Otto (2015) suggests this passage indicates that the city administration had responsibility for real estate development, and that there were limits to the exercise of individual agency. In sum, Mesopotamian cities were variable and diverse right from their humble beginnings as scaled-up versions of early farming villages. They were interesting hybrids of planned and unplanned spaces. They embodied narratives about cosmology and imperial power. Architects used complex assemblages of buildings and spaces to provide dramatic sensorial experiences. Other aspects of Mesopotamian cities are unclear, including the functional nature of open spaces. We lack knowledge about urban edge zones and transitions between urban and non-urban spaces (McMahon 2013a). We also lack physical evidence of markets. McMahon (2013a) suggests, in keeping with Sennett (2018a), that edge zones may have been the locus of vibrant commercial exchange, as well as intercultural interaction. Trypillian Megasites Around the same time as the earliest Mesopotamian cities (4000–3500 BCE, contemporary with developments at Tell Brak and Uruk) megasites akin to Çatalhöyük and just as enigmatic developed in Ukraine. An accumulating literature (Gaydarska 2016 and associated commentaries; Müller et al. 2016; Chapman 2017; Diachenko and Menotti 2017; Chapman et al. 2019; Gaydarska et al. 2019) describes these settlement phenomena, debates their meaning, and puzzles over their implications for

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understanding variation in early urbanism. The largest of these settlements – Nebelivka – covers 238 hectares, comparable to Uruk at its peak. Nebelivka contains 1,500 structures, 14 residential quarters, and 160 neighborhoods. Public architecture includes twenty-three mega-structures interpreted as Assembly Houses. These appear to be regularly distributed across a city populated by up to 46,000 people coming from up to 100 kilometers away. These are short-lived settlements, occupied for only sixty to eighty years. These settlements are considered ‘low-density’ cities by their investigators (Gaydarska et al. 2019). They were highly structured using some combination of four basic planning principles. All four principles are evident at Nebelivka. These include a circular, concentric arrangement of structures, internal radial streets, sectoral growth in quarters, and an inner open space. At Nebelivka the central open area covered 65 hectares. Intriguingly, in their spatial layout Trypillian megasites bear formal similarity to Black Rock City (aka ‘Burning Man’), a contemporary utopian gathering held every year in the Nevada desert whose occupation ends with the burning of a large man-like structure at the camp’s open center. Burning Man’s large size and other city-like qualities has attracted the attention of contemporary planners (Berg 2011) and even Nobel laureates (Badger 2019). Investigators of Trypillian megasites suggest that these cities reflect determined efforts to ‘reduce social difference’, integrate multiple local identities, and cultivate a common identity using domestic architecture as well as the sharing of painted ceramics, figurines, and other material cultures (Chapman et al. 2019). Their organization appears to embody principles of social inclusion and self-expression, gift/barter economies, and civic responsibility – an ethos that has been explicitly articulated for Burning Man. There is even evidence that the settlements were purposely burned at their abandonment – which gives the comparison to Burning Man some added resonance – and then rebuilt later. It is hard to know what to make of these ‘emergent’ urban phenomena, assuming for the sake of argument that they pass muster as cities. Wengrow (2015:19) gives it a shot: they are reminders of ‘the possibilities of egalitarian organization on an urban scale’. They may contain implications for planning low-density cities today, implementing participatory design, and growing a culture of citizenship. Minimally, they disclose another novel settlement configuration that

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was present at the creation. What Der and Issavi (2017) say about Çatalhöyük also goes for Trypillian megasites: urbanism for archaeologists is best formulated not as a static concept but as a flexible one having a multiplicity of meanings and adaptable to a diversity of settlements and trajectories of growth and decline. Indus Valley  Another original cradle of civilization is located in the Indus Valley of Pakistan and western India. Developments here are comprehensively described and analyzed by Rita Wright (2010). The Indus exhibited two cycles of urbanization (Petrie 2013). I focus on the earliest, from 2600 to 1900 BCE. Five unusually large settlements from this time period have been investigated, the most famous being Mohenjo-daro and Harappa. Although there are some variations in planning and architecture (Petrie 2013; Lawler 2008), the original Indus cities have broadly similar overall layouts. They have a consistent order as evidenced by semi-orthogonal gridding, paved streets, and formal gateways into the city. An irregular, organic pattern of streets and passageways is also evident. Questions exist about the extent to which Indus cities were centrally planned. They were certainly cosmopolitan and global, as indicated by the evidence for extensive trade with Mesopotamian cities (G. Clark 2016:35). Petrie (2019:127) suggests that, like Mesopotamia, Indus cities are scaled-up versions of earlier agricultural settlements, with monumental public architecture emulating the form of earlier houses. It is interesting that Indus cities contain small blocks and abundant intersections – i.e., abundant edges – that fit securely into the cognitive and evolutionary scientist’s ideal form of a city (e.g., Sussman and Hollander 2015:31). Mohenjo-daro in Pakistan is especially interesting. The 2.5-kilometersquare city contained a population of 40,000 (Yoffee 2005). It is spatially divided into a ‘Citadel’ (an acropolis of fired brick) and a ‘Lower Town’ of modular residential architecture, separated by open space. The Citadel appears to be non-residential, limited to public buildings. Archaeologists are not sure what’s going on with the open space. An agricultural commons? Formal public space? Informal housing? Mohenjo-daro, like other Indus cities, was culturally and ethnically diverse. This is evidenced by the biological variation among individuals buried in the city’s cemeteries (Kenoyer et al. 2013; Valentine et al. 2015) and local variation in craft production techniques (M.L. Smith 2006). Immigration into the cities from the sustaining hinterland may

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have been substantial, especially during the market season. Kenoyer (2003) suggests that the population for Harappa may have swelled to 80,000 at that time. Widely shared similarities in material culture production and use – black painted/red-slipped pottery, carved steatite bowls, cubical weights, ceramic figurines, shell bangles and beads, and copper tablets (which may have functioned as coinage; see Kenoyer 2003) – bound the cities and their sustaining hinterlands together. This shared set of artifact styles and religious symbols has been interpreted as a ‘veneer’ on top of local patterns of considerable diversity (Mary Davis 2017; Petrie et al. 2017). Thus, it may have constituted a unifying ideology or civic brand that served the cause of social cohesion. Mosher (2017) provides some insight into the structure of Mohenjo-daro’s neighborhoods. He identifies multiple walled sectors and centers. However, it is interesting that neighborhood boundaries are difficult to locate. The implication is that walls functioned as permeable edges – as borders – rather than hard and fast boundaries (Sennett 2018b). There is no evidence that neighborhoods were ethnically segregated. There seems to be inequality in house sizes, and certain artifact hoards containing exotic materials are differentially distributed, but otherwise wealth differentiation appears limited. Water management in Indus cities provides a window into ‘just sustainability’ as theorized by Agyeman (2013). The system was complex. Nearly all houses contained bathing facilities. Streets incorporated numerous wells and drains. The latter moved waste out of the city via brick-lined channels. Water management also figured in the architecture of social and religious integration. Mohenjo-daro’s central Citadel featured a ‘Great Bath’ as a distinctive piece of monumental architecture. The rectangular pool measures 12 meters long by 7 meters wide by 2.5 meters deep. It may have played a role in religious purification and public cleansing rituals. M.L. Smith (2006) suggests that the health of citizens across the Indus was generally pretty good, perhaps as a consequence of urban water infrastructure. Certainly, Mohenjo-daro’s system of water management is as historically significant as the nineteenth-century infrastructural innovations and improvements made in Paris under Baron GeorgesEugène Haussmann or in London under Joseph Bazelgette. Thus, it is reasonable to see Mohenjo-daro as our earliest example of the ‘Eco-City’.

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Where civic administration is concerned Mohenjo-daro yields no images of individual rulers, no burials of kings or queens, and no evidence of a ruler cult (Blanton and Fargher 2008:62; B. Chase et al. 2014; Yoffee 2016). The evidence for palaces is ambiguous. Vidale (2010) suggests that larger houses might be the residences of elites because some of them have a physical form that mirrors that of the Great Bath. More interesting is Adam Green’s (2018) identification of distinctive small structures that existed near public spaces and street intersections. These buildings had thick walls and multiple entrances. They were ‘permeable’ and became more so over time. These structures may have served as places where distinct social groups negotiated their differences (see also Petrie 2019). They may be public ‘third spaces’: ancient analogues for Amin’s (2006) ‘prosaic spaces of civic inculcation’, Wood and Landry’s (2008) ‘spaces of day to day exchange’, or Anderson’s (2011) ‘cosmopolitan canopies’. If there were palaces at Mohenjo-daro they may not have been for the elite, but rather they may have been intended as ‘palaces for the people’ (Klinenberg 2018). The positive evidence in the Indus for well-provisioned cities offering extensive and equitable access to life sustaining resources, public amenities, and consumer goods suggest the early manifestation of a sharing economy (McLaren and Agyeman 2015:88–89). The absence of evidence for hierarchical rulership suggests collective governance combining some form of centralized authority with strong citizen autonomy at the local level. In other words, a system of ‘heterarchical’ decision-making and power-sharing among corporate groups. Carole Crumley offers the authoritative definition of heterarchy within archaeology: Heterarchy may be defined as the relation of elements to one another when they are unranked or when they possess the potential for being ranked in a number of different ways. For example, power can be counterpoised rather than ranked. Thus, three cities might be the same size but draw their importance from different realms: one hosts a military base, one is a manufacturing center, and the third is home to a great university. (Crumley 1995:3)

Kenoyer (quoted in Lawler 2008) suggests a model for Indus cities of polycentric power among competing elites who negotiated across a

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wide landscape. It is not clear that Indus cities were divided by function or role in the way that Crumley describes in her hypothetical example. However, the whole appears to have been bound together by a unifying civic culture or identity as evidenced by the veneer of shared artifact styles and religious symbols. Sub-Saharan Africa  Within Africa, the ancient city in Egypt has long been the focus of scholarly and popular interest. There are longstanding scholarly debates about the kind of urbanism Egypt represents and its relevance for today. One early view suggested that, because of the absence of good settlement evidence, Egypt was a ‘civilization without cities’ (Wilson 1960). That view is now rejected, and the debate about Egyptian urbanism is more nuanced (Bard 2008). As noted earlier, Marcuse (2002) brings Egyptian cities into the contemporary debate about urban segregation. Smith et al. (2015) bring them within the scope of a comparative urbanism by noting similarities between worker compounds at the imperial capital of Amarna and company towns in the USA and Latin America. Africa south of the Sahara, on the other hand, has always been a blind spot in global histories of urbanization. This long history of neglect is related to the ‘colonial imagination’ that saw Africa as essentially rural in character, consisting of undifferentiated villages of mud and thatch huts (McIntosh and McIntosh 2003). If Africa was urban at all, the condition was imposed from without; e.g., via contacts with the urban Islamic world. Alternatively, the anthropologists Comaroff and Comaroff (2012) regard the African continent as an essential source of theory precisely because of its presumed otherness. Myers (2011) sees Africa as perfectly situated to contribute to debates about urban inequality, exclusion, service provision, shared culture and identity, and the meaning of cosmopolitanism. West Africa  The West African (Mali) city of Jenné-jeno, dating to 400–800 CE, is important and instructive as an early example of an ecologically and socially conscious urbanism. The essential source is work by Roderick and Susan McIntosh (S. McIntosh 1997; McIntosh and McIntosh 2003; R. McIntosh 2005). The Jenné-jeno

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urban complex consists of several clustered mound-based communities distributed within a 4-kilometer radius along the margins of the Niger River. Its population totaled up to 40,000 people. The mound centers appear to have been ethnically distinct but functionally interdependent, guided by principles of specialized craft production and the reciprocal exchange of goods and services within a generalized economy. This made good ecological sense in a dynamic and unpredictable environment characterized by high inter-annual variability in subsistence production. Unlike Ancient Egypt, however, Jenné-jeno was not stratified politically. Evidence for a dominating ruling class has never been found. McIntosh and McIntosh (2003) suggest that power was shared horizontally between corporate groups; that is, the governance was heterarchical. M.L. Smith (2006:116) sees clear similarities between Jenné-jeno and Indus cities in this regard. It is intriguing that although separated by 2,500 to 3,000 years, Indus and West African cities implemented some of the same integrating or unifying principles while creating very different kinds of urban settlement: concentrated settlement in the Indus, clustered settlement along the Niger. Both developed overlapping domains of authority and unifying civic ideologies reflected by distinctive material assemblages. It is unlikely that Jenné-jeno’s unique ‘clustered cities’ model of urban settlement can be transferred wholesale to today. But the case study retains some relevance for imagining how eco-social interdependence among heterogeneous groups and its accompanying unifying ideology might be constructed within contemporary cities. Indeed, we might be seeing some reflections of this ethos in the self-organizing qualities of the bottom-up, informal urbanism that characterizes the favelas and barrios of today’s mega-cities in the Global South. East Africa  The Swahili Coast is a second case study from SubSaharan Africa that has more direct relevance. Urbanization occurred here between 500 and 1500 CE. The form was very different than that of Jenné-jeno. Walled ‘stonetowns’ were constructed out of rough coral and mortar. Evidence suggests that the stonetowns are an indigenous urban form, not imposed from without (i.e., by contact with the Islamic world) as previously thought (Patel 2014). But the stonetowns were clearly embedded in global networks. They were

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outward looking, oriented to economic opportunities provided by international trade. Like Mesopotamia and the Indus, the cities drew people from afar afield: the immediate hinterlands as well as India and the Far East. Political leaders attracted followers (and ‘wealth in people’) by appealing to traditional forms of ancestor veneration. This produced multiethnic, cosmopolitan cities. Wynne-Jones (2018) categorizes coastal settlements as ‘emporia’: places where a mixed population came together. Bissell (2018:599) describes them as centers of ‘extraversion, creative incorporation, and flexible adaptation’. Kusimba (2008) notes that town-hinterland relationships before 1500 CE were inclusive and non-coercive. This would change after 1500 with the onset of the global slave trade. The stonetown of Songo Mnara provides an especially good window into the social and material dynamics of Swahili cities. Songo Mnara is located in southern Tanzania, and was occupied between 1355 and 1500 CE (Fleisher 2010). Its relatively short occupation and quick abandonment provide high data resolution (Wynne-Jones and Fleisher 2015) and excellent insight into how citizens ‘dwelled’, in Pardy’s (2009) sense. The city features a couple dozen housing blocks loosely arranged around three large open spaces with an enclosing wall. There are six mosques, four cemeteries, and elevated palace complexes in the southwest and northeast sections of the city. Economic production ‘territories’ cross-cut social divisions (WynneJones and Fleisher 2016). Surrounding and subdividing walls were constructed less for protection than for symbolic purposes. They marked the city as ‘cultured space’, inviting interaction from afar (LaViolette and Fleisher 2004:340). They also signaled, to foreign traders and investors, political and economic stability and credit worthiness (Bissell 2018:591; Robertshaw 2019:151). Walls were part of the performance of cosmopolitanism (LaViolette 2008). So too were the causeways that connected the city to the coast. Indeed, the entire material assemblage represents a monumental architecture of cosmopolitanism (Pollard et al. 2012). Of particular interest are the open spaces at Songo Mnara (Fleisher 2014). They defy classification according to the Western binary of public/private. Instead, they are versatile, multifunctional, and inclusive: excellent examples of Sennett’s ‘synchronous spaces’ design form. They hosted public ceremonies and performances. But they also allowed room for urban gardens, trade kiosks, and workshops (shell

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and stone bead making, iron smithing). Perhaps most strikingly, they accommodated informal housing. Earthen houses existed alongside public amenities and performance spaces (Fleisher 2014). In many cases houses were nestled up against city walls (Fleisher and WynneJones 2012), indicating that walls in Swahililand were both resistant and permeable: Sennett’s borders. The informal housing would have been in full view of elites in their elevated palaces. This situation calls into question the ability of elites to exert full control over public space. The occupants of earthen houses appear to have had roughly proportionate access to the same kinds of goods as those in the elite houses, including coins and expensive imported pottery (Patel 2014). Thus, Songo Mnara seems a good example of how a city’s public spaces can be dedicated to ‘mixed public use, without excessive surveillance, gating, privatization, or humiliation of minorities’ (Amin 2006:1017; Low 2004). In this combination of qualities Songo’s spaces also may have literally possessed what Sennett (2013:394–395) describes as the power of teatro mundi (theater of the world): the precise quality that separates active and vivacious public spaces from those that are monofunctional, well-ordered, and devoid of life. Many years ago Richard Hull (1976:127) suggested that African cities ‘were at once utilitarian, ornamental, and humane’. Urban living ‘radiated a spirit of mutual aid and cooperation, of civility and gentility’. More recently Lawhon et al. (2013), adopting a Provincial, ordinary cities perspective, highlight the ‘variety of logics’ that structure African cities. Steyn (2007) likewise marvels at their physical and social organizational variation. The ancient Sub-Saharan cities of Jenné-jeno and Songo Mnara provide a sense of what Hull, Lawhon et al., and Steyn are talking about. Although defining opposite ends of a settlement form and governance continuum, with clustered/heterarchical at one end and enclosed/hierarchical at the other, Jenné-jeno and Songo Mnara are potentially rich in insights about how to employ urban forms predicated on inclusion rather than exclusion (Fleisher 2010). In Jenné-jeno’s case, the forms were put in the service of a just sustainability; in Songo’s, to the creation of a genuinely cosmopolitan attitude. Mesoamerica  Cities developed in many areas of Central and South America well before the time of the European conquest. As with

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CHACO CANYON

CHUNCHUCMIL

TEOTIHUACAN CARACOL

0

1000

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0 1000 2000 3000

CAHOKIA

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4.2  Location map of New World cities discussed in the text

other regions, we see physical and implied political variation right at the origins of urbanization. However, the Americas are not given sufficient attention as wellsprings of interesting urbanism. The 900-page Oxford Handbook of Cities in World History (P. Clark 2013) ignores the pre-conquest Americas with the exception of passing reference in one chapter (Fernández-Armesto 2013). As M.E. Smith (2013) notes in a review on his blog, indigenous cities in the Americas were substantial

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enough in their form, geographical reach, and cultural impact to warrant chapter-length treatment in any comprehensive compendium of cities in world history, if we understand ‘history’ to include the entire time period of human existence on the planet and not just time periods for which we have written records. Yet, indigenous urbanisms go largely unrecognized and unappreciated by urban historians. The earliest expression of urban society in Mesoamerica is among Olmec peoples in the Veracruz and Tabasco areas of Mexico at 1200 BCE. The major Olmec settlement of La Venta establishes the fundamental, time-honored Mesoamerican urban configuration of a planned, central ceremonial core containing monumental buildings aligned to the cardinal directions, with houses of subjects scattered in the jungle beyond (M.E. Smith 2017). The impression is one of hierarchical, autocratic governance. But this appears to be just one of a number of early possibilities. The existence of an urbanism predicated on equity and just sustainability is implicated by findings at the city of Tres Zapotes (Pool and Loughlin 2016; 2017; Wade 2017a; 2017b). Tres Zapotes started as a minor, outlying center in La Venta’s sphere of influence. Around 400 BCE it came into its own as a political force after La Venta’s influence waned. Christopher Pool (cited in Wade 2017a) suggests that the city was built on mass migration of presumably ethnically distinct people from La Venta and elsewhere. But the city is distinctively different in both physical form and implied form of governance compared to La Venta. Monumental architecture is distributed in four separate plazas as opposed to one single large plaza as at La Venta. These four plazas are evenly spaced throughout the city. Their layouts are nearly identical, and are likely laden with cosmological significance. Ceramics from the plazas are similar in style and technique, implying contemporaneity as well as a broad social equity. The overall message here is consistent with what we see in places like the Indus and West Africa: collective governance, power-sharing among participant groups, heterarchy rather than hierarchy. Tres Zapotes might be a concrete realization of Yoffee’s (2016) ‘infrastructures of resistance’ to formal power. Yoffee emphasizes that, in his use, infrastructures are social, referring to groups of people and their leaders who are not part of formal governing institutions. But the infrastructures may have also been physical. The two may have allowed Tres Zapotes to persevere through whatever external

