The City Is Dead! Long Live the City!

Bisserka Gaydarska

doi:10.1080/00293652.2016.1164749

Abstract

The urban way of life is considered to be a major milestone in human development. It has attracted unparalleled research interest, breaking boundaries between time and space and between modern academic disciplines. The 150-year-long history of this research in archaeology has witnessed shifting paradigms and has coped with ever-growing new evidence, so that it can substantiate the claim that diversity is what underpins the urban phenomenon worldwide. This long history, however, has also resulted in deeply rooted pre-conceptions of the characteristics of ‘urban’ and the replication of outdated constructs which assess new evidence as ‘wrong time, wrong place’. This article offers the views of a novice, unrestrained by top-down approaches and equally interested in the local origins of cities, as well as the global variability of what makes people dwell in that way. It is inspired by anomalously large sites dated to the 4th millennium bc – the so-called Trypillia mega-sites, in modern Ukraine. The inconsistent engagement with archaeological theory of current urban studies hinders the analysis of these sites within this framework and cannot provide a definitive answer to the question: ‘were these sites urban or not?’ The alternative suggested here is a discussion around four major issues, whose development would move the urban debate on significantly.

Highlights

Michael Mann (1986) once famously said that there were two types of historians: parachutists and truffle-hunters
The theoretical framework of the urban phenomenon is like the current state of archaeological theory – ‘pick and mix’. This is not the place to discuss in detail the ‘pick-and-mix’ tendency in archaeology; suffice it to say that in archaeological traditions with poor or selective engagement with archaeological theory, this may have serious implications, like allowing free rein to anecdotal claims for towns in the 5th millennium BC in Bulgaria (Nikolov 2012)
Without forming an exhaustive list, the following four critical points would seem to be essential to re-formulating the urban debate: 1. Recognition or deconstruction of the uncritical acceptance of ‘urban’ as an analytical category, of the inconsistencies in how the ‘urban’ concept is applied on local and global levels, and the double standard applied to site-based and regional-based urban studies

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Michael Mann (1986) once famously said that there were two types of historians: parachutists and truffle-hunters. This is not the place to discuss in detail the ‘pick-and-mix’ tendency in archaeology; suffice it to say that in archaeological traditions with poor or selective engagement with archaeological theory, this may have serious implications, like allowing free rein to anecdotal claims for towns in the 5th millennium BC in Bulgaria (Nikolov 2012) Another result of this state of affairs is that theoretically inspired studies remain fragmentary due to their region- or site- or period-based character, with minimal cross-cultural impact, which is filtered down primarily by those very few equipped to seek common patterns across time and space. Capital cities are not always the largest sites, whether Canberra, Ankara or Brasilia

Findings

DISCUSSION

CONCLUSIONS