Why Archaeology Is Necessary for a Theory of Urbanization

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Abstract

In recent decades researchers in several disciplines have promoted ‘urban science’ to acknowledge the advantages of multidisciplinary approaches and the expanding ability to collect data for contemporary cities. Although practitioners tend to treat the city as the object of study, in our view the more appropriate focus is the process of urbanization. When framed this way, the archaeological record becomes central to a robust theory of urbanization, and even helps to clarify aspects of urbanization that are difficult to study in a present-day context. In this paper, we illustrate this point by discussing examples where archaeological evidence has clarified and expanded aspects of settlement scaling theory, an approach that was initially developed in the context of contemporary cities but which applies to settlements of all shapes, sizes, and periods.

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Power-Law Distributions in Empirical Data

Aaron Clauset, Cosma Rohilla Shalizi, M. Newman (2009)

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Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities.

Luís Bettencourt, Dirk Helbing, Christian Kühnert … (2007)

Humanity has just crossed a major landmark in its history with the majority of people now living in cities. Cities have long been known to be society's predominant engine of innovation and wealth creation, yet they are also its main source of crime, pollution, and disease. The inexorable trend toward urbanization worldwide presents an urgent challenge for developing a predictive, quantitative theory of urban organization and sustainable development. Here we present empirical evidence indicating that the processes relating urbanization to economic development and knowledge creation are very general, being shared by all cities belonging to the same urban system and sustained across different nations and times. Many diverse properties of cities from patent production and personal income to electrical cable length are shown to be power law functions of population size with scaling exponents, beta, that fall into distinct universality classes. Quantities reflecting wealth creation and innovation have beta approximately 1.2 >1 (increasing returns), whereas those accounting for infrastructure display beta approximately 0.8 <1 (economies of scale). We predict that the pace of social life in the city increases with population size, in quantitative agreement with data, and we discuss how cities are similar to, and differ from, biological organisms, for which beta<1. Finally, we explore possible consequences of these scaling relations by deriving growth equations, which quantify the dramatic difference between growth fueled by innovation versus that driven by economies of scale. This difference suggests that, as population grows, major innovation cycles must be generated at a continually accelerating rate to sustain growth and avoid stagnation or collapse.

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The origins of scaling in cities.

Luís Bettencourt (2013)

Despite the increasing importance of cities in human societies, our ability to understand them scientifically and manage them in practice has remained limited. The greatest difficulties to any scientific approach to cities have resulted from their many interdependent facets, as social, economic, infrastructural, and spatial complex systems that exist in similar but changing forms over a huge range of scales. Here, I show how all cities may evolve according to a small set of basic principles that operate locally. A theoretical framework was developed to predict the average social, spatial, and infrastructural properties of cities as a set of scaling relations that apply to all urban systems. Confirmation of these predictions was observed for thousands of cities worldwide, from many urban systems at different levels of development. Measures of urban efficiency, capturing the balance between socioeconomic outputs and infrastructural costs, were shown to be independent of city size and might be a useful means to evaluate urban planning strategies.