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If you happen to be among the many people who are born and raised in the countryside, chances are that you have found yourself at some point in your life quarrelling about city people who seemed to imagine themselves to be naturally more innovative and progressive than the rest of humankind, your good self included. The juxtaposition of supposedly polished metropolitans and rugged rustics is at least as old as the Epic of Gilgamesh, and probably as ancient as cities themselves. What’s more, a host of urban theorists have borne tribute to this idea, from geographer Edward W Soja (in Postmetropolis) to economist Edward Glaeser (in Triumph of the City). Its most ardent advocate, however, was a writer, civic activist, and eager urbanist, who also claims fame as the only major theorist to base an economic thesis on an archaeological excavation.
Jane Jacobs shot to fame in 1961 with the book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Taking her cue from the struggle to spare New York’s Greenwich Village from high-rising redevelopment, she launched a frontal attack on purported planning and ‘urban renewal’, which she argued drained the very lifeblood of urban societies. Instead, she presented a vision of cities as motors of self-organising power fuelled by bottom-up action. When today’s architects or developers talk of ‘eyes on the street’, the ‘sidewalk ballet’, or ‘mixed-use developments’, they can thank Jacobs. As doggedly as Jacobs had leapt into urban planning, she then set out a few years later, in 1969, to rewrite economics in The Economy of Cities, a little book that she always held to be her greatest achievement. This bold statement did not go unnoticed. Economists still refer to it when they speak of cross-fertilisation between industries as ‘Jacobs externalities’.
Jacobs’ central inspiration for this book had come from a highly unexpected corner. During the 1960s, the legendary – and legend-spinning – archaeologist James Mellaart had discovered and revealed the extraordinary remains of the early Neolithic settlement Çatalhöyük, in modern-day Turkey (Türkiye), today a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the most widely debated prehistoric sites on record. Jacobs had read Mellaart’s fascinating book Çatal Hüyük: a Neolithic town in Anatolia, and formed a vivid idea of this Anatolian township as the origin of human cities, with intriguing art and artefacts, and trade in the black gold of the Neolithic economy: obsidian. Mellaart stressed Çatalhöyük’s extreme antiquity, and noted that its earliest levels seemed even to have preceded the origin of agriculture.
A Neolithic Big Apple
The last idea was one that Jacobs grasped fervently: a city pre-dating farming. It was a controversial idea, at odds with observations even in the summer of ’69, and it has subsequently drawn the ire of many archaeologists (for a scathing review, read International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2014). Jacobs, however, was not swayed by the blunt facts of Çatalhöyük. Trusting thought over observation, she built her theory on the ideal city of New Obsidian, a place of her own invention. Here in New York’s imagined Neolithic conterpart, life was full of comings and goings. People were constantly confronted with new acquaintances, with different ideas and ways of doing things, and with the prospect of taking part in rewarding exchange, if only they could think up something suitable to offer. As a result, invention was constant. Meanwhile, the most routine, unimaginative production, such as stock rearing or crop-growing, would soon be moved out from the city. Hence, in Jacobs’ imagination, the origin of farming, and of what she saw as the dormant, laggardly countryside, fit only for producing food for cities. In this way, Jacobs would argue, cities had prepared the way for agriculture, rather than the other way around. The city – not necessity – was invention’s mother.
Jacobs’ idea has appealed to many urbanites, reared with access to the technical amenities that gave modern cities an edge over the countryside, from gaslight to ethernet. But were ancient cities ever innovative in a similar way? Cities of the past certainly put the cutting edge of ancient societies on display. In the Western cultural sphere, it is the Mediterranean region of classical antiquity that takes the prize for being home to most cities. Visiting the excavated ruins of classical Pompeii, Gerasa, Ephesos, Rome, and many more, the visitor is often instantaneously impressed by the sophistication of domestic and public structures. But take a moment to ponder living in structures without electricity and heating you can just turn up and down, without running water; imagine the darkness and dampness, the constrictions on daily life imposed by raw natural forces. Indeed, the necessities of daily life in the ancient city would have demanded innovations to make life, especially that of the elites, nicer, healthier, and safer.
Lots of innovations seem to have been made for classical city contexts: running water and sewage systems, recycling of materials such as pottery and glass, as well as the optimisation of fuel sources, like the use of olive kernels as a fuel base in furnaces heating the large baths of Roman cities. Innovations in building techniques, such as famously the Roman finessing of concrete, were made in cities where people from different crafts came together more easily than in other places. The term ‘cross-crafting’ springs to mind, a form of interdisciplinarity in the crafts and across them, leading to ‘knowledge spillovers’ – another term coined by Jane Jacobs. This is a topic that has become central to research on the classical world in recent years, pushing the boundary of how we think about innovation and about what it truly is and represents.
Keeping up with the Julio-Claudians
The reason why ancient cities put so much ingenuity on show, however, was not primarily because they were inhabited by particularly creative individuals, but rather that they were the places where rich rulers and lavish elites would display their wealth – through art, edifice, gadgets, and more generally conspicuous consumption. It is in the direction of such novelties, rather than what we would see today as economically productive innovation, that ancient urban inventiveness was generally pushed. Nero’s Domus Aurea in central Rome is one example of such a contrivance, which featured entirely new components such as a rotating cupola.
This bend towards posh superfluities has earned ancient Mediterranean cities a scornful verdict as parasitic ‘consumer cities’ – a strict term of abuse in urban studies. As is clear today, however, few can draw a line between beneficial and useless innovations. Ancient novelties from metal and glass to concrete and hydraulic mortar first originated as vehicles of posh display, yet they have become indispensable to the modern economy. Here Jacobs’ original point may apply. She was keen to stress that cities, to her mind, were essentially a style of community, rather than a particular type of built environment.
The inhabitants of ancient cities may not have been particularly inventive or adaptive – as often as not, they may have been downright conservative. Yet what can be said is that cities and their infrastructure on all levels facilitated the bringing together of people, who had differing sets of skills or developed these in city contexts. It was those people who pushed for innovations, whether out of need, or skill, or a will to show off their wealth. Ancient cities could indeed be mothers of this invention, even when their offspring might roam far from their source. As Jane Jacobs did on her imagined route from Çatalhöyük to New Obsidian.
Rubina Raja is Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art and director of the Centre for Urban Network Evolutions, Aarhus University, Denmark. Together with Søren, she is founding editor of the Journal of Urban Archaeology.
Søren M Sindbæk is Professor of Medieval Archaeology at Aarhus University, Denmark, and co-director of the Centre for Urban Network Evolutions.