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conditions brought about the decline of La Venta in 400 BCE. Tres Zapotes was very long-lived, persisting to 300 CE. The diversity of the city may have required different factions to cooperate if all were to achieve some measure of stability, resilience, and sustainability. The organizational and material principles allowing this should be of compelling interest to critical urbanists. The Basin of Mexico  Even research on some singularly impressive and influential cities that we thought we had figured out are yielding new and surprising insights about ancient urbanization, and in turn suggesting the need for new concepts and theories. As noted in a previous section, the great metropolis of Teotihuacan in the northeastern Basin of Mexico conforms to general urban scaling laws as established by scientific urbanology. But it also represents a break in the social and cultural history of Mesoamerica. The city was of unprecedented size and population for a Mesoamerican city. It covered 20 square kilometers. The latest demographic studies establish a population of 100,000 (M.E. Smith et al. 2019). Teotihuacan was also unprecedented in terms of its formal planning and the size and scale of its monuments (M.E. Smith 2017). The entire city was orthogonally planned. It contained housing that was never seen before, in the form of more than 2,000 standardized apartment compounds (Nichols 2016:16). Another planning innovation – the Central Avenue of Dead aligned on a north–south axis – served as an armature for planning civic monuments and apartment compounds. M.E. Smith (2017) describes Teotihuacan as an ‘anomaly’. The reasons behind this strike me as far more interesting than the city’s conformance to general scaling laws. Teotihuacan was populated via immigration. As with Uruk, Teotihuacan was a powerful magnet attracting people from throughout the region. Cowgill (2003; 2015) supports an earlier finding that 80–90 percent of the people in the Basin of Mexico lived there. As with Uruk, the conjoined processes of extreme urbanization and ruralization must have seemed planetary to anyone living in the region (Yoffee 2005; Clayton 2015). The resident population was socially heterogeneous, multiethnic, and linguistically diverse, a product of immigration from the Gulf Coast and the west (Spence et al. 2005). These migrations are evidenced by the existence of at least three distinctive ethnic enclaves at Teotihuacan identified on

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the basis of burial practices, pottery styles, and studies of human biology (York et al. 2011). The most well-known immigrant enclaves are the Oaxacan Barrio at the southwest edge of the city, the Michoacan Compound at the west edge, and the Merchants Barrio to the east (Manzanilla 2009; contributors to Manzanilla 2017). This pattern of enclavization bears some conformance to Sjoberg’s spatial model of the pre-industrial city. Teotihuacan’s ethnic diversity clearly produced a dynamic, creative urban society as evidenced by the production of fine craft items and lavish sumptuary goods made from jadeite, travertine, and other exotic materials (Manzanilla 2015). Although as centrally planned as one ancient city could get, there is still ample evidence at Teotihuacan for considerable citizen autonomy and control; for ‘bottom-up expression of local group and individual interests’ (Cowgill 2015:127). Apartment compounds were constructed as open form shells with courtyards and patios. They varied internally in terms of furnishings and activities. They were routinely expanded, re-modeled, improvised, and adjusted (Cowgill 2015:157). Material differences between compounds likely expressed differences in status, class, occupation, and ethnicity (Nichols 2016:16). There was social and economic mixing at the neighborhood level, and even within apartment compounds. Perhaps most interestingly and surprisingly, a lot of informal, ‘insubstantial’ housing existed alongside the formal, planned apartment compounds (Clayton 2015). Robertson (2008) suggests that as much as 15 percent of Teotihuacan’s population lived in insubstantial housing (see also Stanley et al. 2016). It also appears that citizens at Teotihuacan, unlike those at Nineveh under Sennacherib, could take liberties encroaching upon the orthogonal street grid without losing life or limb. Cowgill (2015:157) notes that the spacious entryway of one household jogged far out into the street. Work at Teotihuacan has produced other unexpected findings. One is the surprising and counterintuitive finding that the city has an extremely low Gini coefficient of 0.12 (Kohler et al. 2017:621). Elites probably clustered at the center of the city and likely enjoyed the best access to city services (Stanley et al. 2016; Dennehy et al. 2016). However, the Gini and other data suggest that there was broad economic equity, prosperity, and social mobility (but see M.E. Smith et al. 2019 who suggest that the Gini coefficient for Teotihuacan might be too low given new analysis of excavated residences). In any event,

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civic organization seemed successful at overcoming the frictions of distance that are typically associated with a large, sprawling metropolis. It is also surprising, given the scale and complexity of the city, that political governance of this highly ordered and multiethnic polity was more collective than autocratic. As with Indus cities, there is no evidence of royal palaces (M.E. Smith 2017; Yoffee 2016) and no depictions in the civic art of individual leaders or political dynasties. Scholars vigorously debate the precise form of Teotihuacan governance (Froese and Manzanilla 2018). Linda Manzanilla (quoted in Wade 2017b) argues for governance by a council of four leaders, each representing a different quadrant of the city. This constitutes another version of the collective, heterarchical governance scheme that is evidenced elsewhere (e.g., West Africa, the Indus). And, with those other cases, Teotihuacan further substantiates Jennings’ (2016) belief that we need to rethink the traditional narrative about the rise of cities and civilization. Leaders and citizens at Teotihuacan seem to have successfully harnessed diversity and cultural creativity on a collective governance model that generated wide prosperity. Almost certainly shared cosmological beliefs had something to do with this (M.E. Smith 2018). This city, like the others considered here, combined numerous features and processes of an intercultural character that we can mine for insights that are potentially applicable to open, inclusive city building today. After Teotihuacan urban patterns in the Valley revert to the older ancestral pattern that was first expressed at La Venta. The Aztecs would emulate some aspects of Teotihuacan materiality – a monumental core, orthogonal planning – to create their imperial capital at Tenochtitlan after 1300 CE (M.E. Smith 2017). Teotihuacan likely figured prominently in the Aztec creation myth, and we know that Aztecs made pilgrimages to the old city. However, Aztec governance was predicated on hierarchy and a strong ruler cult. Interestingly, Teotihuacan-style collaborative governance seems to have been revived at the city of Tlaxcallan, a smaller polity located east of Tenochtitlan and occupied at the same time. Tlaxcallan was likely populated by refugees from Aztec domination (Wade 2017b). The form of the built environment reflects, at least in part, a different form of government. Tlaxcallan was organized into twenty neighborhoods each focused on its own plaza. Twenty-four plazas

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in total are distributed throughout the city. There are no substantial pyramids and a palace has not yet been identified. Residential areas are uniform in style and reflect minimal social differentiation. David Carballo (quoted in Wade 2017b) suggests that the city represents ‘the opposite of ethnic nationalism’; it may have been another case of urbanism for all. Tlaxcallan may have been to Tenochtitlan what Tres Zapotes was to La Venta: both a physical and social infrastructure of resistance to autocratic power (Yoffee 2016). The Maya Lowlands The Mayan world of lowland Mexico and Central America is a particularly rich area of urban archaeological study. Like everywhere else, scholars are discovering lots of variation in the physical composition of Mayan cities and, by extension, variation in political structures, social life, and governing ideologies. For example, Wade (2018) describes Nixtun-Ch’ich’, a city in Guatemala built on a grid 400 years before Teotihuacan that may have embedded in its physical plan a distinctive creation myth involving pervasive crocodile symbolism. Caracol  Diane and Arlen Chase’s work at Caracol provides a particularly comprehensive picture of Mayan urbanism (Chase and Chase 2017). It is a picture that also lends itself to direct conceptual comparison with cities today. Caracol (600–900 CE) was the center of an expansive (200 square kilometers) and well-integrated landscape of large and small settlements, intensively cultivated agricultural terraces, and nearly 2,000 water reservoirs (A.S.Z. Chase 2016a). The prominence and sophistication of this agricultural landscape has earned for Caracol the moniker of a ‘Garden City’ (Chase and Chase 1998), after Ebenezer Howard’s (1898) classic formulation. The population of the city is estimated to have been 100,000 at 650 CE. The population density of the downtown core is figured at 940 people per square kilometer, roughly in-between the density of modern Boston and Philadelphia (A.S.Z. Chase 2016b:16). The built environment consisted of a central monumental core connected by dendritic causeways to outlying settlements that the Chase’s, following Garreau (1991), describe as ‘Edge Cities’ (Chase and Chase 2007). Indeed, the entire Caracol cityscape can be seen as constituting an ancient form of Transit Oriented Development.

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As much as we moderns might like to think so, urban agriculture is not a new thing. For the residents of Caracol and those of many other ancient cities agriculture was a fully integrated urban activity for many millennia (Isendahl 2012; Chase and Chase 2016). Caracol’s built environment, especially its system of reservoirs, reflects an adaptation to local landscape hydrology (Chase and Cesaretti 2019). Residents enjoyed equitable access to monumental reservoirs in the urban core as well as hundreds of smaller residential reservoirs distributed around the landscape (A.S.Z. Chase 2019). Indeed, it seems that the Maya and other Mesoamerican cultures made no theoretical or practical distinction between urban and rural, and that their cosmology was one that emphasized a conservationist ethic (Lucero 2018). Maya cities might in fact provide a useful guide for re-imagining urban–rural relationships today (Isendahl and Smith 2013; Garrison et al. 2019). Given the extent of this continuous ‘conurban’ (Garrison et al. 2019:143) landscape, citizens would have produced most of their own food. Food deserts were unlikely, even with extensive sprawl (compare with today; see Hamidi 2019). Plazas and markets were also evenly distributed around this landscape (A. Chase et al. 2015). They guaranteed resident access to a variety of exotic goods that could not be produced locally, including obsidian, marine shell, salt, and jadeite. Other objects (polychrome pottery, ritual containers, and incensarios) were so widely distributed that they likely reflect a common ritual (and civic) identity that helped to integrate the entire polity. This seems comparable to the veneer of widely shared material objects and symbols that characterized Indus cities. Arlen and Diane Chase (2009) take this distribution as reflecting a ‘symbolic egalitarianism’ that served the interests of citizens as well as their political leaders who, more likely than not, occupied a well-established administrative hierarchy but without anywhere near total power over their subjects. As at Mohenjo-daro and other Indus cities, Caracol’s shared identity was likely instrumental in helping to generate civic prosperity and overall good citizen health (Chase and Chase 2017). The prosperous middle class at Caracol certainly challenges some of the assumptions made about pre-modern cities, including the popular one that they consisted of a rich elite and a vast, impoverished working population (e.g., Gilbert 2013). The Gini coefficient of 0.34 for Caracol is

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impressively low (A.S.Z. Chase 2017; Kohler et al. 2017:621). It is not as low as Teotihuacan (0.12) but it is lower than the Mayan average (0.53). This broad prosperity is a function of equitable access to food, water, exotic goods, and public space. In fact, Caracol appears to have achieved what some leading urbanists suggest metropolitan areas need today: a polycentric, well-connected plan with good urban fabric in the suburbs (Mehaffy 2018; 2019). Chunchucmil  An ancient Mayan city less well known to popular audiences but perhaps as rich as Caracol with implications for urbanism today is the city of Chunchucmil, in northwest Yucatan. Scott Hutson, a co-director of the archaeological field research at Chunchucmil, has synthesized most of what we know about the structure and form of the city in his book The Ancient Urban Maya: Neighborhoods, Inequality, and Built Form (2016). Much of what follows is indebted to his synthesis. Chunchucmil dates to the middle of the Classic period in Maya history, 400–600 CE. Its urban area covers 20–25 square kilometers. Its peak population was 40–45,000. The population density of over 3,000 people per square kilometer in the city’s 6-square-kilometer center exceeds the density of many modern cities. Some 10,000 structures have been mapped at Chunchucmil, grouped into over 1,400 house compounds bordered by stone walls or albarradas. The city lacks a single civic-ceremonial core defined by a huge templeplaza complex, making Chunchucmil an unusual Mayan city in terms of monumental architecture. The city lacks a ‘regal-ritual’ character. Instead, the city contains over a dozen monumental compounds or quadrangles having modestly sized ‘patios’ and temples only 6–18 meters high. These quadrangles served as civic-ceremonial focal points for several distinct residential neighborhoods. Interestingly, the quadrangles repeat on a larger scale the layout of domestic groups, a social and perhaps moral code that also characterized Mesopotamia and the Indus. Like Teotihuacan, Chunchucmil lacks free-standing carved monuments that glorify individual rulers or ruling dynasties. Thus, it is another city that appears to have been collectively governed. Chunchucmil’s relevance for thinking about cities today is established in other ways. First, its public spaces look very secular. They don’t appear to be designed to accommodate large groups of citizens

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and pilgrims. Second, Chunchucmil is located in an area of marginal agricultural productivity. Soils are poor, rainfall is scarce, and yields are low. Although we cannot rule out some infield agriculture (Fisher 2014), the disconnect between agricultural marginality and high population density, plus the city’s secularized character, alerts us to a different reason for its existence: as a commercial center in desirable products. These likely included obsidian and especially salt. Third, the largest public space in the city is a centrally located marketplace with capacity for up to 500 stalls and 1,000 people (Hutson 2016:196–198). Smaller open spaces throughout the city were perhaps given to the same function. Various other services related to commercial activity were also likely on offer, in the areas of transportation, security, hospitality, and entertainment. Thus, if Caracol was a Garden City, Chunchucmil was a Market City. Chunchucmil’s density and commercialized economy enhance the relevance of whatever lessons the city has to teach for contemporary urban planning and design. Neighborhoods at Chunchucmil are clearly identifiable and arranged in a distinctive, for the Mayan world, hub-and-spoke pattern radiating out from the central core. Raised processional avenues called sacbes connect monumental compounds to each other and, to some extent, to neighborhoods. Hutson argues that the hub-andspoke plan strongly encouraged regular and intense face-to-face interaction among neighborhood residents while simplifying access to the civic-ceremonial compounds and the central marketplace. Interestingly, this radial/concentric model is akin to that characterizing Trypillian megasites. The public spaces (patios) at the monumental compounds were large enough to accommodate all of the residents of a particular neighborhood. The city’s physical framework accomplished this without impeding the freedom of residents to circulate more widely via other streets (callejuelas) and pathways. The hub-and-spoke pattern and the cross-cutting pathways are reminiscent of some African settlements not considered here; for example, the Ibo of Nigeria. Their use of such a plan made for efficient use of space and increased feelings of intimacy while also offering escape from uncomfortable encounters (Hull 1976). As discussed previously, residential mixing by ethnicity and wealth is relatively commonplace in ancient cities. The amount of ethnic diversity at Chunchucmil is unknown, but evidence is abundant for

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the existence of wealth differences between households. Although Chunchucmil’s prosperity depended on wealth moving into and out of it, the city seems to have avoided the residential segregation by income that, in our modern context, normally goes with that territory. Household wealth at Chunchucmil is measured by architectural volume and domestic yard, or solare, size. Simply put, the greater the volume of architecture in a house lot, and the more solare space, the wealthier the household. Detailed analysis of one neighborhood showed that richer and poorer households lived side by side at Chunchucmil. These households shared boundary walls and streets. The Gini coefficients calculated by Hutson for Chunchucmil average around 0.58, suggesting economic inequalities between house­ holds. As noted, the average Gini for a number of other ancient Mayan cities is 0.53. These Gini values are in line with the values that have been generated for modern cities including those marked by strong residential segregation of people based on wealth. For example, Chicago’s Gini coefficient hovers around 0.52, St. Louis’s around 0.50, and New York City’s around 0.54. However, Chunchucmil’s neighborhoods departed from the modern norm in that they mixed residents at different income levels. It is also likely that the neighborhoods mixed occupations and perhaps even ethnicities. But interestingly enough, all households at Chunchucmil appear to have enjoyed roughly equal access to important commercial goods like salt and obsidian. These commodities were widely distributed across house lots in every neighborhood at Chunchucmil. This suggests that regional commerce linked all of Chunchucmil’s households, despite their inequalities and differences of kin and culture, into overlapping and interdependent social networks or, perhaps, what Hutson and his co-authors call ‘cooperative associations’ (Magnoni et al. 2014:167). Like Caracol, Chunchucmil’s long-term prosperity may have depended upon equitable inclusion of its citizens, however unequal they were in other ways, into the urban and wider regional economy. Evidence for this is the extension of the practice of albarrada construction in the urban core outwards to the city’s residential periphery. Here, there was no particular need for residents to delineate house lots with stone walls. Yet they did it anyway, perhaps as a symbolic marker of shared identity (and a shared urban imaginary) with those living closer to the city center. If so, residents at Chunchucmil may

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have participated in a shared materiality akin to the veneers that we have already described for Mohenjo-daro and Caracol. Walkability, connectivity, prosperity, social mixing. If all of this sounds like New Urbanism, that’s because it is. Analysis of Chunchucmil in light of our contemporary urban condition suggests that the ancient Maya were effectively practicing and living by the tenets of New Urbanism – but actually realizing that paradigm’s elusive goal of social and economic mixing – 1,500 years before the term was invented by Western architects and planners (Hutson and Welch 2019). A check of New Urbanism’s Charter (Congress for the New Urbanism 2000) indicates that Chunchucmil successfully realized every one of its most important principles: •• a ‘coherent and supportive physical framework’ with clearly defined neighborhoods and corridors; •• neighborhoods ‘diverse in use and population’; •• ‘Universally accessible public spaces and community institutions’; •• a ‘regional economy that benefits people of all incomes’; •• ‘Citizen-based participatory planning and design’, reflected by the freedom that Chunchucmil’s residents apparently had to make bottom-up decisions about albarrada and callejuela construction and the use of open space. Chunchucmil also illustrates formal aspects of Sennett’s open city: low walls, permeable edges, ample pathways, and co-produced, synchronous public spaces. Whatever inequality existed at Chunchucmil was likely experienced very differently than how citizens experience inequality today. Chunchucmil would not have been exceptional in this regard. A similar situation may have obtained in the other ancient cities discussed in this chapter. For example, Steyn (2007:62–63) makes the case that African urbanism was an intimate ‘urbanism of villages’ of the sort celebrated by New Urbanists. North America  In his article ‘Civilization in Color: The Multicultural City in Three Millennia’ Xavier de Souza Briggs (2004) compellingly argues that our best historical examples of well-functioning pluralist cities are ancient Rome and medieval Córdoba. Both were shaped by explicit commitments to cosmopolitan city building. These commitments were driven, however, by autocratic rule. I have already

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discussed several ancient examples of diverse, intercultural cities that were developed on democratic or collective grounds. Some of them are separated by vast amounts of space and time: Mohenjo-daro in the Indus Valley and Teotihuacan in the Basin of Mexico. But even places not generally considered in discussions of urbanism might qualify as cosmopolitan success stories. An argument like the one M.E. Smith made for Mesoamerica can also be made for ancient North America. If Mesoamerica is Mars to urban historians then North America is Neptune – a place that lies even further beyond the orbit of world urbanism. But North America has two good examples that qualify as urban in the sense used here. Both are recognized as historic sites that can be easily visited by citizens: Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site in East St. Louis Illinois, and Chaco Culture National Historic Park in northwest New Mexico. The residents of Cahokia were ancestral to Eastern Woodlands Indian groups; those at Chaco to contemporary Pueblo Indians of the American Southwest. There is good evidence derived from studies of material culture and human biology that both Cahokia and Chaco were multiethnic polities (see Alt 2006 and Emerson and Hedman 2016 on Cahokia; Schillaci 2003, Wills 2009, contributors to Heitman and Plog 2015, and Lekson 2018 on Chaco). Cahokia was a sprawling metropolis covering 20 square kilometers and containing huge, earthen conical and platform mounds and clearly differentiated public space. It housed up to 20,000 people (Pauketat et al. 2015 provide an overview; see also contributors to Pauketat and Alt 2015). As at Teotihuacan, many of those residents were immigrants from elsewhere who were attracted by the city’s power. The city sits in an environment of very rich agricultural potential and is at the nexus of many exchange corridors defined by interior rivers and streams. However, the bigger draw for residents may have been socio-religious or cosmological. At its height in 1100 CE tens of thousands additional people identified with Cahokia over an area of 2,000 square kilometers. Cahokia also created an impact felt hundreds of kilometers away. It was comparable in size to its contemporaries London and Paris. The Mesoamerican archaeologist John Clark notes that if you found Cahokia in the Mayan lowlands its urban status would not be in doubt; indeed, ‘it would be a top ten of all Mesoamerican cities’ (quoted in Lawler 2011).

