Alona Forkosh Baruch

Editorial: Where Do Cities Come From and Where Are They Going To? Modelling Past and Present Agglomerations to Understand Urban Ways of Life

Francesca Fulminante

Patterns of Etruscan Urbanism

Simon Stoddart, Alessio Palmisano, David Redhouse, Graeme Barker, Giorgia di Paola, Laura Motta, Tom Rasmussen, Troy Samuels, Robert Witcher

This paper examines the patterns of Etruscan urbanism by the innovative use of newly available rural data, employing rank size, and indices of centralization. The detailed case study looks at the development of urbanism of pre-Roman Etruria where both robust and delicate urbanism were present alongside one another. To achieve this end, the paper will draw on the complementary features of two recent articles—Redhouse and Stoddart (2011) and Palmisano et al. (2018)—to provide a synthesis that both examines the large places and the supporting rural settlement. The territorial boundaries of the major urban places were predicted by the XTENT model in the first article. The cumulative numbers of rural settlement (and other proxies of population) over time were examined in the second article. This paper will look at the regional variation in landscape organization within the predicted territorial boundaries of the major robust centres and the more delicate transitory centres, as well as the buffer zones in between. At least three phases of boundary development can be examined, equivalent broadly to the Iron Age, Orientalizing/Archaic and Post Archaic periods, seeking to match these with the correspondingly dated rural settlement. The results will be critically examined in terms of broader knowledge of the economic and political development from current fieldwork in Etruria. The ethnographic analysis of Kopytoff (1989) will also be applied to assess the application of the internal African frontier to the central Italian context. In this way, the quantitative will be matched with the qualitative to provide a deeper understanding of urban development in an under-assessed example within the Mediterranean world.

Urbanity as a Process and the Role of Relative Network Properties—A Case Study From the Early Iron Age

Oliver Nakoinz, Michael Bilger, David Matzig

In the past numerous concepts of urbanity have been discussed and a variety of criteria for towns have been developed. They include size, population, legal aspects, way of life, structural and functional approaches. However, since the mentioned criteria cover only a part of the phenomenon and partly use fixed and arbitrary thresholds, they are not sufficient for analysis. We turn to an understanding of urbanity as a process that creates and shapes the scenery of the buildings and people and that is mainly driven by complexity. In this sense, we understand urbanity as a process of adaptation to changing conditions or contexts in a complex settlement system, which is triggered by size, attracted by exemplary solutions and characterized by the emergence of new structures. In this paper we address the issue of relative centrality as proposed by Christaller in the urbanity process as well as centrality within a network sciences approach. Our aim is to interweave different concepts of urbanity, centrality, interaction and connectivity, combining different concepts and research traditions as well as expanding them, resulting in a collection of different terminological frameworks. In the context of adaptation, urbanity is relative in the sense that different places may have gained better or worse adaptation under different conditions. The urbanity process is always shaped by the threat of too much complexity and too little connectivity. Above all, it is a certain surplus of connectivity that characterizes urbanity. This surplus is mapped by the variant of centrality proposed by Christaller. While Christaller's models can be transferred into network sciences frameworks, Christaller does not offer an adequate centrality measure. Therefore, his concept of centrality cannot be transferred correctly without being translated carefully into the network research context. In this article, we argue why this is necessary and explain how it can be done. In this paper the above concept will be applied to the Early Iron Age Princely Seats with a special focus on the Heuneburg. In order to represent similarities and interaction between different nodes a very limited part of the material culture can be used. For this purpose we use fibulae which allow for fairly accurate dating and hence ensure a narrow time slice for the network analysis. Using Fibulae the research will be limited to a certain social segment, which we refer to as “middle class.” This paper is intended to deal with the rather complex issue of urbanity using more simple approaches such as network analysis. In this context, we pursue a tight integration of theory and methodology and we consider certain conceptual issues. This paper has two main results. Firstly, we develop a consistent approach in order to apply social network centrality measures on geographical networks. Secondly, we will analyse which role the above mentioned middle class played in the course of urbanity processes.

Ancient City, Universal Growth? Exploring Urban Expansion and Economic Development on Rome's Eastern Periphery

Matthew J. Mandich

This article investigates the urban expansion and economic development of ancient Rome through the application of models and theories originally designed for the study of contemporary cities. While the growth of ancient settlements is often difficult to track and analyze, archaeologically observable changes in land use can be read and interpreted as a function of broader economic oscillations over the longue durée. By re-examining the available archaeological and textual evidence pertaining to land use change on Rome's eastern periphery this article demonstrates how the frameworks selected can be successfully appropriated via a narration of Rome's urban transformations from the mid-Republic to the later Imperial period. The ultimate goal is to determine if the patterns of urban expansion identified in modern cities also existed in ancient Rome. The findings provided have the potential to produce rich insights on the dynamics of urban and economic growth across time and geographies, thereby opening the door for new and further studies.

Quantitative Methods for the Comparative Analysis of Cities in History

Luís M. A. Bettencourt, José Lobo

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 for illuminating present puzzles of human development and testing emergent urban theory.