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一个城市专家团队将对30座古老历史城市的样本中城市居民获得城市服务的方式进行比较。今天，规划者和城市官员正在艰难地决定学校、诊所、公园和其他设施的选址。学者们发现，一些城市服务的位置让特定群体比其他群体获得了更好的服务。该项目将确定历史上城市组织其服务的方式。过去，非政府机构(教堂、行会、社区协会)在提供城市服务方面发挥了重要作用。这些服务的分布是否比城市当局提供的服务更加平均，或者政府在公平地向居民提供服务方面做得更好？通过回答这些和其他有关古城服务的问题，这个项目将为学者和规划者提供更广泛的知识基础，适用于世界各地的现代城市。研究团队包括来自四个学科的专家-考古学、地理学、政治学和社会学。联合首席调查人员是克里斯托弗·布恩、莎伦·哈兰和阿比盖尔·约克，以及高级科学家乔治·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描绘过去城市服务的概貌。该团队将从14个早期城市传统中选择每一个城市，从古埃及到中世纪欧洲。对于每个城市，该团队将数字化描绘住房和服务设施的历史或考古地图。然后，这些地图将在一个共同的框架内使用地理信息科学的方法进行空间分析，以显示服务设施的位置如何与社区以及精英和普通家庭的住宅相关。目标服务包括商店/商业服务、宗教服务和公众集会场所。该小组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内进行编码和分析，然后团队将把它与空间分析的结果进行比较，以确定什么样的城市、政治和经济系统能够为城市人口提供更平等的服务。这个项目有三个主要的学术价值：(1)这将是迄今进行的对前现代城市的最严格的比较研究；(2)来自四个不同学术学科的学者团队的联合工作将产生对城市服务的特别广泛和全面的分析；(3)将现代城市服务的分析方法和概念应用到过去城市的样本中，将产生与我们对当代城市服务的知识直接可比的结果。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包括西班牙裔学生在内的一批本科生实习生的培训和指导。此外，我们收集和系统编码的关于前现代城市的科学知识将通过两种方式为关于服务在当代城市化中的作用的研究和政策提供信息：(1)它将提供大量可比较的城市样本，供学者和规划者参考；(2)它将提供关于城市、服务和城市变化的长期历史视角。