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More questionable as an urban entity is the so-called ‘Chaco Phenomenon’ of the American Southwest, which flourished between 1050 and 1150 CE. Its development was roughly contemporaneous with that of Cahokia. The questions persist despite a long history of archaeological investigations and a vast literature (see Plog et al. 2017 for a summary of interpretive positions). The Chaco Phenomenon is centered on a collection of twelve, multi-story sandstone masonry ‘Great Houses’ containing hundreds of rooms each located in Chaco Canyon, northwest New Mexico. But the urban landscape extends well beyond this ‘downtown’ canyon core. A sustaining hinterland contains up to 300 outlying masonry pueblos of similar architectural style. The farthest outlier is 250 kilometers away from the central canyon. The entire network of settlements was connected by 650 kilometers of roadways. This road network covered the entire Four Corners area of the American Southwest, extending out of New Mexico into the surrounding states of Arizona, Colorado, and Utah. About 2,500 people lived full-time in the downtown core and 60–100,000 more plugged into the network over 100 square kilometers. If this is urbanism it is urbanism of a dispersed nature, and easily gives Caracol a run for its money as an example of a complex, networked landscape. In fact, Lekson (2018) uses the term altepetl, borrowed from Mesoamerican archaeology, to insist that Chaco was a bona fide city. Altepetl is an urban form distinguished by a central capital surrounded by up to 75 square kilometers of farmland, and governed on a rotating or shared basis that prevented development of hereditary claims to rulership. The earthen mounds at Cahokia and the sandstone Great Houses at Chaco are clearly monumental. They were arranged and sequenced in coherent spatial patterns, involving principles of cardinality and oriented to the movement of the sun, moon, and perhaps other heavenly bodies. They likely materialized mythic narratives about ancestral origins and the relationship of people to the cosmos. These architectures and monumental landscapes were theatrical exercises and likely produced in their users (immigrants at Cahokia; mostly pilgrims at Chaco) exactly the kinds of embodied architectural experiences celebrated by cognitive scientists and described in Chapter 3. They tapped into human nature and evolutionary memory, and they almost certainly had a political purpose. It is intriguing that Fritz (1978) identifies specific forms of ‘rotating symmetry’ in the ritual

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architecture of Chaco great houses and also among Great Houses at a regional scale that may be a symbolic reflection of commitments to alteptl forms of rotating governance. Also intriguing is the fact that both Cahokia and Chaco ‘powered up’ as urban phenomena right around the time that Córdoba was enjoying its ‘Golden Century’, i.e., between 929 and 1031 CE. It has always struck me that there was something in the air during this century and the one immediately following (what might be called the ‘Long Twelfth Century, 1050–1200 CE), that propelled cultures in North America and elsewhere towards long-distance interactions and inspired local investments in monumental placemaking. That ‘something’ is still rather elusive (but see Lekson and Peregrine 2004). The specific social meaning of Cahokian and Chacoan archaeological patterns is not entirely clear. Unlike Teotihuacan, Cahokia does not conform to laws of urban scaling as established by scientific urbanologists (Peregrine et al. 2014). Chaco is as anomalous for its time and place as is Teotihuacan. All scholars would agree that power and ceremony at both Cahokia and Chaco were intertwined in significant ways. Beyond that, there are several different reconstructions of how Cahokia and Chaco were governed. In some models they are politically centralized states run by autocratic leaders who used some combination of ideology and political force (or at least the threat of violence) to maintain social order. In other models they are communal undertakings based on shared, deeply controlling ‘Big Ideas’ and forms of political power that are rather more fluid and heterarchical (e.g., Pauketat 2019 describes the cultural orders of Cahokia and Chaco as ‘open and permeable’, which may have been part of their cosmopolitan appeal). But even scholars preferring the latter scenarios (like myself) recognize that both cultures were organizationally quite complex, perhaps of a kind unknown in history either before or after. For me, the most interesting studies of Cahokia and Chaco use empirical evidence to suggest that these phenomena – because of their geographical reach, which extended south to the Basin of Mexico and contact with the Toltec Empire (and its great capital city of Tula, which flourished between the heydays of Teotihuacan and Tenochtitlan) and other Mesoamerican cultures – were not so much distinct political entities as ‘pluralities’ or ‘hybridities’ characterized by great cultural and ethnic diversity and integrated by distinctive

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new practices and ideologies. The precise content of these integrative Big Ideas is tough to determine archaeologically. However, it is a good bet that they were rooted in animism and ‘world renewal’ rituals, and probably spiced up by the long-distance connections with urban centers in Mesoamerica. More apparent is the intercultural effects of these ideas. Citizens of both Cahokia and Chaco successfully, for a time, harnessed ethnic, linguistic, and other cultural diversities to make dramatic and unprecedented investments in place. Open, permeable cultural orders spurred long-distance trade and exchange, and supported prosperous ways of living. These latest interpretations of Cahokia and Chaco emphasizing organized ethnic plurality are fully consistent with a description of Chaco I offered over twenty years ago (Saitta 1997), as a particular form of community conceived in multiplicity and difference in an open social reality, and held together by a sense of community (a ‘being in common’ rather than a ‘common being’) that thrived on and celebrated social difference rather than subordinating difference to regulation and control.

There are echoes here of Swahili and other open city urbanisms. The current challenge to Cahokian and Chacoan archaeology is to discover the unifying ideas and commitments that promoted this ‘being in common’ and its associated forms of spatial belonging. What were the norms of ethnic co-existence? How were they established? How did they encourage (or compel) what Briggs (2004) describes as the ‘cross-cutting loyalties’ that bridge ethnic difference, promote collective action, and defuse social conflict? And, why and how were they eventually co-opted? Jennings (2016:127) explores this last question for Cahokia and Lekson (2018:213–218) does the same for Chaco. Even if we eventually discover these norms of ethnic co-existence there is no guarantee that Cahokian or Chacoan society and history will have any general lessons to teach us about urbanization today (but see Stuart 2000 for one particular take on the lessons taught by Chaco). It is also questionable whether there are any Big Ideas available today capable of integrating the many urban diversities and complexities that currently surround us. That is, we lack

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large-scale, inclusive civilizing projects of Roman or Córdoban character capable of generating unifying identities that can bridge ethnic and religious differences. Still, there could be something in the distinction – derived from Jean-Luc Nancy’s (1991) work on The Inoperative Community – between ‘being in common’ and ‘common being’ that can serve as a useful touchstone for imagining the conditions and forms of social and spatial belonging that would best serve the goals of the intercultural city. Summary

Commenting on urban history, M.E. Smith (2013) notes: [I]t covers the entire world, through time from the earliest cities to the present. If we really want to comprehend cities and urbanism, a broad perspective is essential. Archaeologists have long appreciated the value of an inclusive comparative framework, and scholars of contemporary urbanization are starting to look to ancient and premodern cities as a source of ideas to better understand cities and their problems today and in the future.

This chapter has taken a global tour of a representative sample of ancient cities, examining them with an interest in what they might teach about intercultural urban planning and design. The findings suggest significant similarities and significant differences between the cities of the ancient world and the cities of today. Today’s urban growth and spatial agglomeration are not really unprecedented. Traditional explanatory narratives about the sequencing of the state, the city, and other trappings of civilization are problematic, and new theories need to be formulated. Ancient cities were embedded in global (for their time) relationships and were shaped by significant migrations of culturally diverse peoples. They successfully integrated these immigrant diversities. Cultural diversity fueled civic creativity and economic prosperity. Urban governance spanned the continuum between heterarchical and hierarchical, with collective forms of governance showing up in some really surprising places, like Teotihuacan. Urban density does not appear to have been an obstacle to the development of collective governance. Sennett’s (2018b) open forms serving inclusive, cosmopolitan urbanism were used to good effect by the ancients. Architectures tapped deeply into

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humankind’s nature and evolutionary consciousness. In at least a few times and places intercultural forms of social and spatial belonging of the sort fancied by Sandercock (2003) appear to have been produced and widely embraced. The information presented in this chapter suggests that there is something to be learned from the ancients about the art and politics of city building today. It should increase our confidence that some lessons of the past can be scaled up for use by today’s urban planners, designers, architects, policymakers, and others. In the next chapter I examine some contemporary placemaking initiatives that either embody, or could benefit from, the wisdom of the ancients.

5 | T O WA R D T H E I N T E R C U LT U R A L C I T Y: G O O D S TA R T S , P R O M I S I N G D I R E C T I O N S , A N D A LT E R N AT I V E M O D E L S

This chapter considers contemporary planning and design initiatives that are oriented toward producing the inclusive, open city. It considers good starts, promising directions, and alternative models. In so doing, it sets a context for using anthropological and archaeological knowledge to expand and enrich urban planning and design through Sennett’s seed planning and like-minded strategies for intervening in the built environment. I first consider some initiatives in the Global North and South that are generating more inclusive, open, and intercultural cities. These include Europe’s Intercultural Cities program and Social Urbanism projects in the Global South and Mexican–American Borderland. I then look closer to home, at my own city of Denver, Colorado. Denver is a major American city located at the nexus of three distinct and fragile ecosystems: Mountain, Plateau, and Plains. It is a wellknown and widely celebrated site of New Urbanist placemaking. It is also a key site of the impending demographic transition to a majorityminority country. Thus, Denver is the perfect urban laboratory for considering big questions around planning for environmental and social sustainability. Europe’s Intercultural Cities

The Council of Europe (COE) is a pan-European organization dedicated to promoting human rights and democratic values. The Intercultural Cities program is a joint project of COE and the European Commission to promote immigrant and refugee integration in Europe and beyond. Its values and commitments are detailed by Wood and Landry (2008) and the White Paper on Intercultural Dialogue (Council of Europe 2008). Follow-up volumes have tracked the program’s substantive progress (Zapata-Barrero 2015; White 2018). Intercultural Cities presents an alternative to assimilationist and multiculturalist approaches for integrating cultural diversity.

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The program seeks ‘a strategic reorientation of urban governance and policies to encourage adequate representation, positive intercultural mixing and interaction, and institutional capacity to deal with cultural conflict’ (Guidikova 2014:1). It has sponsored many conferences of scholars and practitioners, and produced many policy documents. Most of the Intercultural Cities work has focused on policies and programs for social integration. Relatively less attention has been dedicated to planning and design principles that can support intercultural interaction via physical placemaking. However, it was my great privilege to attend a seminar on this topic at the Palazzo Badoer, Università IUAV di Venezia in June, 2012. As I recall, I was the only American urban studies scholar to participate in the seminar. What follows is a bit of ‘thick description’ of that event. The seminar’s central organizing issue was how urban planning and architecture should take account of ethnic and cultural diversity. The key question was how would planning and architectural design look different if informed by an intercultural approach predicated on cultural inclusion and interaction, as opposed to a multicultural approach predicated on cultural separation and coexistence? An explicit focus was the prevailing attitude among urban planners that diversity is not their business, and how that attitude must change. For me, the most important takeaways of this seminar were the following. There was, of course, great consensus that cultural diversity is a good thing that brings benefits to cities – among them greater social and economic vitality and creativity – if its power can be harnessed and ‘hybridity’ encouraged. Diversity produces new ways of thinking, being, and doing that better equip human populations to deal with changing circumstances and conditions. However, harnessing diversity’s advantages requires improved intercultural literacy or competency; i.e., a more nuanced understanding of the nature, sources, and consequences of cultural difference. Participants were keen to frame the issue of diversity as an opportunity or challenge rather than as a threat, nuisance, or problem. There was also broad consensus that the intercultural city is co-created or co-produced. In keeping with what has become a widespread commitment, working with local communities to generate ‘place’ is crucial. Planners must discover what communities need rather than assert what they think they need. The intercultural city

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is fluid and always in a state of becoming. Thus, particular ideologies of planning and design cannot be imposed top-down. Planners must trade on their powers of empathetic understanding and be good listeners. Indeed, listening was widely embraced by seminar participants as the single most important ingredient to good placemaking. To the extent that citizens don’t communicate in the language of professional planners we need creative ways to solicit the stories and memories that can inform intercultural dialogue and, by extension, better planning and design. Some of these methods will be decidedly low tech; e.g., asking adults and children to visually represent, in paintings, sketches, and models, their image of the ‘good city’. Good planners function as facilitators, mediators, and conflict resolvers. On the other hand, there was disagreement about the extent to which ‘reasonable accommodation’ (sensu Mohammed Qadeer, whose work was discussed in Chapter 2) of ethnic difference should be an explicit part of urban planning. Some saw accommodation as a viable strategy. Others saw accommodation as reinforcing the multiculturalism from which we are looking to escape; i.e., a capitulation to the kind of identity politics that too often impedes development of a shared sense of citizenship. At the time it seemed to me that we need a balance between making accommodations that signal to a city’s new arrivals the presence of a familiar support network and designing the fully democratic public spaces that allow everyone to feel at home. There was no significant consensus about whether there are basic elements of urban design – i.e., some cross-cultural common denominators of taste – that everyone will embrace. At the time I saw this as an interesting question worth investigating, but one that would require broadening the scope of inquiry to include disciplines that are not ordinarily consulted by planners, designers, and architects. The seminar constantly inspired me to think about what the deep time perspectives of evolutionary psychology (Chapter 3) and archaeology (Chapter 4) can contribute to the intercultural placemaking conversation. In fact, the seminar discussions sparked the original idea to write this book. The seminar was highlighted by discussion of three specific projects explicitly informed by intercultural city principles. I have not followed up on all of the initiatives discussed below. Some of the projects are no longer active. They are presented here as illustrative of the kind of conversations associated with brainstorming the intercultural city.

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One project was redesign of the main city park in Melitopol, Ukraine. Design team coordinator Marc Glaudemans of Stadslab European Urban Design Laboratory presented the plan for Gorky Park. Melitopol is home to over 100 nationalities. The redesign of Gorky Park as an intercultural space was based on the cultural values that its designers took to be commonly shared by all of the people who cohabit Melitopol. These shared values are found – to invoke a wonderful descriptive phrase from participating architect Beatriz Ramo – in the ‘magnificent rituals of the simple’ (Glaudemans et al. 2010:13). These rituals include celebration (appropriate for Melitopol given the number and variety of feast days celebrated by the city’s residents), love (given that the city is known for the large number of wedding shops to be found on its streets), and sport (given that sport is one phenomenon that brings diversities together world-wide). The park redesign consequently involves some distinctive physical features. A circular central area anchors the plan. This space can host dances, markets, concerts, festivals, and summer cinema. The central circle is surrounded by a blue bench that can be shared by up to 1,000 people. There’s a ‘Wedding Lane’ that extends from the park’s eastern edge to the center, with landscaping prominence given to whitecolored flowering plants. ‘Sport Lane’ starts at the western entrance and also extends to the center circle. It collects all of the existing sport installations of the park. The distinctiveness of the Melitopol locality is signaled in some other physical ways. Cherry trees and beehives are proposed to reflect the city’s civic identity as a famous producer of cherries, other fruits and vegetables, and honey. In Stadslab’s final report the authors nicely capture the rationale at work: We have no naïve belief in the power of architecture to fundamentally affect people’s values or behavior, but if the basic conditions are there, the architecture of the park can reinforce such behavior and provide an immensely richer environment for being and living together in the city. (Glaudemans et al. 2010:4)

The second project presented was Urban Living’s Sense of Place Project in northwest Birmingham, England. Noha Nasser of MELA Social Enterprise (www.melasocialenterprise.com) highlighted the community participation methods used to engage a diverse public in the process of neighborhood regeneration; i.e., in a process of

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co-creating the city. The population of the Soho-Dudley Road area is over 70 percent black and minority. The neighborhood is a reception area for immigrants, and transiency is high. The population suffers from unemployment, inter-ethnic tension, and the kinds of social conditions that produce segregation, despair, and gang culture. Multiple methods were employed during the mapping phase of the project to gain some understanding of what the place means to this diverse population of residents and to collect their suggestions for improvement. These methods included visual observations, informal and in-depth interviews with passers-by and business owners, participatory arts workshops for kids that used images and music as prompts for starting conversations about place, and a variety of other social media and digital tools (in other words, the low-tech approaches of WorthamGalvin mentioned in Chapter 3). Several catalyst events brought the community together to discuss findings and aspirations. A one-day ‘Living Room’ event transformed Soho Road into a public space that allowed goals-setting and networking discussions. The ‘Community Journalist Taster Workshop’ recruited locals to disseminate community news and information in exchange for training in digital skills. One particular finding indicated that the strongest affection shared among area residents was for the local park and library. This supports Phil Wood’s claim in the circulated pre-conference paper (Wood 2012a) that, when people are asked to identify popular intercultural spaces, the places mentioned with most frequency [are] not the highly designed or engineered public and corporate spaces but rather the spaces of day-to-day exchange such as libraries, schools, colleges, youth centres, sports clubs, specific cinemas, the hair salon, the hospital, markets and community centres. These are the spaces of interdependence and habitual engagement where (what Ash Amin calls) ‘micro publics’ come together and where (according to Leonie Sandercock) ‘dialogue and prosaic negotiations are compulsory’. In these places, ‘people from different backgrounds are thrown together in new settings which disrupt familiar patterns and create the possibility of initiating new attachments’.

The project’s signature result, however, was the ‘Do Dream Pledge’ co-production technique. This technique emboldened residents to

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take ownership of their community; to share experiences, communicate their hopes for the future, and seek new ways to work with others. It also encouraged them to begin to identify as citizens who have a shared stake in the collective good of the neighborhood rather than as members of a distinctive ethnic group. The Sense of Place Project final report convincingly argues that the process employed in this case was not simply ‘consultation’ but rather ‘a real engagement in citizen-driven master planning’. Finally, the third project, Surrey Canal in southeast London, is a mixed-use infill site that takes its lead from the area’s sporting heritage, especially the presence of Millwall Football Club. Plans included an improved setting for Millwall F.C.’s stadium and a leisure district with shops, cafes, and restaurants to serve not only football fans but also other residents of southeast London. There is provision for a new community park and affordable housing. Significantly, however, phase one of the project was focused on construction of a Faith and Community Center. The Center would house a number of faith organizations and affiliated community facilities including a rentable meeting hall with capacity for 1,000 people, a new home for the South London Multi-faith and Multicultural Resources Centre, classrooms, offices, café, and exhibition spaces. The Faith and Community Center brings both reward and risk as articulated by Renewal’s partner in the enterprise, the University of Manchester’s Multi-Faith Spaces [MFS], Symptoms and Agents of Religious and Social Change research project. Its website states: Within these spaces divergent worldviews might be brought together, with potential reconciliation between belief systems occurring. Some even view MFS as places where new religious practices might thrive. Additionally, MFS have received overt political endorsement, with the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) noting the importance of ‘shared spaces for interaction’. Here MFS are viewed as tangible manifestations of tolerance and pluralism, within a socio-religious landscape characterized by a certain degree of fragmentation. Yet issues arise as to whether these spaces are being constructed to promote narrow socio-political agendas (i.e. ‘cohesion’ or ‘inclusion’ policies), or are put in place to merely appease ‘customers’ – for example, in airports, shopping centres or universities. (http://pluralism.org/document/multi-faith-spacessymptoms-and-agents-of-change/)

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Whether the multi-faith space at Surrey Canal will lead to greater inter-faith dialogue and understanding was an open question at the time. It is a dubious proposition that architecture can serve in any direct way to catalyze intercultural engagement and understanding. Alas, we will never know. According to Wikipedia (https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrey_Canal) the development proposal that received planning consent in March 2012 was investigated by The Guardian newspaper in 2016 and 2017. As a result of funding claims that were false and ties between the developer and Lewisham council, the scheme was cancelled. The developer was found to have no experience of such a scheme and lacked funds. Followers of Millwall Football Club, local residents, former players, football commentators, and supporters of clubs across the world expressed their concern about the scheme because it endangered a club with very close community relationships. The Surrey Canal story thus points out the difficulties of bringing diverse stakeholders together to do this kind of intercultural work in the current development environment. The seminar’s closing session featured comments from Marcello Balbo of the Università IUAV di Venezia. Among other things Balbo drew an interesting distinction between ‘owned’ space and ‘belonged’ space. Owned space is a lightning rod for affirmations of ethnic identity. It is contested space. Alternatively, belonged space is flexible, equitable space that best serves intercultural placemaking. This resonates with Leonie Sandercock’s framing (2003:136–138) of the twenty-first-century challenge to planning the intercultural city that was discussed in Chapter 1. This is just a taste of the discussion that occurred at the Council of Europe placemaking seminar. Phil Wood provides another summary (Wood 2012b) and describes a number of more recent success stories involving park re-designs in Lewisham (London) and Rotterdam (Wood 2015). He notes how Barcelona – as part of the urban development plan generated in conjunction with that city’s 1992 Olympics bid – has implemented the kind of interventions that Setha Low’s Public Space Research Group (Low et al. 2005) recommended to boost the inclusivity of public parks. Wood (2015) reports that Barcelona has named streets after important immigrant figures and dedicated statues to famous people from other cultures. He notes that as Barcelona plan recommendations were enacted the strength of citizen concern about immigration, as measured by public surveys, decreased. The percentage of residents mentioning

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immigration as the most serious problem facing Barcelona decreased from 15 percent in June 2008 to 3 percent in December 2012. Thus, the direction is a promising one. Social Urbanism

