Service Access in Premodern Cities

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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.