Urban Network Evolutions

Urban Network Evolutions

Author: Rubina Raja

Publisher: Aarhus Universitetsforlag

Published: 2018-12-31

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 8771846387

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For millenia, urban networks have shaped the development of human societies. Today, new archaeological approaches are unveiling the evolution of these networks in unprecedented detail. Urban Networks Evolutions reviews the new approaches to urban evolution as archaeology endeavours to characterise both the scale and pace of historical events and processes. Issuing from the work of the Danish National Research Foundation's Centre of Excellence, the Centre for Urban Network Evolutions (UrbNet), the book compares the archaeology of urbanism from medieval Northern Europe to the Ancient Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean World. The 40 contributors demonstrate how new techniques for refining archaeological dates, contexts, and the provenance ascribed to material culture, afford a new high-definition approach to the study of global and interregional dynamics. This opens up for far-reaching questions as to how and to what extent urban networks catalysed societal and environmental expansions and crises in the past.


The Archaeology of Urbanism in Ancient Egypt

The Archaeology of Urbanism in Ancient Egypt

Author: Nadine Moeller

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016-04-18

Total Pages: 449

ISBN-13: 1107079756

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This book presents the latest archaeological evidence that makes a case for Egypt as an early urban society. It traces the emergence of urban features during the Predynastic Period up to the disintegration of the powerful Middle Kingdom state (ca. 3500-1650 BC).


Urban Life in the Distant Past

Urban Life in the Distant Past

Author: Michael Smith

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-02-28

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1009249045

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The book describes a novel approach to early cities that is transdisciplinary, scientific, historical, and based on social-science knowledge.


Intercultural Urbanism

Intercultural Urbanism

Author: Dean Saitta

Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.

Published: 2020-07-23

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 1786994127

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Cities today are paradoxical. They are engines of innovation and opportunity, but they are also plagued by significant income inequality and segregation by ethnicity, race, and class. These inequalities and segregations are often reinforced by the urban built environment: the planning of space and the design of architecture. This condition threatens attainment of wider social and economic prosperity. In this innovative new study, Dean Saitta explores questions of urban sustainability by taking an intercultural, trans-historical approach to city planning. Saitta uses a largely untapped body of knowledge—the archaeology of cities in the ancient world—to generate ideas about how public space, housing, and civic architecture might be better designed to promote inclusion and community, while also making our cities more environmentally sustainable. By integrating this knowledge with knowledge generated by evolutionary studies and urban ethnography (including a detailed look at Denver, Colorado, one of America’s most desirable and fastest growing ‘destination cities’ but one that is also experiencing significant spatial segregation and gentrification), Saitta’s book offers an invaluable new perspective for urban studies scholars and urban planning professionals.”


Eurasia at the Dawn of History

Eurasia at the Dawn of History

Author: Manuel Fernández-Götz

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-01-16

Total Pages: 439

ISBN-13: 1316943178

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Our current world is characterized by life in cities, the existence of social inequalities, and increasing individualization. When and how did these phenomena arise? What was the social and economic background for the development of hierarchies and the first cities? The authors of this volume analyze the processes of centralization, cultural interaction, and social differentiation that led to the development of the first urban centres and early state formations of ancient Eurasia, from the Atlantic coasts to China. The chronological framework spans a period from the Neolithic to the Late Iron Age, with a special focus on the early first millennium BC. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach structured around the concepts of identity and materiality, this book addresses the appearance of a range of key phenomena that continue to shape our world.


Urban Life in the Distant Past

Urban Life in the Distant Past

Author: Michael Smith

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-02-28

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1009249037

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In this book, Michael Smith offers a comparative and interdisciplinary examination of ancient settlements and cities. Early cities varied considerably in their political and economic organization and dynamics. Smith here introduces a coherent approach to urbanism that is transdisciplinary in scope, scientific in epistemology, and anchored in the urban literature of the social sciences. His new insight is 'energized crowding,' a concept that captures the consequences of social interactions within the built environment resulting from increases in population size and density within settlements. Smith explores the implications of features such as empires, states, markets, households, and neighborhoods for urban life and society through case studies from around the world. Direct influences on urban life – as mediated by energized crowding-are organized into institutional (top-down forces) and generative (bottom-up processes). Smith's volume analyzes their similarities and differences with contemporary cities, and highlights the relevance of ancient cities for understanding urbanism and its challenges today.


Urbanism in Antiquity

Urbanism in Antiquity

Author: Walter Emanuel Aufrecht

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 1997-01-01

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 185075666X

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Papers from a conference held at Lethbridge, Canada, in 1996. Contents include: Spatial perspectives on early urban development in Mesopotamia ( E. B. Banning ); The agricultural base of urbanism in hte early Bronze II-III Levant ( Arlene Miller Rosen ); Urbanization and northwest Semitic inscriptions of the Late Bronze and Iron Ages ( Walter E. Aufrecht ); Tell Jawa: a case study of Ammonite urbanism during Iron Age II ( P. M. Michele Daviau ); Archaeology, urbanism and the rise of the Israelite state ( William G. Dever ); The ancient Egyptian city': figment or reality? ( Donald B. Redford ); Palace-centered polities in eastern Crete ( Metaxia Tsipopoulou ).


New Materialisms Ancient Urbanisms

New Materialisms Ancient Urbanisms

Author: Susan M. Alt

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-08-05

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1351008471

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The future of humanity is urban, and knowledge of urbanism’s deep past is critical for us all to navigate that future. The time has come for archaeologists to rethink this global phenomenon by asking what urbanism is and, more to the point, was. Can we truly understand ancient urbanism by only asking after the human element, or are the properties and qualities of landscapes, materials, and atmospheres equally causal? The nine authors of New Materialisms Ancient Urbanisms seek less anthropocentric answers to questions about the historical relationships between urbanism and humanity in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. They analyze the movements and flows of materials, things, phenomena, and beings—human and otherwise—as these were assembled to produce the kinds of complex, dense, and stratified relationships that we today label urban. In so doing, the book emerges as a work of both theory and historical anthropology. It breaks new ground in the archaeology of urbanism, building on the latest ‘New Materialist’, ‘relational-ontological’, and ‘realist’ trends in social theory. This book challenges a new generation of students to think outside the box, and provides scholars of urbanism, archaeology, and anthropology with a fresh perspective on the development of urban society.


Coming Together

Coming Together

Author: Attila Gyucha

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 2019-02-28

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 1438472773

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Archaeologists, anthropologists, and classicists discuss how urbanization first emerged in strikingly different sociopolitical contexts in North America, Europe, and the Near East. The pursuit for universally applicable definitions of the terms “urban” and “city” has frequently distracted scholars from scrutinizing processes of how ancient nucleated settlements evolved and developed. Based on the premise that similar social dynamics to a great extent governed nucleation trajectories throughout human history, Coming Together focuses on both prehistoric aggregated and early urban settlements. Drawing from a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, archaeologists, anthropologists, and classicists discuss how nucleation unfolded in strikingly different sociopolitical contexts in North America, Europe, and the Near East. The major themes of the volume are nucleation’s origins, pathways to sustainability, and the transformative role of these sites in sociopolitical and cultural change.