Service Access in Premodern Cities

前现代城市的服务获取

• 批准号: 1260344
• 负责人: Michael Smith
• 金额: $ 38.7万
• 依托单位: Arizona State University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2013
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2013-06-15 至 2017-05-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1260344&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Service; Access; Premodern; Cities

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Michael E. Smith and a team of urban experts at Arizona State University will compare the ways city dwellers gained access to urban services in a sample of thirty ancient and historic cities. Planners and city officials today wrestle with difficult decisions about where to locate schools, clinics, parks, and other facilities. Scholars have found that the locations of some urban services allow particular groups better access than others. This project will identify the ways cities have organized their services throughout history. Non-governmental institutions (churches, guilds, neighborhood associations) have played a significant role in providing urban services in the past. Were these services more equally distributed than those provided by city authorities, or did governments do a better job of equitably providing services to residents? By answering these and other questions about services in ancient and historic cities, this project will give scholars and planners a broader base of knowledge to apply to modern cities around the world.The research team includes experts from four disciplines-archaeology, geography, political science, and sociology. The co-Principal Investigators are Christopher Boone, Sharon Harlan, and Abigail York, with Senior Scientists George Cowgill and Barbara Stark. They will use concepts and methods from these and other fields to produce a broad picture of urban services in the past. The team will select cities from each of fourteen early urban traditions, ranging from ancient Egypt to Medieval Europe. For each city, the team will digitize historical or archaeological maps that portray housing and service facilities. The maps will then be analyzed spatially in a common framework using the methods of Geographical Information Science to show how the locations of service facilities relate to neighborhoods and the residences of elite and commoner families. The target services include shops/commercial services, religious services, and public assembly places. The team will also study historical or archaeological records for each city to reconstruct its social, economic and political patterns. This contextual information will be coded and analyzed in a common framework, and then the team will compare it to the results of the spatial analysis to determine what kinds of cities, political, and economic systems produce more equal service access for urban populations.This project has three primary intellectual merits: (1) this will be the most rigorous comparative study of premodern cities yet undertaken; (2) the joint work of a team of scholars from four different scholarly disciplines will produce a particularly broad and comprehensive analysis of urban services; and (3) the application of methods and concepts derived from the analysis of modern urban services to a sample of past cities will produce results that are directly comparable to our knowledge of services in contemporary cities. This is a particularly important topic for the rapidly growing cities in the developing nations.The broader impacts of this study include training and mentoring for two graduate students and a group of undergraduate interns including Hispanic students. In addition, the scientific knowledge we gather and systematically code about premodern cities will inform research and policy on the role of services contemporary urbanization in two ways: (1) it will provide a large comparative sample of cities for scholars and planners to draw on; and (2) it will provide a long-term historical perspective on cities, services, and urban change.

在国家科学基金会的支持下，迈克尔·E·史密斯博士和亚利桑那州立大学的城市专家团队将在三十个古代历史城市的样本中比较城市居民获得城市服务的方式。如今，规划者和城市官员正在努力做出关于学校、诊所、公园和其他设施选址的艰难决定。学者们发现，某些城市服务的位置让特定群体比其他群体更容易获得服务。该项目将确定历史上城市组织服务的方式。非政府机构（教堂、行会、邻里协会）过去在提供城市服务方面发挥了重要作用。这些服务是否比城市当局提供的服务分布更均匀，或者政府在为居民公平提供服务方面做得更好吗？通过回答有关古代和历史名城服务的这些问题和其他问题，该项目将为学者和规划者提供更广泛的知识基础，以应用于世界各地的现代城市。研究团队包括来自考古学、地理学、政治学和社会学四个学科的专家。联合首席研究员包括克里斯托弗·布恩、莎朗·哈伦和阿比盖尔·约克，以及资深科学家乔治·考吉尔和芭芭拉·斯塔克。他们将使用这些领域和其他领域的概念和方法来绘制过去城市服务的总体图景。该团队将从古埃及到中世纪欧洲的十四个早期城市传统中分别选择城市。对于每个城市，该团队都会将描绘住房和服务设施的历史或考古地图数字化。然后，将使用地理信息科学的方法在通用框架中对地图进行空间分析，以显示服务设施的位置与社区以及精英和平民家庭的住宅的关系。目标服务包括商店/商业服务、宗教服务和公共集会场所。该团队还将研究每个城市的历史或考古记录，以重建其社会、经济和政治模式。这些背景信息将在一个共同的框架中进行编码和分析，然后团队将其与空间分析的结果进行比较，以确定哪种类型的城市、政治和经济体系为城市人口提供更平等的服务机会。该项目具有三个主要的智力优点：（1）这将是迄今为止对前现代城市进行的最严格的比较研究； (2) 来自四个不同学科领域的学者团队的共同工作将对城市服务进行特别广泛和全面的分析； (3) 将现代城市服务分析得出的方法和概念应用于过去城市的样本，将产生与我们对当代城市服务的知识直接相比较的结果。对于发展中国家快速发展的城市来说，这是一个特别重要的话题。这项研究的更广泛影响包括对两名研究生和一组本科生实习生（包括西班牙裔学生）的培训和指导。此外，我们收集和系统编码的有关前现代城市的科学知识将以两种方式为当代城市化服务的研究和政策提供信息：（1）它将为学者和规划者提供大量的城市比较样本；（2）它将为学者和规划者提供大量的城市比较样本； (2)它将提供关于城市、服务和城市变化的长期历史视角。