Social Urbanism is an approach emphasizing human-centered political, economic, and cultural improvements in the physical regeneration of the city. This means promoting access to city services and educational opportunities; strengthening the connection between marginalized neighborhoods and job centers; and involving citizens in civic planning. Social Urbanism is primarily associated with cities of the Global South, especially South America. I am using the term as an example of the alter-urbanizations discussed by Brenner (2019:390): alternative approaches to the production and transformation of space that are focused on realizing potentials for inclusive development, political emancipation, ecological justice, and cultural multiplicity and experimentation. I also take liberty to include under Social Urbanism efforts made elsewhere in the Americas – specifically, the Mexican–American Borderland – to promote what has been variously described as Barrio Urbanism (Diaz 2005) , Magical Urbanism (M. Davis 2000), Latino Urbanism (Diaz and Torres 2012), and Latino New Urbanism (Mendez 2005). I subsume these genres under Social Urbanism because, with Devlin (2011), I do not believe that there is anything endemic to Latino cultures (or African, or Asian, or Islamic, or any other culture) that causes urbanity among peoples to necessarily take a particular form. The values associated with Latino Urbanism are not exclusively associated with the barrio or any other particular urban population (Irazábal 2012). We are guilty of stereotyping by other means if we imply that they are. I am interested in the planning and design values, principles, and forms embedded in these approaches to placemaking that can be considered intercultural, and that might find traction in today’s rapidly diversifying cities. The Global South  The Global South was once a testing ground for top-down modernist approaches, most famously exemplified by Brasilia, as discussed in Chapter 3 (Burga 2009). Now, cities are refocusing what it means to do good urbanism from a social rather

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than a techno-scientific perspective. Justin McGuirk’s (2014) Radical Cities describes and evaluates Social Urbanism as implemented in the South American cities of Curitiba, Bogotá, Medellín, and others. Here, charismatic mayors and architects drove targeted, experimental interventions in the urban fabric that served both the environment and society. These interventions exemplify new forms of sociotech­ nical intelligence (Amin and Thrift 2017:90) in transportation and space planning, landscape design, and architecture. They are oriented toward providing basic quality of life but also promoting more robust cultures of citizenship. Robust citizenship cultures recognize the dignity of all individuals regardless of legal citizenship, and seek to strengthen the obligations of citizens to each other. Jaime Lerner’s social urbanist interventions in Curitiba are very well known. Lerner’s Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system, especially its stylish stations, de-stigmatized bus travel so that more people would use public transportation. Enrique Peñalosa accomplished the same for Bogotá, pairing his Transmilenio bus system with one of the most extensive networks of dedicated bicycle lanes in the world. Rio de Janeiro mayor Cesar Maia and architect Sergio Magalhães located public plazas at the edge of favelas (rather than in neighborhood centers) to break up the physical and psychological barriers between poor and middle-class areas. These plazas served as bridges that turned boundaries into (porous) borders and created a more open city, in Sennett’s (2018b:218–227) sense. In so doing, Maia and Magalhães were implementing principles from evolutionary psychology and ancient urbanist practice as evident in cities from Mesopotamia to the Maya lowlands. Medellín is the most discussed and celebrated recent example of Social Urbanism. Its ‘integral urban projects’ are particularly dramatic in style and effect. Sergio Fajardo expanded the Metro aerial cable car system to connect the poorest areas of the city (especially the notorious Comuna 13) to the urban core. A giant outdoor hillside escalator does the same. Fajardo strategically located and built architecturally distinctive libraries in parks and poorer neighborhoods. In so doing Fajardo, and others, ‘dislocated’ design by appropriating material forms and symbols usually associated with elite and tourist infrastructure (ski slopes and shopping malls) and used them to knit the city back together. Fajardo also did simpler things, like putting bridges over creeks (Restrepo and Orsini 2012). And,

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like Chunchucmil’s planners and residents, he used simple pathways to do the same. These provided access to formal sector jobs and also mixed cultural diversities. It is not too far-fetched to characterize these mayors as Assyrian innovators of the modern age. They exemplify experimental ‘topdown activism’ in the tradition of Sennacherib, but without the autocratic ambitions. Southern architects are also at the leading edge of progressive urban change, working from the bottom-up and using participatory planning approaches. The Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena is particularly notable. Aravena came to international attention by designing low-income housing in his home country predicated on the production of incomplete forms; i.e., Sennett’s shells. Given limited government funding Aravena opted, with the approval of residents, to build half of a high-quality house (including the basic structure, kitchen, and bath) instead of a whole house done on the cheap. He then let residents finish them off when they had the time and money. This incremental design strategy offloads design to the householders themselves, with the architect’s job to ‘give order to their interventions’ (Aravena cited in Kimmelman 2016). The result is not always pretty and there can be lots of disharmony given different aesthetic tastes, but the social effects cannot be underestimated. Occupants take pride in owning and building equity in something that they have created. The ability to express themselves inspires greater community belonging (Riggs 2019). Aravena eloquently notes (in Kimmelman 2016) that his houses ‘fulfil desires beyond immediate needs’, and that ‘people can have a life of the imagination’. Herein lies an alternative to the ‘tiny house’ movement gathering steam in many American cities, especially if the target demographic is culturally disposed to larger families. Larger families cannot always go small, but they can always go shell. There is much to like in Social Urbanism. However, a critical literature exists that de-mythologizes or de-romanticizes some of the more over-the-top celebratory accounts. Scruggs (2018) notes that BRT and other mass transit systems can be overcrowded and plagued by increased waiting times. In some cases fares have risen. Poorer people have been displaced to housing that lies even farther afield, further increasing their travel times and costs. The infrastructure required for cable car lines has sometimes consumed already scarce public space. Car traffic and congestion are still present.

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Franz (2017) and Sotomayor (2017) report that locational disadvantages still exist, that unemployment is still a problem, and that significant gaps between rich and poor remain. They note that Social Urbanism’s celebrated physical changes are not a panacea, and that cities will not move toward greater inclusion and equity without significant political-economic transformation. Still, Social Urbanism has improved quality of life for many barrio residents and opened up some economic opportunities, especially around tourism (Hernandez-Garcia 2013). It points the way forward if we keep our focus on values, principles, and forms. Eschewing the master plans of the modernists in favor of the small urban project, and using ‘urban acupuncture’ (Lerner 2014) or, alternatively, Foucault’s (1980) ‘little tactics of habitat’ to catalyze larger social effects, will be key. Locating the best architecture in the poorest neighborhoods, or at least at their edges, might be the most dramatic example of these kinds of interventions. As Sennett (2018b:172) notes in the context of advocating for seed planning, for people to take ownership of their communities there must be something in their communities worth owning. Ancient practices of city building, with their sustained investments in places having strong symbolic value and their accommodations of diversity, exactly reflect this attitude. The Mexican–American Borderland  Similar interests in culture, connectivity, and community are roo­ted in urbanist projects along the Mexican–American border and in Southern California. Efforts here constitute a ‘Borderland Urbanism’ that is similarly ‘alter’, in Brenner’s (2019) sense. Planners and architects like James Rojas, Michael Mendez, and Katherine Perez think broadly and deeply about the kinds of design elements that best serve resident Latino cultural values and preferences. These values and preferences include high-density neighborhoods connected by public transport, and a variety of housing options including units that can accommodate the multiple generations that come together in large extended families. Houses are often organized around shared courtyards and patios so as to better serve child care and other common needs. As Mike Davis (2000) notes in Magical Urbanism, unrelated households sometimes move as entire ‘transnationalized communities’. Social Urbanism in the borderland blurs boundaries between public and private space. Features like porches, verandas, and

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fenced-in front yards (la yarda, as Spanish speakers call it) serve as interaction-rich ‘transitional’ or ‘intermediary’ zones. Fences are not of the stereotypical white picket variety often pictured in, or conjured up as a mental image of, the New Urbanism. The formal bounding that occurs here is both practical and social. Fences create play areas for children and also routinely function to hang wet laundry, thereby serving the cause of environmental sustainability. They display goods for sale to passers-by. In this regard fences catalyze social interaction and engender political and economic activity by essentially transforming streets into plazas. Beyond the home, spaces often begrudgingly tolerated as necessary by-products of mixed-use New Urbanism – e.g., surface parking lots – allow other important contributions to an informal economy materialized as the stalls, pushcarts, and vans of ambulantes or itinerant street vendors. The distinctive Mexican American housescape (Arreola 1988) described above can have a variety of other social effects, depending on context. Sandoval-Strausz (2013; 2019) notes how it made a real difference to Latino residents surviving the Chicago heat wave of July 1995, in which temperatures climbed to 106 degrees and stayed there for a week. Klinenberg (2002) first noted the differential survival rate of Latinos (nine deaths) compared to African-Americans (256 deaths) and whites (252 deaths). Sandoval-Strausz suggests that Latino residential practices and commitment to public presence, by encouraging residents to seek shade out of doors and the company of neighbors and friends on sidewalks and storefronts, was crucial to their survival. In this case the Latino built environment was particularly determinative in its effects. This manifestation of built form is the product of ‘syncretic processes’ (Arreola 1988:310) that combine a number of cultural influences including Roman, Islamic, Iberian, and Native Mesoamerican. But the example nicely illustrates what can be a very close articulation between urban identity, materiality, prosperity, and survivability. The architecture of Social Urbanism in the borderland has sometimes been described as ‘kinetic’ because of its flamboyant use of color, graphics, and words in murals and on building facades (Rojas 1993). Herein lies a direct link to the ancients of Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica, and elsewhere, who used color on the facades of great buildings and monuments to activate them as part of a bigger narrative. The plastered surfaces of some Mayan temples were kinetic

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in another, more practical sense. They channeled rainwater into reservoirs and urban gardens, thereby serving the cause of agricultural sustainability (Scarborough and Lucero 2010:195–197). These dual threads of cultural and environmental sustainability are picked up in intriguing, and fundamentally anthropological ways by San Diego architect Teddy Cruz. Cruz admits to being influenced by expressions of Social Urbanism in Medellín and elsewhere (Misra 2017). McGuirk (2014:284) suggests that Cruz’s work along the San Diego–Tijuana border constitutes a bridgehead that reverses the usual flow of ‘planning intelligence’ (Yiftachel 2006) from Northto-South to South-to-North. Cruz noticed how the poor residents of Tijuana created a distinctive kind of alter-urbanism by incorporating into their houses building materials (garage doors, tires) cast off by rich households in San Diego. Because of the resulting structures’ layered effect, Cruz describes the practice as ‘club sandwich urbanism’ or ‘second hand urbanization’. This prompted his idea of designing pre-fabricated building frames that would support the use of recycled materials that people claim from San Diego (Cruz 2005). Such structures represent Sennett’s and Aravena’s shells in another form, with people trusted to ‘fill the void’ (Catling 2014) in the absence of alternative ways to secure adequate housing. Cruz has also produced more formal designs with clusters of co-habiting families in mind: houses that layer together housing, collective kitchens, community gardens, work spaces, and business incubators. Thus, Cruz brings together incremental design, informal urbanism, a commitment to porous borders, and architectural kinetics in a way that, I believe, would be the envy of the ancients. All of this work is prelude to a larger intercultural project. Cruz is currently working with his partner Fonna Forman to re-imagine the borderland region as a distinctive binational/transnational city linking cultures that, whether they are aware of it or not, share some common values, are intimately interconnected, and have intertwined destinies. Cruz and Forman are looking to create material settings for cultivating a form of citizenship that crosses (porous) borders, rather than being thwarted by an impermeable wall (Misra 2017). New Urbanism in Denver

For my third case I turn to the city where I live and work: Denver, Colorado. Denver is among the top five fastest growing cities in

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America. It is currently enjoying ‘destination city’ status. Denver was among the first cities to adopt Richard Florida’s (2002) creative city regeneration strategies when they were all the rage back in the 1990s (Peck 2005). At present, Denver is in the top ten of large American cities for where the creative class live and where the creative class is growing. Denver is a highly educated city. It is in the top ten of American cities for the share of population holding four-year degrees (40 percent of residents) and the share of adults holding graduate degrees. As a consequence, between 2005 and 2017 Denver was also in the top ten of large American cities showing the most gains in high-tech innovation sector jobs (Atkinson et al. 2019). Denver has a well-earned reputation as a city invested in progressive placemaking. It has long been an important proving ground for New Urbanism. Retrofits of the old Stapleton municipal airport and the metro area’s many suburban shopping malls are much-discussed examples (Ehrenhalt 2012:205–217). Denver’s Lower Downtown (LoDo) historic district – a mixed-use area now nearly forty years on from its original redevelopment – is a historic preservation and revitalization success story. The city has made major investments in transit-oriented development, highlighted by its Fast Tracks light rail system and newly refurbished downtown train station (Union Station). Denver has an active Tactical Urbanism movement. Amenities to attract and retain cultural creatives as well as the coveted target population of millennials are popping up left and right. These are mostly breweries, marijuana stores, and upscale food markets. Such efforts routinely propel Denver to the top of city rankings for livability. A New York Times article extolling Denver’s virtues was the high water mark of national attention (Hanc 2016). Given this publicity the urbanology discourse in Denver has been overwhelmingly triumphal. Today, self-satisfaction still exists but analysis is turning a bit more critical. Like other cities, Denver is struggling with all of the problems around social inequality, spatial segregation, and affordability that Richard Florida identifies in The New Urban Crisis (Florida 2017). Denver is in the top ten of large American metros for income segregation and, especially, education. Gentrification and the displacement of minority populations, both physical and psychological, are significant concerns. The historically revitalized and regenerated downtown center is 76 percent white. Denver exemplifies the ‘core-oriented’ pattern in Florida and Adler’s

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(2018) typology of ‘patchwork’ metropolises: a segregated city center with deepening inequality and spatial segregation overall. Denver’s level of racial and ethnic segregation, and public school segregation of African-Americans and Latinos, is higher than the national average for 100 American metropolitan areas (Goetz and Boschmann 2018:198). Consequently, Denver is bedeviled by problems and tensions around race and ethnicity. Goetz and Boschmann (2018:195) assert that Denver has ‘evolved and matured into a cosmopolitan metropolis’, but this assessment strikes me as premature. On the definition of cosmopolitanism used here – an openness to ethnic and cultural difference – the evidence suggests that Denver is far from being a cosmopolitan city. Denver’s mayor, just elected to a third and final term, is widely perceived by citizens to be in the pocket of developers. Redevelopment disproportionately affects more diverse and impoverished areas, but no area is exempt from densification. This takes the form of greater allowable building heights and the introduction of mixed housing types. As usual, some neighborhoods have more time, resources, and political will to resist these forces than others. Where regeneration occurs it is usually accompanied by rather unimaginative architectural designs. New residential buildings are going up so fast and the architecture is so pervasively ugly (or at least homogenous) that there is a Facebook page dedicated to tracking it (‘Denver FUGLY’). The spatial proliferation of four- and five-story wood apartment boxes is a textbook example of how neoliberal development produces gentrified enclaves of visual and social sameness (Tonkiss 2005:91). Current debates about whether Denver should be ‘smarter’ or more ‘creative’ or more ‘sustainable’ – today’s great triumvirate of popular urbanisms – largely proceed without understanding that such formulations often discriminate in favor of particular groups, spaces, and forms of urban development. Denver’s political and business elite routinely emphasize how diversity is valued in the city. However, it is not always clear what kind of diversity is being referred to. It seems to refer to the variable tastes of the millennial generation that forms the target demographic for Denver’s economic revitalization. City leaders want to satisfy the millennial penchant for walkability, bikability, and a diverse array of unique shops and restaurants. They want to fulfill their wish for personal freedom to customize residential floor plans. They worry about what will happen

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when millennials start having children, and what they can do to keep their families in the urban core. They want the empty nesters among them to be able to age in place. City leaders and planners do not worry as much about accommodating different tastes in family size and composition, built form, and landscape aesthetics among the other cultural groups moving into the city or displaced by the millennial migration. Although the city is trying to take inclusion and segregation seriously, not much has been done beyond the creation of a sizable affordable housing fund. But even with the infusion of money questions remain about where these affordable units will be located and what they will look like. Will they be woven or marbled into the urban fabric instead of concentrated in one place (Flint 2015)? Will they be designed to accommodate and perhaps even attract cultural diversity? Or, will they be designed for the typical American nuclear family? Will they have a distinctive architecture with the potential to increase rather than decrease surrounding property values? There has not been much attention to the quality of housing and public space in the city, and the connections between them. As a result, current policy recommendations risk deepening the urban crisis rather than solving it. In short, Denver today is in many ways a site of display rather than a site of dwelling. The distinctions made by Miguel de Oliver and Maree Pardy – highlighted in Chapter 2 – are important and compelling touchstones for any city building enterprise that views inclusion as a social equity imperative rather than just another civic branding opportunity. The three more detailed case studies that follow evaluate the success of Denver’s preferred paradigm of New Urbanism in meeting three specific challenges of contemporary urban development: retrofitting dead suburban shopping malls, making sustainable places on the urban periphery, and improving neighborhood connectivity. Retrofitting Suburban Malls as Urban Villages  Denver has been retrofitting a glut of vacant 1960s and 1970s suburban shopping malls to create ‘urban villages’ (live–work–play spaces) for a while now. More than half of the metro area’s dozen or so regional malls are already retrofitted, and more are being repurposed. Belmar on the site of the old Villa Italia Mall in suburban Lakewood is a retrofit success story celebrated for its green buildings, great connectivity, and a nice ‘sense of place’ (Dunham-Jones and Williamson 2009).

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Buntin (2013) concurs: he pitches Belmar as ‘a model for redeveloping suburban malls across the U.S.’. Alan Ehrenhalt (2012) casts Denver as ‘the emerging capital’ of America’s suburban town center phenomenon. Because Denver is such a busy incubator of New Urbanist theory and practice it offers numerous opportunities for students to do original fieldwork in urban anthropology. For several years I have been sending students in my urban anthropology class around town to compare and contrast three suburban mall retrofits located to the west, southwest, and south of the city. These include Belmar (Lakewood), CityCenter Englewood (Englewood), and The Streets at SouthGlenn (Centennial), respectively. The students’ task is to (1) discuss how each project conforms to New Urbanist goals and ideals; (2) critically evaluate their prospects for success in light of current ideas about urban ecological and cultural sustainability; and (3) identify the one development that they would choose to live in and explain why. I ask them to look, listen, and interview the users of each place as the opportunity allows. In other words, I ask them to engage in a little urban ethnography, based on Setha Low’s (Low et al. 2005:175–193) ‘Rapid Ethnographic Assessment Procedure’ (REAP). This involves collecting and triangulating between three different sources of information: (1) observation, (2) interviews with residents and visitors, and (3) physical traces mapping (examination of posters, advertisements, street names, signs of human activity/ trash, etc.). I urge them to make multiple visits to their field sites, on different days and at different times of day. Students prepare for the assignment by reading some combination of the following: Charter of the New Urbanism (Congress for the New Urbanism 2000), an excerpt from Wood and Landry’s (2008) The Intercultural City, Brugmann’s chapter on ‘Building Local Culture: Reclaiming the Streets of Gràcia District, Barcelona’ in his Welcome to the Urban Revolution (Brugmann 2009), essays by Qadeer (2009) on multicultural planning and Rojas (2008) on Latino Urbanism, Buntin’s (2013) chapter in Unsprawl, and Mike Davis’ chapter on ‘Fortress LA’ in City of Quartz (Mike Davis 1990). Students are also urged to dip into Spiro Kostof’s (1991) The City Shaped and Jane Jacobs’ (1961) The Death and Life of Great American Cities. I guide students to some concepts in this body of work that strike me as especially relevant. Foremost among these is Wood and Landry’s notion

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of ‘cultural literacy’ and how the basic building blocks of the city – street frontages, building heights, set-backs, public space, etc. – look different when viewed through ‘intercultural eyes’. I want students to consider the extent to which New Urbanist projects exemplify the Barcelona urbanist’s particular concept of espai public – defined as a distinctive ‘third territory of streets and squares where private interests and public uses are vitally interwoven’ (Brugmann 2009:231). Mike Davis’ book is a veritable cornucopia of useful and provocative concepts. I ask students to ponder his notions of ‘spatial apartheid’ and the ‘archisemiotics’ of built form – the latter broadly understood to cover the meanings conveyed by a project’s architecture, advertising images associated with its effort to create a distinctive identity, and other features of the designed environment. My students are not an especially diverse group in terms of ethnicity, given that the University of Denver is a largely white, upper-middleclass institution. But I do get some minority students, mostly Latinos. Exchange students from the United Kingdom, Italy, Eastern Europe, and Africa have contributed their unique international perspectives. Thus, the retrofitted mall assignment is an excellent opportunity to learn what kind of urban development best resonates with a demographic that is migrating to American cities in droves. The results are very instructive. Just under half of the students – 49 percent – would choose to live in the widely celebrated Belmar development. This leaves a slim majority of 51 percent preferring something else or nothing at all. Each development is a mixed bag of development hits and misses. What follows are some of the more typical comments about each that have been collected over the last four years. Students join Dunham-Jones and Williamson (2009) in appreciating Belmar’s commitment to green building and environmental sustainability (use of solar and wind). They like the large, irregularly shaped public plaza located at the center of the development, and its adjacent restaurant patios. Students identify the big windows of retail shops that maximize the inter-visibility of private and public space as a good example of Barcelona’s espai public. They appreciate efforts to soften the edges of parking lots with features like ‘Lily Pad Lane’, a pedestrian path with a rainforest motif and piped-in nature sounds. However, one student reasonably wonders if Lily Pad Lane is consistent with the developer’s commitment to build a ‘real’

