Service Access in Premodern Cities

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组城市专家将在30个古老和历史名城的样本中比较城市居民获得城市服务的方式。如今，规划者和城市官员都在艰难地决定学校、诊所、公园和其他设施的选址。学者们发现，一些城市服务的地点让特定群体比其他人更容易获得服务。该项目将确定城市在历史上组织其服务的方式。非政府机构（教会、行会、邻里协会）过去在提供城市服务方面发挥了重要作用。是这些服务的分配比市政当局提供的服务更公平，还是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代和历史城市服务的问题，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。联合首席研究员是克里斯托弗·布恩、莎伦·哈伦和阿比盖尔·约克，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，对过去的城市服务进行广泛的描述。该团队将从14个早期城市传统中选择城市，从古埃及到中世纪的欧洲。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。然后将使用地理信息科学的方法在一个共同的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普通家庭的住宅之间的关系。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、政治和经济系统能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)这将是迄今为止对前现代城市进行的最严格的比较研究；(2)由来自四个不同学科的学者组成的团队的联合工作将对城市服务进行特别广泛和全面的分析；(3)将源自现代城市服务分析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了解直接可比的结果。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。本研究更广泛的影响包括对两名研究生和一组包括西班牙裔学生在内的本科生实习生进行培训和指导。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服务当代城市化的研究和政策提供信息：(1)它将为学者和规划者提供一个大的城市比较样本；(2)它将提供关于城市、服务和城市变化的长期历史视角。

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.