Incorporating Geographical Imagination into Early Urban Demographic Estimates

Abstract

Global estimates of early levels of urbanization are shown to be grossly underestimated. An attempt is made to rectify this using Jacobs’s ideas on cities converted into a broad ‘geographical imagination’, a theoretical patterning of cities. This is applied to estimates of urbanization in 300 bc to fill in the many missing cities in a current historical demographic study. This results in a sixfold increase in estimated urbanization that is interpreted as a qualitative difference based upon different approaches to understanding cities. In conclusion, some implications of this difference are discussed.