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downtown for a western suburb that produces a distinctive sense of place. Floor plans in one residential building are named after idyllic New England towns (e.g., Nantucket, Newport) thereby evidencing New Urbanism’s nostalgic longing for traditional American built form. Many use words like ‘packaged’, ‘commercial’, ‘artificial’, and ‘inauthentic’ to describe Belmar. Some liken it to an ‘outdoor mall’ and the kind of downtown that’s more befitting an alpine ski resort than a Denver suburb that is looking to become more urbane. Belmar comes up short in several other ways. One British exchange student remarked that its High Street was curiously empty on a lovely Saturday afternoon in autumn. American and European students alike comment that there tends to be more activity in Belmar’s Big Box department store parking lots than on its streets. Most students do not see Belmar meeting New Urbanism’s call for developments that seamlessly connect to their surroundings. The broad, six-lane avenues that border Belmar to the north and west (the legacy of mid-twentieth-century modernist planning) are seen to function as de facto gates separating it from the adjacent, largely Hispanic neighborhoods. Another British exchange student very perceptively said of Belmar that ‘I don’t feel that the local area understands it well enough to welcome it properly’ and that it lacks a distinct identity (the subtle attempts to brand itself as reported by Dunham-Jones and Williamson, and Buntin, notwithstanding). Finally, while students note the diversity of housing options available at Belmar, affordability is another issue altogether. Students often provide comparative data showing that purchase prices and monthly rental costs require close to 90 percent of monthly minimum-wage take-home pay, making housing within the development prohibitive for most working-class people. Thus, they question whether people employed at retail businesses in Belmar could also afford to live there – a key New Urbanist ambition. When students ask retail workers about this, the answer is invariably no. CityCenter Englewood (CCE), on the site of the old Cinderella City Mall in the southwest suburb of Englewood is the oldest retrofit, opening in 2001. It is decidedly lacking in upscale amenities and is not as widely celebrated by experts as Belmar. It is the only one of the three retrofits that has transit-oriented development. Students see the multimodal transportation options of CCE as an appealing feature, with accommodations for light rail, buses, and bicycles. Ehrenhalt

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(2012:215) argues that CCE ‘turns its back on the light rail station and on transit oriented development in general’. Interestingly, students do not agree. They value CCE’s light rail connectivity, whereas Belmar’s eight connecting bus lines do very little for them. However, Ehrenhalt still has a point. One student observed two automobile accidents in the hour that she was visiting CCE. CityCenter Englewood is punctuated (in Sennett’s 2018b sense) by a collection of outdoor art and sculptures. A regular Art Shuttle that runs around the area earns praise. Here, my students describe a more interesting and ‘authentic’ streetscape, with greater potential to be urban. This might be because CCE is the oldest retrofit, and thus has had more time to mature. Messages and advertisements on public bulletin boards – which some students reasonably use as a proxy variable for taking the pulse of local life – suggest a development that appears a bit more ‘lived in’. Students report the relatively greater visibility of homeless people and transients at CCE and (perhaps not coincidentally) a greater frequency of what Mike Davis describes as ‘bum-proof benches’ designed to prevent people from lying down. They also appreciate the greater opportunity to encounter ethnic diversity, which some students explicitly link to the nearby presence of value shopping alternatives like a Walmart store. These characteristics suggest that CityCenter Englewood, unlike the other two retrofits, is of a piece with the wider city. Finally, The Streets at SouthGlenn (SSG), is on the site of the old Southglenn Mall in Centennial, a historically white and politically conservative area of the city. It gets the harshest critique. According to students SSG’s virtues include an elongated Commons Park with water fountain, fireplace, coffee and snack shacks, comfortable seating, and abundant plant life. The Park succeeds in creating a pleasant ‘outdoor room’, which is a key New Urbanist goal for public space. SSG is perceived as being relatively more family and kid friendly than the other retrofits. It is described as having more active public spaces, which may be a function of its kid-friendliness plus its greater compactness. Terminating vistas that exemplify a bit of what Spiro Kostof (1991) describes as ‘Grand Manner scenography’ earn praise, even though the vistas are focused on Big Box department stores rather than interesting monuments or other cultural amenities. Still, SSG is complimented for having more colorful and ‘kinetic’ architecture compared to other mall retrofits. The use of one-way

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streets and roundabouts to control traffic produces a greater sense of pedestrian security. One student identified SSG’s branch of the Arapahoe Public Library as best exemplifying the ‘spaces of day-today exchange’ that Wood and Landry (2008, following Amin 2002) have found to be among the most popular for multicultural populations in Britain. However, it is located in a context that is neither center nor edge, and is clearly subservient to retail and recreation. Students often make some very perceptive comments about the archisemiotics of built space at SSG, which also hold for Belmar. Retail advertising in both places is targeted to white people, especially young, well-heeled women with disposable income. The user group is almost a perfect reflection of the people pictured in the adverts, a classic case of life imitating art. The local neighborhood’s median family income is about twice that of the neighborhoods surrounding Belmar and CCE. Consequently, some students suggest that the ‘Street Life’ and ‘Life on the Streets’ slogans used to market SSG take on entirely different meanings given the serious issues of homelessness that plague other parts of Denver and most American cities. Names of the floor plans at the development’s major residential tower are those of Spanish cities: Barcelona, Sevilla, Cordoba. The SSG soundscape also draws fire: the music that is piped into The Streets (as well as Belmar) produces space that is as clinical as that of the old indoor malls that they have replaced. Finally, a substantial, unbroken brick wall that separates SSG from residential neighborhoods to the west is seen to function much like the broad avenues that surround Belmar, signaling closure and exclusivity. As noted, suburban retrofit scholars and advocates still applaud Denver for being a leader in abandoned mall regeneration, suggesting that city developers have it figured out. But this assessment might be a bit hasty. The main lesson learned from the mall REAP exercise is that Denver’s retrofits have a decidedly mixed appeal for collegeage millennials of diverse national and ethnic backgrounds. Their experience in, and evaluation of, these places can be very different from those of professional planners and opinion-shapers. In class discussion it is often hard for students to remember which retrofit is which. They blend together in the mind and are often confused, the starkest differences between them notwithstanding. Their formulaic plans are not conducive to creating a unique sense of place, or drawing diverse populations. Student critiques often match those of New

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Urbanism’s harshest critics, presented in Chapter 2. Lack of housing affordability (all developments require 80–90 percent of monthly, minimum-wage income to pay for housing) and congeniality to cultural diversity are central criticisms. Still, students are inclined to be charitable. They see each of these developments as a work in progress. Their biggest challenge is attracting ethnic diversity and a mix of incomes. Over time students seem to be noticing more Latinos patronizing the shops and open spaces at Belmar. At SSG, however, ethnic diversity is primarily observed among the custodial and landscaping staff. It is safe to conclude that Denver’s New Urban mall retrofits still signal – to Americans, Europeans, and Ethnic Others alike – homogeneity and exclusivity. The accumulated results of this exercise give one pause to wonder whether New Urbanism, as applied to dead suburban shopping malls, can really succeed in accomplishing, at the same time and within the same program, its diversity, equity, and community-building goals. Wood and Landry (2008) challenge planners and architects interested in intercultural city building to either structure space so that different cultures might see and use it in a variety of ways, or create more openended spaces to which a diversity of people can lay claim (e.g., an ‘entropic’ or ‘elastic’ urbanism – see Lempel 2011). Some students wish to challenge New Urbanism in the same way. Alternatively, one student questions whether New Urbanism is capable of producing an intercultural city at all. As she puts it, perhaps an intercultural city already exists in the urban fabric and just needs some poking and prodding – using some other theory of urbanism – to draw it out. Making Sustainable Places on the Urban Periphery  The stocktaking presented above addresses the urban core and inner suburbs. Developments on the urban periphery are also of interest, given that even city-loving millennials tend to leave the center for greener pastures (i.e., bigger homes, better schools) that lie beyond. That is, they come under what David Brooks (2005) describes as the ‘Paradise Spell’: the distinctively American belief that the promise of a better future is to be realized out on the open frontier. Soja (2018:200) summarizes some of the high-density developments taking shape in what was once sprawling, low-density suburbia (e.g., Edge Cities, Exopolises), identifying the urban periphery as a ‘rich frontier for comparative research’.

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This is where Ebenezer Howard’s concept of the Garden City (encountered earlier in the discussion of Caracol), becomes relevant. Although invented by the ancients, the Garden City has a long and honorable pedigree within the Western tradition of urban planning. It was recently re-invigorated by Peter Hall’s updating of the concept in his 1998 book Sociable Cities: The 21st Century Reinvention of the Garden City (re-released in 2014 with co-author Colin Ward). Promoted as a socially inclusive and environmentally sustainable way of living, the Garden City concept is informing – either consciously or unconsciously – new proposals for environmentally sensitive development on the urban periphery here in the American West. Analysis of Sterling Ranch, a master planned community located about 30 miles southwest of downtown Denver, highlights some important issues around the social and environmental sustainability of this ostensibly ‘post-suburban’ form. Sterling Ranch is a mixed-use, live– work–play development. The development is not explicitly based on a Garden City model. However, it certainly conforms to the model. Although planned for just over half the acreage of Howard’s Garden City (3,400 acres compared to 6,000 acres), Sterling Ranch is nearly identical to the Garden City in terms of the resident population it is intended to serve: 31,000 people. A dense, amenity-rich town center and civic gathering place will transect outward – in concentric patterns as per Howard’s model – into clustered, tightly knit villages ending in rural, hillside ranchettes. Sterling Ranch will offer 30 miles of hiking, biking, and horseback riding trails, community sports facilities, and small ‘pocket parks’ in residential areas. It will access three regional parks and two state parks. These amenities will offer the ‘Areas of Tranquility’ that Hall and Ward count as one of twelve key strategic policy elements for building their Howard-inspired model of the Sociable City. The developer of Sterling Ranch negotiated with several builders who are producing a range of different housing types using what are described as distinctive and ‘authentic’ styles. These include singlefamily homes, townhouses, and loft apartments. Reflecting Howard’s belief that ordinary working people deserve affordable housing, a range of housing prices will also be available. Current marketing materials indicate that 35 percent of the house product will be priced below $200,000. Whether this counts as ‘affordable’ in today’s economy is open to debate. Whether this bar will be maintained as build-out proceeds, given a historically volatile economy, is also uncertain.

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Environmental sustainability is an explicit planning and design principle at Sterling Ranch. Howard’s contribution to sustainable planning is found in the Garden City’s eminent walkability. Walkability will certainly characterize Sterling Ranch’s clustered, mixed-use residential villages. It will also govern wider transportation planning. Eighty percent of the planned 12,000 housing units in Sterling Ranch will have bus stops within easy walking distance. Shuttles will move commuters to Regional Transportation District (RTD) Light Rail stations, cutting down – at least in theory – the use of personal automobiles for travel to work. Telecommuting will be supported by the provision of auxiliary workspace units above garages (echoes of Teddy Cruz’s Club Sandwich Urbanism) and a state-of-the-art fiber optic network will connect the entire community. Bus lines, light rail, and high-speed internet thus combine to serve as the ‘Inter-Municipal Railway’ that linked Howard’s Garden Cities to each other. They also exemplify the ‘Top-Quality Linkages’ that Hall and Ward count as another key strategic policy element for building the Sociable City. The signature sustainability feature at Sterling Ranch will be its water conservation measures. Some of these are pioneering. They include water-efficient toilets, faucets, showers, and washers and dryers; a dual inside and outside water metering system with tiered pricing; artificial turf on sports fields; underground water storage beneath the sports facilities; water-saving native plants in landscaped areas; and, most significantly, technologies for harvesting and recycling rainwater. Almost 97 percent of the annual rainwater in the local jurisdiction of Douglas County never reaches a stream and is either absorbed by vegetation or evaporates. Sterling Ranch has received approval to harvest this rainwater for irrigation purposes. It is the first master planned community in Colorado to receive such permission. With these measures in place the water use per household at Sterling Ranch is estimated to be less than one-third of that traditionally required by houses in Douglas County. Sterling Ranch will reinforce its strong conservation ethos by dedicating a water conservation staff to develop water use guidelines for residents, who can choose to spend their allocated water budgets on either water-wise plantings or an edible garden. It will also sponsor programs to educate school children and community residents about the importance of conserving water.

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While Sterling Ranch will not have the formal agricultural greenbelt proposed by Howard in his classic conception of the Garden City, its developer is partnering with Denver Botanic Gardens in a ‘Community Supporting Agriculture’ project. Collaboration with the local scientific establishment was part of the central animating spirit of Howard’s original Garden City movement. The Botanic Gardens project will determine whether the development’s fresh produce needs can be met by community gardens instead of trucking in fruits and vegetables from afar, thereby reducing its carbon footprint. Sterling Ranch represents a unique vision rooted in a noble conservationist ethic. It is an experiment in peripheral urbanization that is worth monitoring. However, even if it is successful the question will arise of how many Sterling Ranch-style Garden Cities can Western metropolitan areas accommodate? And, will this land-use pattern promise any greater long-term environmental sustainability than high-rise densification projects in the urban core? At the moment it is not clear that clustered Garden Cities would offer, over the long term, any significant water savings compared to a single dense, vertical urban center. Peripheral urbanization is further complicated by the fact that distance (as it affects urban core connectivity) and water are not the only relevant constraining variables. There is also the matter of changing demographics. Online promotional materials for Sterling Ranch clearly target a demographic that is largely white, middle-class, and nuclear family-based. They are a lot like the adverts found at The Streets at SouthGlenn. As noted earlier, however, the United States is approaching a tipping point as concerns the ethnic composition of its population. Like the rest of the country Colorado is becoming increasingly diverse in terms of ethnic makeup. Over the last decade Colorado’s Hispanic population, the state’s largest minority, increased by 41 percent. The Asian population grew by 45 percent. The African-American population grew by 19 percent. By contrast, the white non-Hispanic population in Colorado increased by less than 10 percent. These minority population increases occurred throughout the state and not just in metropolitan areas. This raises the question: will domestic minorities be drawn to communities like Sterling Ranch, or any other Garden City-style peripheral development, if cultural diversity is not a central planning and design concern? Traditional American suburbia, with its

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low-density spread and singular housing type, has forever made life difficult for minority populations (Talen 2012). Sterling Ranch promises residential and public architecture that is ‘remarkable’ and ‘authentic’. However, as discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, it is a wellestablished fact that cultures can vary in their design preferences for residential, public, and green space. The built form and aesthetics of civic and residential architecture can carry particular cultural meanings and thus can have differential appeal across ethnic groups. This point is especially germane where planning for community gardens is concerned. Decisions regarding the kinds of fruits, vegetables, and other plantings contained by these gardens may require an especially strong dose of intercultural literacy and sensitivity, in keeping with the analysis of Agrarian Urbanism offered in Chapter 2. Ethnic groups also differentially value and assign meaning to water – a major preoccupation of planning for Sterling Ranch. In many cultures water is a spiritual as well as an economic good. Case studies of water use from around the world have documented clear differences between Western, Eastern, Middle Eastern, and indigenous cultures. Zenani and Mistri (2005) describe various rituals and ceremonies in traditional African religions as well as religions like Islam and Hinduism in which water plays a central role. Some of these rituals require facilities for water pooling. In other ceremonies water has to be running. In still others the water must be pure and neither tap nor recycled waste or ‘grey’ water will suffice. Some of these rituals clearly have implications for urban design and architecture. Interestingly, Zenani and Mistri note that these rituals and ceremonies have been gaining popularity in urban as well as rural areas. Thus, the widely noted world-wide migration of people from country to city is not likely to change cultural practices involving the use of water. Smith and Ali (2006) report that studies of water flows in District Metered Areas (DMAs) in a number of British cities highlight ‘startling differences’ in water use patterns that are related to religious and cultural practices. Characteristic patterns are found principally in Jewish and Muslim communities. For example, there is a Jewish peak on Friday afternoon in anticipation of Shabbat. Within Muslim communities intense washing precedes daily prayers, especially during the month of Ramadan. Prescriptions in Islam against wasting

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water align with Western conservation values but there are clearly times when unusual amounts of water must be available for various household practices. The importance of using running water in a cultural practice of washing up is also a characteristic of Hindu groups. In this case, however, the practice links not to religious belief but rather to culturally inscribed dietary practices: the high fat and oil content of Indian cooking. In short: The overwhelming evidence is that religion [and culture generally] has a fundamental bearing not only on how people use water but also on how they think about water. The overall conclusion is that it would be extremely unwise to exclude religion or ethnicity as parameters in any further research into understanding domestic water demand . . . Understanding such fundamental differences caused by religious practice may be critical to the planning and design of network water systems. (Smith and Ali 2006:209)

Finally, Medd et al. (2007) summarize and extend work like that described above. Their study is very aggressive in critiquing the implicit assumption of a ‘white, Christian norm’ of water consumption that far too often (and perhaps unconsciously) informs water management strategies. It is likely that such a norm also pervades other assumptions about, say, cultural standards of cleanliness. While there are some clear convergences between ‘West’ and ‘Other’ in the ways that water is valued, the study concludes that there is ‘little to suggest that valuations of water in any faith systematically translate to a tendency to water conservation’. Effective and sustainable water demand management strategies require beginning with diversity in cultural identities and values, and especially with diversity in the everyday practices, habits, and routines of the consuming population. Thus, water management is not simply a technical matter. The different cultural uses and meanings of water need to be recognized by urban planners and basic service providers. Non-Western concepts of water as sacred can easily dovetail with a Western ethos of environmental sustainability. However, water-regulating strategies like metering, recycling, and budgeting can conflict with particular cultural values identifying water as sacred and even as a basic human right. Certainly, management strategies like differential pricing of

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water based on intensity of use can easily discriminate against some cultural groups and contradict broader Garden City commitments to life quality and social equity. Sterling Ranch has, in theory, considerable promise as a new form of Garden City for the twenty-first-century American West. Its development model is underpinned, like Ebenezer Howard’s original Garden City model, by a strong vision. Sterling Ranch’s planned integration of green space and provision of multimodal transportation options for residents are clearly features worth emulating elsewhere. Its proposed suite of water conservation measures is a model for urban development in any part of the world where water is a key constraining variable. As noted, however, it would be wise to temper water planning with a clear understanding of how water is differentially valued and used by diverse ethnic groups. The phased build-out of Sterling Ranch over a twenty-year period certainly will allow for adjustments in planning, design, and marketing of the community as urban demographics and cultural preferences change. If cultural inclusion, life quality, and social equity are important elements of what makes a city ‘sociable’, then designing built and open space for broad intercultural appeal should be a top priority going forward. Twenty-first-century Garden City, Sociable City, and other urban models that seek to better integrate ‘town and country’ could benefit from a greater understanding of how ethnic groups cognize their cultural and natural surroundings differently as a function of history and socialization. Whatever the admirable and exportable virtues of Sterling Ranch’s vision of Garden City-style development, the looming convergence in the American West of constraints on fossil fuel use, limits to water availability, and shifts to a majority-minority demographic could also recommend a future for Western cities that is compact, dense, vertical, and core rather than periphery oriented. Whatever the future, greater awareness of cultural variation in ways of dwelling, using water, producing food, designing public space, and interacting with the natural environment will be important as cities in the American West are planned and developed. The margin for error going forward is likely to be very small. The Garden City concept has a compelling intuitive appeal. But planners and architects have work to do in order to make this traditional and still desirable form of settlement more environmentally and interculturally attractive and sustainable.

toward the intercultural city | 137 Improving Neighborhood Connectivity  One of the major takeaways from archaeological study of ancient cities is that neighborhoods are ubiquitous and that they are typically heterogeneous and wellconnected to the whole. In some instances it is hard to tell where neighborhoods end even if the center is clearly identifiable (e.g., at Mohenjo-daro). When modern, monocultural planning was not destroying traditional ethnic enclaves and ethnically mixed neighborhoods in the twentieth century it was isolating them courtesy of expressway construction, redlining, and benign neglect. The challenge today is restoring connectivity and weaving isolated neighborhoods back into the urban fabric. Mariposa Social Housing  One of Denver’s acclaimed success stories in this regard is the Mariposa public housing project just to the south of downtown. It is located in Lincoln Park, a historically non-white neighborhood and one of Denver’s oldest. Developed between 2011 and 2017, Mariposa is often cited as an example of Denver capitalizing on an opportunity to be inclusive and interconnected. Here, the Denver Housing Authority (DHA), replaced nearly 300 units of dilapidated 1950s social housing with 600 new low-income and market-rate housing units, including dedicated housing for seniors. Mariposa is connected to the downtown core by a Fast Tracks light rail line. In that respect the project is reminiscent of Social Urbanist initiatives in the Global South. Its planning benefitted from another Social Urbanist principle, participatory design. Developer outreach to the local community was aggressive. DHA used a ‘cultural audit’ to solicit broad spectrum community opinion about desired features and services. These include a job/ workforce training site, culinary academy, youth center, community garden, and public plaza. The project includes some nice physical design features that respect cultural diversity and honor the history of the community. Murals inspired by Latino and Somali culture and produced by local artists reflect the cultural identity of the neighborhood’s residents. Context-appropriate historical markers and sculptures punctuate the landscape. A particularly nice touch that explicitly refers to the ancient ancestors is a unique interactive staircase in one of the residential buildings (Peterson 2014). It tells a Mayan folk tale of Kulukan’s gift of a sacred chocolate tree to humanity using words, light, and sound.

