Greek Urbanization — Theoretical Issues

Abstract

Urbanization is a process that can be studied both historically and philosophically. The examination by case studies in these pages draws on architectural and art historical insights to illuminate the term “urbanization” as a process. Some theories of great current interest to classicists and ancient history experts are ignored here lest the digression into their arguments impede our concentration on evidence for water management. Rather, we may generalize in very simple terms from accumulated examples. A family selects a site and builds a house. Their grown sons and daughters form households and settle nearby. Friends come to live there too, and strangers arrive to trade or worship, and stay on. Gradually a small settlement with advantageous resources—human, physical, and cultural—prospers and becomes a town, even a city. It forms ties with other settlements and increases its prosperity by trade and cultural interaction. The city’s need for food, raw materials, and population has a strong impact on the countryside, so that other hamlets become towns in response to urban demands for their goods. Thus urbanization may be said to be a process. Growth and decay of urban centers are part of the same process. Once the process of city building is well underway, the resulting “package” of knowledge and behavior can be exported as a product. Greek colonization of the Mediterranean area was done by means of cities, a group of settlers carrying with them to the new place both the concept of city and the technological and political means to bring it into existence (see Fig. 3.1, selected Greek sites). Colonists were organized in one of several standard ways, to make a new urban place without going through a gradual process of social evolution and physical agglomeration. This set of activities is well described in A. J. Graham, Colony and Mothercity in Ancient Greece (1983), and in N. H. Demand, Urban Relocation in Archaic and Classical Greece (1990). In the general field of urban history and theory, we have the works of Vance, Hohenberg and Lees, Wheatley, and Pirenne. From them we learn how urbanization has been understood in the last two centuries.