[NYTr] Archeology: Anti-authoritarian Cities

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

AlterNet - Sep 5, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/61757/


Anti-authoritarian Cities

By Annalee Newitz

Archaeologists have discovered that one of the oldest urban areas in
the world was built in a way that completely defies conventional wisdom
about how cities grow. Last week, a group of researchers working in
Syria published a paper in Science about a 6,000-year-old city called
Brak, a once-thriving urban center in northern Mesopotamia (now
northern Syria, near its border with Iraq). It has long been believed
that cities begin as dense centers that grow outward into suburbs.
Brak, however, began as a dispersed group of settlements that formed a
rough ring shape and gradually grew inward to form an urban center that
boasted a massive temple and a thriving import-export trade in tools
and pottery.

Built sometime between 4200 and 3900 B.C.E., Brak eventually grew to
130 hectares, making it one of the largest known cities of its era,
surpassed in size only by Uruk in southern Mesopotamia. Long buried
under a tell -- a hill of accumulated debris and layers of urban
development -- Brak's early history has only recently been revealed.
Archaeologists are racking their brains to figure out why the place
doesn't follow known patterns of city growth.

Harvard anthropologist Jason Ur, one of the researchers investigating
Brak, writes that Brak's history might mean that urban development can
be an emergent property of many immigrant groups coming together in the
same region. Early cities might have spontaneously arisen via the
development of a handful of neighboring villages. This flies in the
face of older theories, which hold that cities develop when a ruling
elite or a set of dominant institutions creates a dense, hierarchical
city center whose culture and populations spread outward from it.

Brak reflects a "bottom-up" model of city evolution, in which a central
political power is built slowly out of diverse cultural interests.
According to Ur and his colleagues, Brak's layout "suggests both
dependence on but some autonomy from the political power on the central
mound ... This pattern suggests a greater role for noncentralized
processes in the initial growth of Brak and lesser importance for
centralized authority."

Short of hopping into a time machine, we'll never know for certain if
Brak's layout reflects its citizens' attitudes toward centralized
authority or not. What we do know, however, is that not all cities
develop in the same way. More important, we now have social scientific
theories to explain why that might be -- theories that can help us
understand urban development in the contemporary world as well. Cities
today could be evolving from decentralized areas, out of geographically
dispersed groups that do not view themselves as subject to one dominant
set of institutions.

Brak might be an example of how cities would grow if neighborhoods had
more social and political autonomy. What if, for example, we considered
a city to be a federation of neighborhoods rather than a downtown with
satellite suburbs? Would that be the foundation for an
anti-authoritarian cityscape?

To answer, let's contemplate a possible modern-day version of Brak:
Silicon Valley, a region of dispersed urban centers that have formed a
loose economic federation via the computer industry and proximity to
freeways. Residents of Silicon Valley may not consider the area to be
one city, but it's very possible that people excavating the toxic
remains of Silicon Valley 6,000 years from now will interpret the area
as a single urban unit.

Like Silicon Valley dwellers, residents of Brak may have thought of
themselves as living in a series of linked villages, united by nothing
more than a system of commerce and a set of roads. Does this mean that
authority in Brak was truly decentralized? Maybe the urban development
of Brak belies a deeper truth, which is that centralized authority does
not always reveal itself via tall buildings at a city's core. An entire
region may bow to the authority of an economic system that stratifies
it into rich and poor, and yet never have a common culture.
Decentralized urban spaces are not necessarily anti-authoritarian ones.

[Annalee Newitz (annalee at techsploitation.com) is a surly media nerd who
wonders if Google has a time-displaced satellite office in Brak.] 

© 2007 Independent Media Institute.