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It is reminiscent of the famous stone hieroglyphic staircase at the great Mayan capital of Copan located in western Honduras. Thirty-six buttons distributed the length of the handrails activate sounds and lights on a 40-foot chandelier. The rationale is to entice kids to climb stairs rather than use the elevator, in the interest of promoting better childhood health. This is a fine example of a ‘little tactic of habitat’ that uses whimsy and narrative to serve an important social purpose. Although the Mariposa development produced a residential displacement rate of 52 percent, the DHA says that this is much better than the typical national displacement rate of 85–90 percent for redeveloped housing. Census data indicate that the Lincoln Park population was 66 percent non-white at the time of Mariposa’s ground-breaking in 2011. The census reports that the neighborhood was 56 percent non-white in 2016. So, redevelopment has brought some loss of ethnic diversity. But the key question to be asked is whether an incremental urbanism of the sort practiced by Aravena and Cruz and also evident at Teotihuacan (e.g., the use of incomplete forms, or shells) might have avoided any displacement of residents. University Master Planning Like Denver’s Housing Authority, Denver’s private university (the University of Denver, my employer) is also looking to forge better neighborhood connections. This is something that has concerned urban universities for a long time. A special issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education about cities published in the summer of 2017 frames the key questions. Contributing authors were asked: What responsibilities does the university have to the city of which it is a part? And, what does fulfillment of these responsibilities look like (Chronicle of Higher Education 2017)? Located in a southeastern inner ring suburb and, like Mariposa, connected to the downtown core by a Fast Tracks light rail line, the University of Denver (DU) recently had an opportunity to contemplate these questions. DU suffers from citizen perceptions that boundaries, both physical and psychological, exist between campus and surrounding communities. To address these perceptions, the university administration sponsored a campus master planning competition among several internationally known design firms to see what could be done. Predictably, all proposals were variations on a New Urbanist theme. The winning proposal’s animating Big Idea is to create ‘a

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great college town in the heart of the city’. The most important and consequential element of the plan is development of a six-acre piece at the northeast corner of the campus that I will call, in a nod to one of Latino Urbanism’s key design elements, the ‘Front Porch’ of the university. What happens on that corner – a major edge of campus, in Sennett’s (2018a; 2018b) sense, or a ‘seam’ in Jacobs’ (1961:267) sense – will have everything to do with promoting institutional identity, signaling the university’s intentions to the community and city, and contributing to good urbanism. The winning plan targets the Front Porch for a mixed-use development consisting of marketrate and affordable housing for students and faculty, unique local restaurants and retail, multiple entertainment options, a university bookstore, a boutique hotel, and a Visitor Welcome Center. All of this is a faithful reflection of input received via the design firm’s many conversations and workshops with university stakeholders and surrounding University Park neighbors. These groups appear to be united in their desire to have a neighborhood akin to other ‘vibrant’ neighborhoods in Denver that have been widely celebrated as regeneration success stories. For example, Lower Downtown’s historic Union Station has been explicitly embraced by DU leaders as a model to emulate. All things considered, the winning design firm did an excellent job of developing a plan consistent with the desires of campus stakeholders and the university’s immediate neighbors. The firm clearly listened to its clients. However, the current plan offers little to nothing on the concerns that should be central to intercultural city building. Aside from multi-lingual signage, there is no evidence of a multicultural theme for designing other aspects of the built environment. There is no specific engagement with local cultural and historical contexts. Other than some basic conceptual renderings in the form of neo-modern boxes, there is a loud silence about architectural design. It is unclear whether we will see more of the same ‘Collegiate Gothic’ style in new university buildings or if we will see something disruptive and edgier. In short, there is an overall capitulation to the ‘white spatial imaginary’ (Lipsitz 2011) that is an all-too-frequent outcome of New Urbanism. That the plan reflects such an imaginary is unsurprising, given the local demographic context. It is very different from Mariposa’s Lincoln Park neighborhood. DU sits in a neighborhood that is

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racially homogenous and economically prosperous. The surrounding nine census tracts are 90 percent white. The average median household income in these neighborhoods is $70,000, compared to a Denver city average of $60,000. The median home value is $421,000, compared to a Denver city average of $415,000. Thus, unlike a lot of other urban universities concerned with development, DU’s neighborhood is not one that requires regeneration. It is one of those ‘concentrated advantage’ neighborhoods that have come to comprise one-half of today’s American city, with concentrated poverty comprising the other half. And therein lies the problem. It is not clear that Denver needs another development scheme that caters to upscale middle-class tastes. Or, one that essentially replicates the formula for producing urban ‘vibrancy’ as expressed in other places. Mallach (2018:49–73) singles out development around universities and medical centers (‘eds and meds’) as symptomatic of the dividing of American cities along lines of ethnicity and class. Many years ago Jane Jacobs criticized universities for not giving more ‘thought or imagination to the unique institutions that they are’ (Jacobs 1961:267). She urged them to serve as seams rather than barriers, placing uses intended for the public at strategic points on their perimeter rather than hiding them within. DU is a university with a public good mission that explicitly values innovation, inclusion, equity, and justice. It should think bigger, beyond the confines of the neighborhood in which it is located. Given that DU is not located in a distressed neighborhood with contested edges, it has a warrant and maybe even an obligation to do a different kind of urban placemaking – one that speaks to broader civic and maybe even planetary issues and concerns. One that connects to the bigger city rather than just the locality (Rutheiser 1997). One that might better connect University Park with Lincoln Park. Although the winning plan still promises isolation, the good news is that it is still a work in progress. Nothing yet is carved in stone. I believe a better path can be followed by engaging with critical urban studies, and ‘thinking with elsewhere’, including the Global North, Global South, and Ancient World. An alternative plan (an alterurbanization) should embrace the challenge of comprehending the city in its entirety (Canefe 2018); of connecting across many urban spaces (Fincher et al. 2014). It should think of the redeveloped space as forming part of the city’s general public space. Such was the

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thinking of another visionary mayor, Barcelona’s Pasqual Maragall, whose ‘darning urbanism’ was dedicated to achieving that goal and, by extension, strengthening the urban fabric (Albert 2010:331). We should envision a campus that is of the city and not simply in the city. To do so, we should start thinking about the city as a set of relationships, flows, and processes that constitute an urban fabric, rather than seeing the city as a collection of discrete objects, things, and places to be either avoided or emulated. The ‘college town’ trope with all its connotations of racial homogeneity, class privilege, and implicit nostalgic longing for small town America should be abandoned. The college town metaphor rejects the city rather than embracing it. It is fundamentally anti-urban and antithetical to values of diversity, equity, and inclusion. It certainly does not do much to remedy the perception that too many Denver residents have of DU as a bastion of whiteness and wealth. Alternative imaginaries, metaphors, and models are required and available. One possibility is Elijah Anderson’s (2011) notion of the cosmopolitan canopy, a pluralistic space in which residents from different neighborhoods mingle to create community. Although Anderson’s canopies offer only temporary zones of inter-ethnic association and inclusion, even temporary connections can go a long way toward producing a cosmopolitan attitude in the sense used here. It seems to me that the ancients invented and effectively realized this imaginary. Although typically arising today around food markets or other spaces with carnivalesque elements, there is no a priori reason why cosmopolitan canopies – islands of coexistence and civility – couldn’t form around the marketplace of ideas. What can we learn in this regard from places like Mohenjo-daro and Caracol? Another metaphor would require not only re-imagining the neighborhood but also re-imagining the academy and, specifically, the urban academy: the parts of the university whose work is on or about the urban, broadly defined (Schafran 2015:305). This is Barnes and Sheppard’s (2010) notion of the trading zone: a site where researchers with very different beliefs and from very different research cultures plurally engage one another, exchanging ideas in order to realize practical ends. Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman have established something that sounds like a trading zone with their ‘Cross-Border Initiative’ at the University of California, San Diego. The Initiative establishes community spaces along both sides of the

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US–Mexico border to facilitate research and programming for the diverse populations of San Diego and Tijuana whose destinies in this environmentally fragile and politically fraught borderland are closely intertwined. The current DU master plan allows for the usual stuff that is commonplace on many campuses: STEM quadrangle, sports performance facility, and dedicated spaces for particular academic units. But there is nothing of a visible transdisciplinary nature that would connect urban academics internally and, more importantly, with external communities. A cosmopolitan canopy or trading zone for DU’s Front Porch might take physical form as an Intercultural Research and Learning Collaborative that unites in one building university centers, institutes, campus-community partnerships, and other organizations that educate about human cultural diversity and history, and conduct research on urban academic problems. This would be a significant, meaningful step toward transforming the university from an academically siloed and bureaucratically managed ‘metropolis’ into a ‘cosmopolis’ predicated on fluid, flexible, open-ended structures and relationships that blur traditional academic boundaries (Frost and Chopp 2004). The university’s anthropology museum would make an excellent first-floor entry, given that the museum is widely regarded as another kind of zone, a transcultural ‘contact zone’ (Clifford 1997). Contact zones are spaces in which cultural differences are expressed, contested, and negotiated. It was with Clifford’s contact zone in mind that I was struck by Van De Mieroop’s (2003) reporting of a possible ‘museum’ in the Northern Palace of Babylon. Here, a number of objects were excavated that dated to the founding of the city in the late third millennium BC. Van De Mieroop is dubious that such an amenity existed, but we cannot completely discount the possibility. Nor can the assemblage be discounted as meaningless. The ancients were just as interested in preserving and celebrating cultural heritage as we are today. The collection in the Northern Palace likely connected the rulers of Babylon to those of the past, and so too the city’s inhabitants. There is no shortage of other university entities, existing and proposed, that would be at home under a cosmopolitan canopy/trading zone at the university’s edge. Many of these entities are typical fare for universities. The Center for Multicultural Excellence, the Center for World Languages and Cultures, the Center for Judaic Studies,

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the Latino Center for Community Engagement and Scholarship, the Interdisciplinary Research Institute for the Study of Social Inequality, the Institute for Freedom, Opportunity and Community Inclusion, the Center for Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation. Throw in some interdisciplinary degree programs: Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Sustainability Studies (appropriately broadened with the addition of cultural heritage as the fourth pillar of sustainable development), and Urban Studies. Add other academic units that do volunteer and pro-bono work for marginalized populations or in collaboration with community partners. Provide classroom space for selected course offerings in the university’s adult continuing education curriculum. Add informal spaces and design studios supportive of new and still-to-be-imagined academic initiatives (e.g., invite the Smart Cities research group over in the School of Engineering to join us humanists in a more comprehensive exploration of Smart Urbanism that redresses the problems identified in Chapter 2). Include community internet facilities and a small lending library. And, of course, a roof-top café. This sort of thing strikes me as far better than a Visitor Welcome Center, bookstore, or boutique hotel if the essential aim is to not just de-siloize academic thought but synergize scholarly interaction across university think tanks and energize campus– city relationships. An architecture reflecting the commitment to knowledge exchange, intercultural research, education, and policy formulation would make all the more of an academic and civic impact if it had a distinctive design, character, and feel. Something that disrupts the normal architectural fabric. Something akin to the Ghanaian architect David Adjaye’s Idea Store in Whitechapel, London, whose form and design connect hardscrabble East End communities to their immigrant and working-class pasts (Moore 2005). Many universities covet the opportunity to experiment with new architectural forms and styles that speak to campus context, history, and educational mission (for a sampling, see Biemiller 2019). For DU – a campus aesthetically united by its Collegiate Gothic style – the choice of a disruptive Front Porch architecture should be a no-brainer. Planning up to now has been minimally attentive to how DU’s campus – like the rest of Denver – occupies ancestral Cheyenne and Arapaho land. Respecting the campus’s environmental setting and iconic mountain views is one thing. Recognizing

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its white settler history and remembering the native peoples exterminated, subjugated, or displaced by that history is quite another. There is a compelling need for the university to give voice to what Raewyn Connell (2007) calls the ‘silence of the land’. A rich tradition of thought about indigenous planning and design is available for study. So too is a detailed archaeological history of the Denver region that empirically substantiates the area’s deep history as a crossroads of cultural interaction and locus of cultural coexistence (Nelson et al. 2001). Contributors to Porter (2017) describe appropriate principles and practices for indigenous placemaking (see also Nejad et al. 2019). There are many concrete examples of what is possible; e.g., the First Nations architect Douglas Cardinal’s work in Canada. These examples serve as a guide to how new and potentially regenerative spaces of inclusion and belonging can fill the interstices of the ‘urban settler state’ (Patrick 2017). DU’s Front Porch is one such interstice of the white urban settler state. It is worth sacrificing not only the Visitor Welcome Center but also the bookstore and boutique hotel in favor of a public plaza or civic commons that intimately connects with the Intercultural Learning Collaborative, ideally with one space flowing into the other and both flowing into the street. I can easily imagine an expanded campus and civic commons open to multi-functional use: a busy setting for markets, festivals, bazaars, and pow wows, re-enchanted by indigenous architecture and spiritually enlivened by memorable public art. Songo Mnara’s synchronous public spaces, porous walls and edges, and commitment to teatro mundi provides one model. Summary

This chapter has discussed some contemporary urban planning and design initiatives oriented toward intercultural placemaking. I have identified some good starts, promising directions, and alternative models. The Council of Europe’s Intercultural Cities initiative offers a sophisticated, theoretically informed take on the diversity advantage and how urban policy and planning can best harness it. Social Urbanism and other alter-urbanizations of the Global South and Mexican–American Borderland have a lot in common with alterurbanizations of the ancient world from the standpoint of strategies for integrating cultural diversities. All are predicated on working

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the edges of neighborhoods, using shells as an open-ended building form, mixing uses, and preserving the commons. They are powered by different kinds of sociotechnical intelligences for building the open, inclusive city. New Urbanism, as applied in Denver, has some nice qualities but is not fulfilling the inclusion and equity commitments of the movement’s founding Charter. The final chapter pulls together some takeaway lessons from my studies of ancient and modern urbanisms that are relevant to the challenges of contemporary placemaking, and that might be useful as a framework for generating new urban imaginaries and approaches to planning theory and practice.

6 | C O N C LU S I O N

In his book Cities in the Urban Age, Robert Beauregard (2018) notes that the city contains many paradoxes and contradictions. It creates great wealth but also concentrates it in the hands of a few. It can be environmentally destructive but it also has some significant sustainability advantages compared to other forms of human settlement. It is an ideal place for democracy to thrive but it also enables centralization of political power. It encourages people to be tolerant, but it also nurtures intolerance and sometimes violence (see also Sennett 2018b:6). Yet, for Beauregard, the city remains a ‘field of possibilities’, and this should give us hope. Tilling that field requires a Critical perspective rather than a Triumphal one. Colin McFarlane (2011b) frames the challenge from the standpoint of urban geography while also invoking the assemblage theory of urban sociomateriality of interest here: [C]urrent debates about the ‘creative’ or ‘smart’ city value particular exclusive groups, spaces, and forms of urban development, particularly around well-educated elites living in premium residential spaces and working in high-end service economies, including in particular science, technology, research, media, and finances. For urban geographers, a conception of assemblage can serve to expose which groups and ideologies have the greater capacity to render urbanism in particular ways over others, and therefore offers a ground for thinking how the city might be assembled differently. At stake here is the critical relationship between the actual and the virtual city, between the city that is and the city that might have been or that might otherwise arise. (McFarlane 2011b:668)

Robert Sampson (2017) also uses Smart Urbanism as an entry point for critiquing today’s focus on technology and Big Data as solutions to the urban problems and paradoxes that bedevil us:

conclusion | 147 [T]o be truly ‘smart’, cities of the future – and the diverse neighborhoods therein – need fresh theoretical ideas and analytic tools for integrating environmental sustainability with the promotion of human welfare, or social sustainability . . . [W]hereas ecological processes have understandably taken precedence in the urban sustainability literature, the sustainability of cities entails vital social processes: human well-being and environmental outcomes are intertwined . . . [Progress] in urban sustainability requires an additional theoretical focus on the social structure of cities and their neighborhoods.

Interestingly, Sampson references the archaeological work of M.E. Smith and others on urban neighborhoods in the ancient world, underscoring the importance of a long, historical view for developing equitable principles and policies of urban governance. This book is a brief for developing an urbanism that deals with the central issue raised by McFarlane, Sampson, and others committed to fulfilling the New Urban Agenda (United Nations 2017; Mehaffy and Haas 2018). That is, how to make cities more equitable, inclusive, just, and sensitive to the needs of diverse individuals and groups. Even Triumphalists recognize the urgency of this issue. Edward Glaeser (2018:27) suggests that ‘to effectively thrive in heterogeneous cities, you need the ability to bridge across ethnicities and social groups’. This book has addressed the issue by taking leads from several valued intellectual muses: Leonie Sandercock’s vision of a ‘new planning imagination’ that is intercultural in focus; Richard Sennett’s idea of the open, inclusive city and the material forms that can produce it; and Setha Low’s challenge to urban anthropologists to use our discipline to help advance the field of urban studies. The book has pursued its goal by offering a critical perspective on urban planning and design that is comparative, deep time, and interdisciplinary. It is fundamentally indebted to the pioneering philosophical and theoretical work of Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey. I have drawn inspiration from those who have articulated Planetary (Brenner 2019) and Provincial (Robinson 2006) approaches to urban theory building. I have followed M.E. Smith’s (2009a) advice to move past recentism and ‘temporal parochialism’ in our understanding of urban history. I have heeded Jill Grant’s (2006b:237) advice that looking deep into history can help us avoid ‘myopic’ discussions about the

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significance of one or another planning form, like the urban grid. I have fully embraced Goebel’s (2019) suggestion that understanding urbanization today requires, more than ever before, close attention to the lessons and alter-urbanizations of the past. I have looked far back, and not just around. I have treated the ancient world as a ‘generative source of theoretical innovation and comparative insight’ (Brenner 2019:45). Drawing upon and moving between anthropology, evolutionary science, and the archaeology of ‘diverse elsewheres’ (Brenner 2019:45) I have sought to enlarge the stockpile of ideas and concepts that can inform progressive urban theory and practice. Ancient cities were successful by any number of criteria. Most importantly for this book, they capitalized on diversity’s advantages to generate highly creative civic cultures and widespread social and economic prosperity. Certainly, they were as contradictory or paradoxical as cities of the present, manifesting various forms of social exclusion and in many cases (but not all) degrading their environments. They were often (but not always) crowded, chaotic, dirty, smelly, noisy places, and prone to infectious disease (see Algaze 2018 and commentaries therein). However, they remain largely unexplored as storehouses of planning and design knowledge that might be relevant for addressing contemporary urban problems if we stay focused on general forms and principles for intercultural city building. I have sought to extract some of the lessons taught by ancient cities while also keeping in mind Lefebvre’s warning that we can never go back. Galinsky (1992:79) offers wise advice that, to some extent, captures the difference between New Urbanism and the Intercultural Urbanism advocated here: ‘Vitality comes not from withdrawing into the past but from using it as a basis for transformation’. What has been learned from this study of ancient urbanism, and how can today’s planning and design professions benefit from this knowledge? I review my major takeaway lessons below. I am under no illusion that urban planners and policymakers will rush to take them on board. As M.E. Smith notes in a number of publications (2009a; 2012; 2019), any lessons from archaeology that relate to contemporary planning and policy issues will have to be carefully expressed, because not everyone knows what archaeology is really about. Findings and insights will have to be presented in ways that allow urban studies scholars, planning professionals, and policymakers to translate them into familiar terms and useful forms.

