Editorial—Just How Comparative is Comparative Urban Geography? A Perspective from Archaeology

Abstract

A series of recent papers in Urban Geography on “comparative urbanism” (Robinson, 2004; Dear, 2005; Nijman, 2007a; Ward, 2008) raises concerns about the domain within which urban geographers undertake comparisons. Nearly all discussion concerns contemporary and very recent historical cities with little serious consideration of ancient or preindustrial cities (one exception is early modern Amsterdam; Nijman, 2007b). There may be good reasons for limiting consideration to modern urban settings, and it is not clear that drawing ancient cities into the mix would improve our understanding of the cities included in this journal. Nonetheless, at least one of the papers advocates this wider domain of comparison. Jan Nijman opens his introductory essay to a special issue on comparative urbanism with this statement: “Comparative urbanism, as a field of inquiry, aims at developing knowledge, understanding, and generalization at a level between what is true of all cities and what is true of one city at a given point in time” (Nijman, 2007a, p. 1). Comparative analysis can play several roles in advancing scholarship. It aids in the identification of both regularities and anomalies or unique cases. But to achieve an adequate perspective on the range of variation in urban phenomena (“what is true of all cities”) will require scholars to broaden their perspective beyond the modern and recent eras, and archaeologists are now poised to make contributions to this effort. In the past few decades, archaeological data on ancient cities and urban systems have expanded tremendously, and a growing number of my colleagues are engaging with urban theory and analyzing (or reanalyzing) their data to help build a foundation for a broader comparative approach to urbanism (Fletcher, 1995; Smith, 2003; Storey, 2006; Sabloff, 2008; Smith, n.d.). For example, an active topic of archaeological fieldwork and comparative analysis today is the low-density agrarian city as mapped and excavated in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Roland Fletcher (1986, 1995) identified these settlements— with their impressive public architecture surrounded by extensive areas of settlement and farming—as a distinctive type of city in ancient times with parallels in the modern world. Fletcher has continued work on this topic through fieldwork at Angkor (Evans et al.,