Quantitative Methods for the Comparative Analysis of Cities in History

Luís M. A. Bettencourt,José Lobo

doi:10.3389/fdigh.2019.00017

Abstract

Comparative studies of cities throughout history are one of the greatest sources of insight into the nature of change in human societies. This paper discusses strategies to anchor these comparisons on well-defined, quantitative and empirical characteristics of cities, derived from theory and observable in the archeological and historical records. We show how quantitative comparisons based on a few simple variables across settlements allow us to analyze how different places and peoples dealt with general problems of any society. These include demographic change, the organization of built spaces, the intensity and size of socioeconomic networks and the processes underlying technological change and economic growth. Because the historical record contains a much more varied and more independent set of experiences than contemporary urbanization, it has a unique power of illuminating present puzzles of human development and testing emergent urban theory.

Highlights

Cities have always held a special fascination to any scholar of human societies
Because we are asking for quantitative ways to perform comparative analysis of cities in history we need to obtain data that are consistent across places and times
The history of cities presents us with a bewildering variety of social, economic, political and cultural ways in which human settlements can exist

Summary

Introduction

Cities have always held a special fascination to any scholar of human societies. Coincident with the advent of the first cities, we observe the appearance of many technologies and adaptations that, in different forms, are still with us today (Adams, 2005). There is the empirical challenge of identifying cultural, social, political and economic traits, which can be measured in very different settings. There is another difficulty when doing comparative analysis which habitually goes unnoticed. The identification of common traits is often conditioned on performance measures, such as rates of economic growth or energy use per capita, which convey a sense of what today we find important (Mcfarlane, 2010). Conditioning on environmental stewardship and sustainability leads to the Comparative Analysis of Cities in History opposite conclusion, ranking smaller scale societies that had less impact on their immediate natural environments as having higher quality than most recent societies

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Conclusion