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The most basic lesson is that M.E. Smith and his fellow urban researchers are exactly right: there is significant variation in the planning (and non-planning) of ancient cities, and the processes by which they were organized. Chapter 4 presents a small representative sampling of this variation. In surveying ancient urbanism from a global perspective it also appears that a wide range of planning and design possibilities were present at the very beginning of urbanization, and that a progressive winnowing or pruning of this diversity has occurred over time. If this is so, then the history of urbanization is akin to the evolutionary history of life itself (Gould 1989). In the case of cities, possibilities were narrowed as a function of explosive population increase and the expansion of a particular, historically contingent neoliberal development agenda to every corner of the earth. This makes the investigation of ancient cities, and consideration of how their relevant design forms and principles might serve an intercultural planning project today, a worthwhile endeavor. I am impressed by the ethnic and class heterogeneity of ancient neighborhoods in cities where residential areas have been systematically excavated, including Mesopotamia, along the East African coast, and at Teotihuacan. Certainly, relatively homogenous ethnic barrios and enclaves were also part of the mix. I am impressed by the ancients’ harnessing of diversity’s advantages to increase prosperity and generate equitable and sustainable urban communities. Even where there was social inequality in access to services and products (as measured by high Gini coefficients), people still enjoyed some measure of guaranteed access to basic resources, as documented by the study of ancient diets and the biology of health. Almost certainly social mixing combined with guaranteed access to basic resources had something to do with creating the robust middle-class existences that are evident, in different forms, in cities like Caracol and Chunchucmil. I am struck by the ancients’ attitudes toward immigration and its material signature, urban informality. Informality – a mode of urbanization that occurs outside formal legal structures and processes (see the compilation of perspectives in Porter 2011) – is a topic of great interest to contemporary urban policymakers (McGuirk 2014:25). I am impressed by the amount of informal housing that existed in ancient cities, some of which, as noted, had central core densities comparable to those of today. The various contexts of this housing

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suggests that citizenship in the cities considered here was predicated on Henri Lefebvre’s notion of inhabitance – living there – rather than on cultural group or immigration status, with the right to the city more-or-less guaranteed (Lefebvre 1996; Purcell 2002). Informal housing was located in the interstices of public and private space, between elite structures and up against dividing walls. Despite being in full view of the elites (perhaps purposely in some instances, in keeping with a time-honored strategy of panoptic surveillance), such informal housing did not appear to threaten local property values. What else might we discover if we investigated the open spaces between palaces, temples, and pyramids? Perhaps such spaces were not always given over to parks and gardens (Stark 2014). We might acquire some clues about how to better provide ‘unregulated dwelling environments’ (Peattie 1994:136) under conditions of urban densification (Devlin 2011; McGranahan et al. 2016). Or, better ways to implement ‘Lean Urbanism’: bottom-up city building that is unencumbered by onerous codes (Dittmar and Kelbaugh 2019). I am intrigued by the different ways that ancient planners and citizens designed, distributed, and connected public spaces, third spaces, and other amenities. In fact, the ancients appear to have utilized many of the physical forms or design principles recommended by Sennett (2018b; see also Mehaffy 2018) and described in Chapter 1 as elements of cosmopolitan/open city placemaking. Songo Mnara appears exemplary for its provision of synchronous public spaces. These spaces supported a variety of uses that enhanced their cosmopolitan character. By all accounts they seem to have been enticing places (sensu Hildebrand 1999), inviting social mixing. Mesoamerican plazas also fit this bill, with their capacity to accommodate all citizens at whatever scale was appropriate (neighborhood, district, quadrant, entire city). Edges were used at Mohenjo-daro to anchor spaces of everyday exchange and civic inculcation, and may have been the equivalent of today’s cosmopolitan canopies (Green 2018; Anderson 2011). Edges were most likely the locations of markets in Mesopotamia (McMahon 2013a). Walls were employed as permeable or porous borders in the Indus (Kenoyer 2003) as well as in East Africa. They facilitated the construction of informal housing, perhaps even forming one sidewall of temporary structures. Shells were utilized at Teotihuacan in the form of apartment compounds that could be shaped and renovated to their occupants’ desires. The open space at Khorsabad, and the

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empty spaces in urban fabrics that are apparent elsewhere (see M.L. Smith 2008), may have been shells at a larger scale. Only further archaeological investigation will disclose how these open spaces were in-filled and used. The Mayan cities of Chunchucmil and Caracol bring together a number of Sennett’s elements: low walls, porous borders, many pathways, and accessible public plazas. Their built environments offered freedom of movement and many possibilities for social interaction and mixing. Other innovative ideas are conceivably embedded in the design and construction of Sennett’s exclamation points: public buildings and monuments. Some of these seem to incorporate patterned complexity and various optical refinements that cognitive scientists suggest excite our evolved sensibilities and our brains. Many ancient cityscapes, buildings, and monumental markers were invested with narrative qualities and power through their sequencing of spaces and use of light and other material assemblages (Goldhagen 2017). In other words, the ancient city was very often a theatrical exercise. Most intriguing is the palace at Khorsabad (McMahon 2013b), and we see something similar at Babylon (Van de Mieroop 2003). The Americas are replete with examples of how ancient builders located pyramids, earthen mounds, and masonry Great Houses to heighten emotional and psychological responses, tell stories, preserve memories, and create mystery while at the same time producing social integration and a shared civic identity (Hildebrand 1999; Coburn et al. 2017). We do this today, of course (think of the design proposals for rebuilding lower Manhattan after the 9/11 attacks), and there are many studies of the experiential nature of architecture going back to ancient Rome (e.g., Coburn et al. 2017). But perhaps there are new principles of design to be illuminated if we allow that ‘built narrative’ (Filep et al. 2014) is a practice much more deeply rooted in the human past. If engaging with the ancients to learn about architectural narrative and theatre is a bridge too far, we can focus on their socially just and environmentally sustainable resource management practices. This very popular topic is a prime target of Public Anthropology (M.E. Smith 2012; Sinclair et al. 2016). Policies and practices of water and waste management in the Indus did not discriminate by class or ethnicity. There was wide distribution and intimate folding of agricultural plots into the urban fabric at Caracol, and likely in Mesopotamian

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cities as well (Van de Mieroop 1997:86). The reservoirs and terracing at Caracol conformed the city to its natural setting. The same sort of sensitivity to nature likely constrained urbanization at Jenné-jeno. Africa and the Americas offer contemporary cities new imaginaries for practicing urban agriculture in inclusive and sustainable ways. Ancient cities have still more to offer. Some urbanists (e.g., Kunstler 2011) argue that cities today need to contract and densify, suggesting that opportunities for a dispersed, low-density urbanism have come and gone. Others argue that the urban future is regional, with all kinds of alternative settlement forms destined to fill the periphery (Soja 2018). The ‘New Ruralism’ is a growth framework that seeks to integrate preserved farmland and sustainable agricultural practices into contemporary development (Newman and Saginor 2016). It combines ideas from New and Agrarian urbanisms. The Maya offer models of high-density, peripheral urbanization or ‘high density ruralism’ (Scarborough et al. 2012) that can help us think about regional urbanization and better understand its dynamics in ways consistent with the sprawl-containing sustainability ethos of New Ruralism. In other words, the ancients conceivably offer new imaginaries for connecting urban and rural (Mehaffy 2019). As Petrie (2019:127) notes for Mesopotamia, ancient cities were built upon rural socio-economic underpinnings that were inherently resilient and sustainable. I am intrigued by the sensitivity of ancient planners to local environmental conditions and how they, along with other creative classes, used history, art, iconography, monumentality, and wider ‘sacred landscapes’ to create a shared civic identity out of cultural diversity. The veneers of Harappan cities and the symbolic egalitarianism of the Mayan city of Caracol embody ideas that put citizens on the same page, helping to contain more destructive polarizations and tensions. Sandercock (2003:225) ends Cosmopolis II by suggesting that it might be time to re-introduce the importance of the sacred, of spirit, into our thinking about cities and their regions. Perhaps the urbanists of West Africa, who uniquely urbanized in a way guided by an occult ‘grid of power’ (McIntosh and McIntosh 2003), offer a guide? Finally, it is striking that the ancient cities that might be the most socially equitable and environmentally sustainable had institutions and ideologies of urban governance that emphasized heterarchy and bottom-up co-production of the city, rather than hierarchy and

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top-down formal planning. There is ample and widespread evidence for citizen-based participatory design in the ancient city; for political arrangements that allow citizens and interest groups wide latitude to co-design and co-produce the city without too much, if any, interference from planning elites or the state. Indeed, informality appears to have been the original default setting for urbanization. Population density was not an obstacle or impediment to citizen-based participatory planning and design. Some of the densest neighborhoods in the ancient world were also the most egalitarian (Carballo and Feinman 2016). There is also evidence that the more collective the governance of these cities, the more resilient they were (Feinman and Carballo 2018). Thirty-five years ago Richard Wilk (1985) examined the history of scholarship on the ancient Maya to clarify the dual nature of archaeology. He describes this dual nature as, on the one hand, a search for objective knowledge about the past and, on the other, a political dialogue with the present. With respect to the latter, Wilk suggested that the past can be used as either ‘Charter’ or ‘Bad Example’. Using the past as Charter refers to positive lessons that can be applied today. I have reviewed some of the positive lessons taught by ancient cities above. I have not dealt with the ancient city as Bad Example; i.e., as a source of cautionary tales for those of us in the present. My survey of ancient urbanism implicates a few of these tales, related to the popular trope of urban ‘collapse’. It must be said that the notion of collapse may be overdone; what we interpret as collapse may in fact simply be social re-organization or re-configuration (see also M.L. Smith 2019:253–259). After all, the descendants of the ancient Maya (around whom swirl many collapse stories) are still with us today. The same goes for descendants of the Ancestral Pueblo of Chaco Canyon, who did not ‘mysteriously disappear’ according to popular culture and many National Park Service tourism brochures. We know where the ancestors went. But the sources consulted for this book are notable in that many accounts of urban collapse in the ancient world refer to problems that bedevil us today. The wheels started coming off at Tres Zapotes when autocratic rule began re-asserting itself at 300 CE. Increasing ethnic segregation, rising social inequality, and emerging authoritarian leadership spelled an end to collective governance and widespread prosperity at Teotihuacan (Clayton 2015:295–296; Manzanilla 2015; Cowgill 2015:235; Freixa 2018).

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A broadly similar story can be told for Caracol (A. Chase and D. Chase 2009:21; 2007:231; D. Chase and A. Chase 2014; see also Jennings 2016:230). The failure of city administrations to maintain critical infrastructure is implicated as a cause of urban decline in the Indus (Kenoyer 2003; see also Chase and Chase 2009 for Caracol). It seems that it was not the existence of cultural diversity per se that caused these cities to come undone, although in some instances governance structures might have done more to contain segregations and divisions and better manage conflict (e.g., see Emerson and Hedman 2016 on Cahokia). Still, Yoffee and Seri (2019) make a compelling point about Uruk and Teotihuacan: when they fell it was the central administrative precincts that were destroyed, while the neighborhoods where diversities lived and thrived remained untouched. Lucero et al. (2011) offer something of the same for the terminal classic Maya: centers fell, but rural peripheries persisted through the collapse. Although central administrative hierarchies are fragile and neighborhoods resilient, we have evidence that the ancient Maya were able to articulate new relationships between cosmology, governance, and the built environment even through episodes of civic collapse (Mixter 2019). Overall, ancient cities generated what Ash Amin (2008) calls ‘urban plenitude’: a collective domain of public spaces, local facilities, well-functioning infrastructures, and shared experiences. Given this plenitude, it seems that there is not much that is novel in any of the urbanisms discussed in Chapter 2, among the many others that exist. Just focusing on the ‘I’s in the urbanism alphabet, the ancients were committed to city building strategies that were informal, incremental, iterative, inclusive, and intercultural. The details are best detected with investigations that are historical and ideographic rather than generalizing and nomothetic. This is why I believe that focusing on the 85 percent sameness among modern cities emphasized by scientific urbanologists is an insight of limited utility, their contributions to a general science of cities notwithstanding. I am most taken with the 15 percent of urban form that is not explicable with universal law, because it is more directly relevant to the project of creating the new forms of social and spatial belonging that can foster urban creativity and prosperity while minimizing ethnic and class conflict. I suspect that many of the claims and inferences offered in this final chapter and this book as a whole will be met with skepticism among

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scholars, especially those outside of anthropology and archaeology who have limited knowledge of the Ancient Urban Other. It is likely that any proposed interventions will be a hard sell for practicing planners, designers, property developers, city councilors, neighborhood associations, and citizens without some considerable persuading. My own recent experience sharing knowledge about the design and planning of the ancient city with my Denver city councilman met with a confused look, as if cities were things that only originated in his lifetime and that the question of their acceptable form had been settled. On the other hand, it is not hard to imagine how others committed to challenging and changing the urban status quo – be they tactical urbanists, urban acupuncturists, or seed planners – would be more open to knowing and using information about how the ancients planned, designed, and experienced their cities. Making urban places conducive to intercultural exchange and cross-fertilization must begin with changes to planning education and practice that are transformational and not simply reformist (Agyeman and Erikson 2012; Agyeman 2013). Peattie’s (1990) recommendation is still timely: this interdisciplinary work will not happen in agencies and offices, but rather in academic departments and research institutes, urban research labs, and think tanks. In other words, it must be tackled within the urban academy (sensu Schafran 2015) as discussed in Chapter 5. If that sounds elitist, so be it (see Madden 2015 and Meagher 2015 for some context to this debate). Expert knowledge is under siege these days, and perhaps it is time to mount a spirited defense. Education must be transdisciplinary, incorporating lessons from the social, historical, and evolutionary sciences, plus the arts and humanities. Entrenched assumptions of urban studies must be destabilized (Brenner 2019:321) and urban questions reframed (Merrifield 2014:14). Theory building, especially theories of place, design, and architecture that are responsive to cultural history, diversity, and meaning, is crucial. The scope of planning history must include what I call deep history, in order to explore the full range of ideas about how human beings design and build cities. It seems to me that the only way to ensure culturally competent planners and designers is to train them to be culturally and historically literate. Of course, my argument on behalf of academic expertise is overstated. Academic work must surely be made more public and subject

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to citizen scrutiny. It must also articulate with the work of practitioners (L. Lees 2001). Diversifying the ranks of these practitioners is a clear and pressing need. The planning profession is 81 percent white (Stein 2019:9). The numbers in architecture are comparable (Walter 2015; American Institute of Architects 2016). A fundamental requirement going forward is for ‘the whiteness of planning [and architecture] . . . to move over, make space, relinquish power and control at least in some places, to enable indigenous [and other alternative] perspectives to come to the fore on their own terms’ (Porter 2017:652). Regarding practice, expectations and goals need to be modest. We are just beginning to do deep historical and comparative scholarship on the ancient city, and the theory building that can and should result from it. No single ancient city from anywhere in the world can offer a model that is directly transferrable to today. We need to work comparatively across multiple cases and geographies to discover relevant forms, principles, and strategies that can guide contemporary practice. In the absence of models for large-scale master planning that promote intercultural contact and pluralism, it is best to employ Lerner’s (2014) urban acupuncture and Foucault’s (1980) little tactics of habitat in the context of Sennett’s (2018b) seed planning while being vigilant about the impact of specific local interventions on the city as a whole. Such efforts are crucial if the contemporary city is to bridge cultural diversity and difference as successfully as our best examples from antiquity. Low-hanging fruit exists in the rethinking of building and zoning codes (Goldhagen cited in Hurley 2017). Hidden in the shadows, but potentially close at hand, are much bigger and even more consequential lessons about alternative structural (non-neoliberal) ways of thinking, producing, and governing the city. These bigger lessons about deep structural change will also be required if we are to create cities that are sustainably inclusive and equitable. In the meantime, there is a critical need to expand the body of source material for imagining how urban built form can better accommodate diversity in human sociocultural life. Channeling ancient Australian Aborigine wisdom, Leonie Sandercock (2003:227–228) referred to the task of creating a planning imagination for the intercultural city as the work of the Songlines: travelling many pathways in order to perform the activities that sustain life. The allusion

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is relevant and compelling given the objective of this book and, frankly, my allegiances as an anthropologist. It thus makes for an appropriate ending. Songlines of the city – alternative traditions and pathways of sociomaterial life and practice – are deeply embedded in the urban cultures and histories of the modern world. They are also deeply embedded in the urban cultures and histories of the ancient world. Excavating, and thinking with, the knowledge contained in these ancient Songlines is vital for creating a twentyfirst-century planning imagination that sees innovation, inclusion, equity, and justice as indispensable for achieving a broader urban prosperity and sustainability.

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INDEX

Note: Page numbers in italic indicate maps. Abbot, C., 62 Acropolis, 56–7 Adams, R.McC., 70 Adjaye, David, 143 affordable housing, 124, 131, 139 Agrarian Urbanism, 26, 152 agricultural economies, 63, 76 agriculture: Cities First debate, 73–80; urban agriculture, 26, 31, 98, 151–2 Agyeman, J., 30, 31, 86 Alexander, C., 53 Ali, M., 134–5 altepetl, 104–5 alter-urbanization(s), 140, 144, 148 Amarna, 64 ancient cities: decline, 153–4; definition, 5–6; edge environments, 60, 82, 83; egalitarian nature, 61; global and multi-ethnic, 6–7; intercultural inclusion, 11; lack of primary texts, 59; origins, 5–6; planning and design, 149, 150–1; segregation and ethnic clustering, 70–1; source for progressive urban theory, 147–8; unsupported preconceptions, 60–1 Ancient Egypt, 62, 64–5 ancient world: classical world, 61; limited archaeological data, 60; migration, 40; origins of cities, 5–6; scholarly preconceptions, 12; social inclusion, 84 Anderson, E., 141 anthropology: Copperbelt, 42–3; definition, 37; and human nature, 47–8; normative anthropology, 23; typological anthropology, 24; urban anthropology, 41, 125–30; and urban planning, 43–7 Apaolaza-Ibáñez, V., 50 Appadurai, A., 44 Appleton, J., 48 Aravena, Alejandro, 118 archaeologists, publishing outside field of archaeology, 70, 76

archaeology: definition, 9; and ethnography, 44; goals, 9; and modern urban theory, 72; relevance to modern world, 69–70; to give cities ‘plausibility’, 72; of urbanism, 70–2 archisemiotics, 126, 129 assemblage theory, 10, 72, 146 Athens Charter, 16 Australian Aborigine wisdom, 156–7 Aztecs, 96 Babylon, 142 Bahrani, Z., 73 Balbo, Marcello, 115 Balling, J., 48–9, 50 Barcelona, 115–16, 141 Barnes, E., 57 Barrio Urbanism see Social Urbanism Basin of Mexico, 66, 94–7 Beauregard, R., 146 Bedoya, R., 29 Benfield, K., 14–15 Bettencourt, L., 16, 66, 67, 68, 69 bicycle lanes, 28, 30, 117 biology, and culture, 55–6 Birmingham, Sense of Place project, 112–14 Black Rock City (Nevada), 84 Blakely, E., 68 Bogotá, 117 border vacuums, 51 borders see edge environments Borderland Urbanism, 119 Boschmann, E., 123 boundaries see edge environments Bourdieu, Pierre, 41–2 Brasilia, 23, 43, 52 Brecknock, R., 33 Brenner, N., 1, 38, 78, 116 Briggs, X., 102, 106 Bristol, park vegetation, 31 Buchli, V., 41

186  |  index built environment: and culture, 9–10; and human psychology, 51–8 Burning Man, 84 bus systems, 117, 127–8, 132 Cabaniss, A., 66 cable cars, 117, 118 Cahokia Mounds (Illinois), 92, 103–6 Caracol, 92, 97–9, 151–2, 154 Carballo, D., 69, 72 Cardinal, Douglas, 144 Çatalhöyük: Cities First debate, 75–80; creative activities, 75, 78–9; obsidian, 73, 75, 78, 79; settlement, 73–5, 74; trading centre, 73, 75, 78 Central Avenue of the Dead, 94 Chaco Phenomenon (New Mexico), 92, 103–6, 153 Chandigarh, 52 Chase, A. and D., 97–9 Chicago School of Urban Sociology, 27, 62–3 Childe, V. Gordon, 70 Chile, Tulan, 77 China, urbanization, 64–5 The Christian Science Monitor, 67, 69 Chunchucmil, 92, 99–102 cité, 10, 11, 42 cities: basic building blocks, 33–4; clustered cities, 89; development as a process, 76; and development of the state, 72; differences between ancient and modern cities, 68; low-density cities, 84–5; ‘right to the city’, 4–5, 8–9, 33, 39, 150; as site of practice, 39; size and productivity, 66–7; see also ancient cities Cities First, 63, 73-80 civic identity, 79, 98, 112–14, 151, 152 civic responsibility, 84 civilization, characteristics, 71 Clark, G., Global Cities, 65 Clifford, J., 42, 142 clustered cities, 89 cognitive science, 56–7 colonial urbanization, 42 commerce, 100 community festivals, 34, 112 community gardens, 31, 133, 134 community interests, 19, 21–2, 32 community involvement see participatory planning

Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), 16 Congress for the New Urbanism (2012), 22–4 Congress for the New Urbanism Charter (2000), 17 conviviality, 43–4 cooking facilities, 34–5 Copperbelt anthropologists, 42–3 Córdoba, 102, 105 cosmological beliefs, 56, 93, 96, 98, 103, 104–5, 106 cosmopolitan canopy, 87, 141–2, 150 cosmopolitan cities, 10–11, 34, 90, 102–3, 123 Council of Europe, Intercultural Cities program, 109–16 Cowgill, G., 94, 95 creative classes, 78–9, 122 Creative Urbanism, 28–9, 32 Critical discourse, 12, 16–17, 38–40, 57–8; Planetary and Provincial strands, 12, 38–40, 57 Crumley, C., 87 Cruz, Teddy, 121, 141–2 Cugurullo, F., 32 cultural competency, 34 cultural diversity: ancient world, 6–7; benefits, 2–3, 8, 110, 152; as branding strategy, 33; definition, 1–2; and Garden Cities, 134–6; inclusivity in design, 115–16; New Urbanism, 20–5; pressures, 2; right to difference, 8–9; superficial efforts, 33; see also ethnic diversity cultural literacy, 33 culture of citizenship, 60, 84, 117 Curitiba, 117 Darwinian Aesthetics, 50, 55 Davidson, M., 39 Davis, Mike: City of Quartz, 125, 126; Magical Urbanism, 119 de Oliver, M., 33 democratic regimes, 62 Denver, 121–44; creative classes, 122; edge environments, 127, 129; ethnic diversity challenges, 122–3, 129–30; gentrification concerns, 122–3; homelessness, 128, 129; housing concerns, 124, 127; Lincoln Park, 137–8; Mariposa social housing, 137–8;

index | 187 millennial generation, 123–4; mixed appeal of suburban malls retrofit, 124–30; neighborhood connectivity, 137–44; New Urbanism, 122; transport links, 122, 127–8; University of Denver planning, 138–44 Der, L., 80, 85 design, 47; see also planning and design diversity advantage, 3, 144 Dosen, A., 57 Douglas, G., 28 Duany, A., 22–5, 26, 54 East Africa, stonetowns, 74, 89–91 edge environments: ancient cities, 60, 82, 83; border vacuums for large parks, 51; cosmopolitan canopy, 141–2; Denver, 127, 129; fences, 120; Indus Valley, 85, 86, 150; intermediary zones, 119–20; neighborhood connectivity, 137–44; porosity, 10–11, 117, 121; of savannahs, 48, 55; Songo Mnara, 90; university/ town boundaries, 138–9, 141–2; urban periphery, 130–6 elites, 3, 31; see also palaces Ellard, C., 27, 58 Emberling, G., 73, 79–80 embodiment, 56–7, 104–5 engaged pluralism, 40, 57 Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness (EEA), 49–50 environmental sustainability, 30–1, 121, 132–3, 136; see also transport systems; water conservation Espino, N., 46 ethnic diversity: clothing rather than physical features, 73; Denver challenges, 122–3, 129–30; and Garden Cities, 133–4; importance, 2; Indus Valley, 85–6; Mesoamerica, 94–5; the ‘Other’, 25, 44–5; plurality/ co-existence, 105–7; segregation as cause of city decline, 153–4; variable effects, 70–1; see also cultural diversity ethnography, 40–7, 58, 125 ethnoscape, 44 everyday life, 72 Everyday Urbanism, 18–20, 32 evolutionary psychology, 49–51, 56–7, 58, 67–8, 117

Fajardo, Sergio, 117–18 Falk, J., 48–9, 50 fences, 120 festivals, 34, 112 Florida, R., 28–9, 78, 122 food: availability, 31; cooking facilities, 34–5; culturally appropriate facilities, 45; sociable eating, 44; see also urban agriculture food harvesting, 24–5 food production, 26 Forman, Fonna, 121, 141–2 Foucault, M., 119, 156 fractal patterns, 55 Fraker, H., 17 Friedman, J., 60 Galinsky, K., 148 Garden Cities, 97, 131–7 gated communities, 44–5 Geertz, C., 23 Gehry, Frank, 18 gentrification, 24, 30, 122–3 geography, as guide to cultural character, 65 Gilbert, A., 60 Glaeser, E., 16, 147 Glaudemans, Marc, 112 globalization, 65 Göbekli Tepe (Turkey), 77 Goebel, M., 5, 148 Goetz, A., 123 Goldhagen, S., 56–7, 82 Gorky Park (Melitopol), 112 governance: collective, 6, 96–7, 107–8; heterarchy, 87, 89, 96, 152–3; Indus Valley, 87–8; Jenné-jeno, 89; Mesoamerica, 93–4, 96–7 Graeber, D., 60–1, 77 Grant, J., 22, 64, 147–8 Green, A., 87 green space, 45; see also urban parks grid design, 64 guerrilla gardening, 28 Haas, T., 14, 17 habitus, 42 Hadid, Zaha, 18 Hadrian’s Villa, 62 Hall, P., 131 Hannerz, U., 42

188  |  index Harappa (Indus Valley), 85, 86, 152 Hartman, P., 50 Harvey, D., 8, 21–2, 147 Hein, C., 62 heterarchy, 87, 89, 96, 152–3 Hildebrand, G., 54–5, 82 Hodder, I., 78, 78–9 Hollander, J., 55 Holston, J., 43 housing: affordable housing, 124, 131; cultural meanings, 41–2; Denver concerns, 124, 127; high-rise towers, 27–8, 52; inclusivity needs, 46; incremental design (shell), 95, 118, 121, 138, 150; informal housing, 71, 91, 149–50; for large, multigenerational families, 34–5, 119; limited ancient world data, 60; for marginalized people, 43; Mariposa social housing, 137–8; Mesoamerica, 94–5, 100–1; mixing by ethnicity and wealth, 94–5, 100–1 Howard, E., 97 hub-and-spoke design, 100 Hull, R., 91 human nature: and the built environment, 51–8; and the natural environment, 47–8 Hutson, S., 99, 100, 101 identity-making, 79 immigration: Cahokia, 103; and cultural inclusivity, 115–16; Mesoamerica, 94–5; positive effects, 2–3 in/equality: access to products and services, 71, 149; Caracol, 98–9; Chunchucmil, 101; Denver, 140; limited in Indus Valley, 86; Teotihuacan, 95 inclusivity, 46, 84, 91 indigenous cultures, 56, 143–4 Indus Valley, 74, 85–8; edge environments, 85, 86, 150; governance, 87–8; Mohenjodaro, 74, 85–8, 150; urbanization, 64–5; water and waste management, 151 informal economies, 21, 30–1, 34, 35 informal housing, 71, 91, 149–50 informal urbanism, 71, 89 inhabitance, 150 Intercultural Cities program, 109–16 Intercultural Urbanism, 7–9; theoretical commitments, 32–5; see also cultural diversity; ethnic diversity

Iroquois longhouses, 41 Issavi, J., 80, 85 Iveson, K., 39 Jacobs, J., 10–11, 51, 53; Cities First debate, 73–80; The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 2, 46–7; The Economy of Cities, 63, 73 Jenné-jeno (Mali), 74, 88–9, 91, 152 Jennings, J., 76–7, 79, 81, 96, 106; Killing Civilization: A Reassessment of Early Urbanism and Its Consequences, 71–2 just sustainability, 86, 91, 93 Kahun, 64 Kaplan, S. and R., 49 Keith, K., 81–2 Kelbaugh, D., 17–20, 25–6, 31–2 Khorsabad (Dur-Sharrakun) palace, 74, 82, 151 Kim, D., 15 Kimmelman, M., 21 kinetic architecture, 120–1, 128 King, Martin Luther, 8 kinship relations, 81 Komar, Vitaly, 49–50 Koolhaas, Rem, 18, 52–3 Kostof, S., 79, 128 Kotkin, J., The City: A Global History, 64 Krätke, S., 28 Krier, Léon, 53 La Venta (Mexico), 93–4 land development codes, 22–3 land re-adjustment programs, 46 Landry, C., 3, 33, 87, 109, 130 landscape preferences, 48–51 Landscape Urbanism, 25–6 Latino Urbanism see Social Urbanism Lawhon, M., 91 Lawrence-Zúñiga, D., 60 Le Corbusier, 16, 52, 61–2 Lees, A., The City: A World History, 64–5 Lefebvre, H., 38, 59, 69, 147, 150 Leick, G., 81, 82–3 Leitner, H., 39 Lekson, S., 104, 106 Lerner, Jaime, 117 Lewontin, R., 67–8 Libeskind, Daniel, 18 libraries, 113, 129 Lincoln Park (Denver), 137–8

index | 189 Lipsitz, G., 8, 29 London, Surrey Canal project, 114–15 Low, S., 44–6, 58, 115, 125, 147; Public Space Research Group, 45–6, 115; Spatializing Culture, 46 Lynch, K., 10 McFarlane, C., 146 McGuirk, J., 117 McIntosh, R. and S., 88–9 Magalhães, Sergio, 117 Magical Urbanism see Social Urbanism Maia, Cesar, 117 Manchester School, 42 Mandanipour, A., 14 Marcuse, P., 64, 70–1, 88 markets, 35, 83, 98, 100, 112, 141, 150 material culture: Caracol, 98; Çatalhöyük, 75, 78–9; for cosmopolitan city, 10–11; creation, 9; Indus Valley, 86; murals and sculptures, 137–8 Maya civilization, 61, 92, 97–102, 137–8, 152, 153, 154 Medd, W., 135 Medellín, 117–18 medieval cities, 62 Mehaffy, M., 20–1 Mehta, N., 29 Melamid, Alexander, 49–50 Mendez, Michael, 119 Mesoamerica: governance, 93–4, 96–7; plazas, 44, 93, 150; urbanization, 64–5 Mesopotamia: agricultural economy, 63; birthplace of cities, 73; Northern Palace of Babylon, 142; totalitarian regime, 62; Ur, 64; urbanization, 63, 64–5, 80–3, 152 Mexican-American Borderland, 119–21, 141–2 middle classes, 17–18, 28, 29–30, 33, 149 Millwall Football Club, 114–15 Mistri, A., 134 modernism, 16, 19, 27–8, 43, 52–3, 53–4 Mohenjo-daro (Indus Valley), 74, 85–8, 150 monuments, 10–11, 41, 46, 94, 151 Morgan, Lewis Henry, 41 Mosher, M., 86 motor vehicles, parking lots, 3, 21, 30–1, 35, 120 Mould, O., 28, 29 Mumford, L., The City in History, 62

murals, 10–11, 121 mystery, 49, 51, 54, 82 natural environments, 48–51 Nebelivka, 74, 83–5 neighborhood connectivity, 137–44 neoliberalism, 3 New Orleans, 24 New Ruralism, 152 New Urbanism: benefits, 19; Charter, 17, 20, 102; Chunchucmil, 102; and community interests, 19, 21–2; critiques, 21–2, 130; cultural and ethnic diversity, 20–5, 147; Denver, 122; goals, 17–18; and human psychology, 53–4, 65; middle-class appeal, 17–18; SmartCode, 22–3 Nimrud (Mesopotamia), 82 Nineveh (Mesopotamia), 74, 82–3 Nixtun-Ch’ich’, 97 North America, 92, 103–7 obsidian, 75, 78, 79, 98, 100, 101; ‘New Obsidian’, 73 Olmec settlements, 93–4 Olsson, K., 14, 17 open city, 10–11 open spaces, 45, 83, 84, 90–1, 150–1; see also public spaces ordinary people lives, 64 Orians, G., 48 Ortman, S., 66–7, 69 Ostwald, M., 57 ‘Other’, 25, 44–5 palaces: Indus Valley ambiguity, 87; Khorsabad (Dur-Sharrakun), 74, 82; Songo Mnara, 90 paleoanthropology, 48 Pallasmaa, J., 55 Pardo, I., 41 Pardy, M., 33 parking lots, 3, 21, 30–1, 35, 120 parks: border vacuums, 51; Gorky Park (Melitopol), 112; pocket parks, 51, 55, 131; urban parks, 31, 45–6 Parthenon, 56–7 participatory planning, 35, 101–2, 110–11, 112–15, 118, 119, 137–8, 153 Peattie, L., 43–4 Peck, J., 28 pedestrian zones, 30

190  |  index Pellow, D., 60 Peñalosa, Enrique, 117 Perez, Katherine, 119 peripheral urbanization, 133, 152 Pinker, S. The Blank Slate, 51–3 placekeeping, 29 placemaking, 44, 57, 69, 110–11, 112–15, 143–4; see also public spaces Planetary theory, 12–13, 38–40, 57 planning and design: altepetl, 104–5; ancient cities, 149, 150–1; Birmingham’s Sense of Place project, 112–14; centralized planning, 81–3, 94–5; community involvement, 35, 101–2, 110–11, 112–15, 118, 119, 137–8, 153; fractal patterns, 55; grid, 64; hub-and-spoke, 100; Indus Valley, 85–7; integral urban projects, 117–18; low-density settlements, 84–5; monocultural nature, 4; recommendations for changes, 155–6; shell (incremental), 11, 95, 118, 121, 138, 150–1; to enable diversity, 11 plazas, 44, 52, 93, 96–7, 117, 150 pocket parks, 51, 55, 131 population density: Caracol, 97; Chunchucmil, 99; and community involvement, 153; effectiveness of collective governance, 6, 107–8 Post Urbanism, 18–20, 32, 52–3, 53–4, 55 Prato, G., 41 pre-industrial cities, 62–3 prospect, landscape preference, 48, 51 Provincial theory, 12, 38–40, 57, 69, 91 Public Space Research Group, 45–6, 115 public spaces: Chunchucmil, 99–100; for cosmopolitan city, 10, 34; espai public, 126; Indus Valley, 87; limited ancient world data, 60; Mesoamerica, 93; mixed public use, 91; plazas, 44, 93, 150; popular intercultural spaces, 113; Songo Mnara, 90–1; see also parks; placemaking Qadeer, M., 34, 35 race: cultural differences, 25; racial differences, 67–8; see also cultural diversity; ethnic diversity rail systems, 122, 127–8, 132, 137

Ramo, Beatriz, 112 Rapoport, Amos, 41 Reader, J., 64, 79 refuge, landscape preference, 48, 51 refugees, 19, 30, 109 religion, water use in rituals and ceremonies, 134–6 religious houses, 34, 90, 114–15 reservoirs, 97, 98, 121 residential areas see housing ‘right to the city’, 4–5, 8–9, 33, 39, 150 Rio de Janeiro, 117 Robinson, J., 5, 39, 42 Robinson, S., 55 Rojas, James, 119 Rose, J., The Well-Tempered City, 65 Ruiz, F., 34 Salingaros, N., 53, 57 Sampson, R., 146–7 San Diego, 121, 142 Sandercock, L., 7–9, 115, 147, 152 Sandoval-Strausz, A., 120 Santa Fe Institute (SFI), 66–7, 69 Sargon II, 82 savanna habitat, 48–9, 50, 55 Schmid, C., 38 Scott, J., 23 Scruggs, G., 118 seed planning, 11, 34, 119 self-expression, 84 self-identity, 79 Sennacherib, 82–3 Sennett, R., 10, 34, 42, 91, 102, 107, 119, 147, 156 shell, for incremental design, 11, 118, 121, 138, 150–1 Sheppard, E., 39, 57 Siegel, C., 53 Sitte, C., 62 Sjoberg, G., 62–3, 95 Smart Urbanism, 27–8, 31–2, 143, 146–7 Smith, A., 81, 134–5 Smith, M.E., 6, 41, 62, 67, 76, 77, 92–3, 103, 107, 147, 148; background, 70–1 Smith, M.L., 76, 81, 86; Cities: The First 6000 Years, 71 Sociable City, 136 social identity, 79 social inequality see in/equality

index | 191 social sciences, 68–9 social segregation, 63, 64, 70–1 social spaces, 113, 129 Social Urbanism: critique, 118–12; in the Global South, 116–19; incremental (shell) housing, 118, 150; intermediary zones, 119–20; kinetic architecture, 120–1, 128; Mexican-American Borderland, 119–21; participatory planning, 101–2, 110–11, 112–15, 118, 119, 137; porous borders, 117; recycled materials, 121; social benefits, 120; transport links, 117 sociomateriality, 37, 41-42, 146 sociotechnical intelligence, 117 Soja, E., 63, 75, 130 Solomon, D., 22–3 Songlines, 156–7 Songo Mnara (East Africa), 74, 89–91, 144, 150 Southern Turn, 5 space: open spaces, 45, 83, 84, 90–1, 150–1; owned vs belonged, 115 Sterling Ranch, 131–7 Steyn, G., 91, 102 Stonehenge, 58 stonetowns (East Africa), 74, 89–91 story-telling, 47, 55–6 Sturm, J., 66 Surrey Canal project, 114–15 Sussman, A., 55 sustainability, 121, 132–3, 136; see also community gardens; transport systems; water conservation Sustainable Urbanism, 30–1 synekism, 63, 80 Tactical Urbanism, 28–30, 32, 122 tactics of habitat, 119, 156 Taylor, P., 75–6, 77 teatro mundi, 91, 144 Tenochtitlan (Mexico), 96 Teotihuacan (Mexico), 92; citizen autonomy, 95; decline, 153, 154; economic and social equality, 95–6; immigration and ethnic diversity, 94–5; open form (shell) housing, 95, 138, 150; settlement size, 66 Thomas, A., 77–8 Tijuana, 121, 142 Tilly, C., 40, 44

Tlaxcallan (Mexico), 96–7 trade networks, 40, 65, 77–8, 85 Transit Oriented Development, 97 transport systems, 28, 30, 117, 122, 127–8, 132, 137 Tres Zapotes (Mexico), 93–4, 153 Triumphal discourse, 12, 16, 38, 65 Trypillian megasites, 74, 83–5 Tulan (Chile), 77 Turkey, Göbekli Tepe, 77 Ukraine: Gorky Park (Melitopol), 112; Trypillian megasites, 74, 83–5 UNESCO, World Heritage sites, 55, 73 United Nations, New Urban Agenda, 4 universities: California’s Cross-Border Initiative, 141–2; town/university boundaries, 138–9, 140 University of Denver, 138–44; affordable housing, 139; alternative inter-ethnic suggestion, 141–4; Front Porch proposal, 139; indigenous ancestral lands, 143–4; university/town boundaries, 138–9; white, middle class nature, 140 Ur, J., 81 Ur (Mesopotamia), 64 urban academy, 141, 155 urban acupuncture, 119, 156. urban agriculture, 26, 31, 98, 151–2 urban collapse, 153–4 urban geography, 146 urban imaginary, 5, 40, 101 urban imaginaries, 5, 11-13, 145 urban materiality, 9-10, 57 urban parks, 31, 45–6 urban scaling, 67, 69, 94 urban science, 66–70 urban studies, 62–3, 155–6 urbanism: critique of cultural theories, 25– 32; definition, 7; five dominant ideals, 14, 17; Intercultural Urbanism, 7–9, 32– 5; Kelbaugh’s three paradigms, 17–20; Rose’s Nine Cs, 65; types, 14–16, 25–32; see also Borderland Urbanism; Creative Urbanism; Everyday Urbanism; New Urbanism; Post Urbanism; Smart Urbanism; Social Urbanism; Sustainable Urbanism; Tactical Urbanism Uruk (Mesopotamia), 81, 154

192  |  index Van De Mieroop, M., 76, 142 Vazquez, L., 34 ville, 10, 11, 42 walls, 10; see also edge environments water, religious and cultural practices, 134–6 water conservation, 97, 98, 121, 132–3, 136, 151–2 water management, 86 wealth inequality see in/equality Webster , D., 61 Wengrow, D., 60–1, 77 West, G., 16, 67, 68, 69 white spatial imaginary, 29, 139 Whitechapel (London), 143

Whyte, W., 51 Wilk, R., 153 Wood, P., 3, 33, 87, 109, 113, 115, 130 Woolley, Leonard, 64 World Heritage sites, 55, 73 Wortham-Galvin, B.D., 46–7 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 55, 56 Wright, R., 85 Wynne-Jones, S., 90 Yoffee, N., 61, 72, 80, 93, 154 Zambia, Copperbelt, 42–3 Zenani, V., 134