Review of ‘First Cities’ in Urban History

Samuel Chen, in the department of history at the University of Hong Kong, has reviewed First Cities: Planning Lessons for the 21st Century. His review appears in the journal Urban History. I’m grateful for the review. Chen describes the book as a “worthy synthesis” of archaeological research on ancient urbanisms. He also appreciates the work as part of a discipline-wide effort to “stimulate alternative visions” of city-making.

Chen rightly notes the book’s limitations. These were largely produced by the limit of 30,000 words that’s placed on Elements series volumes. I had to be very selective in choice of case studies, which meant excluding interesting places like China and South America. It also meant that I couldn’t go into as much depth with the selected cases as I would have liked. That’s why I sought to support my claims with many references to published scholarship that readers could consult on their own.

Chen notes my “proclivity for heterarchical models of governance” for interpreting cases where the urban population was demonstrably cosmopolitan. That’s because the most interesting recent scholarship makes good arguments for non-hierarchical forms of governance in unexpected places. Political hierarchy has been taken for granted throughout the history of archaeological inquiry into ancient cities. Its existence is well-documented. However, we need to stop taking the pervasiveness of urban political hierarchy for granted, lest we miss interesting social and political variation. Governance heterarchy and hierarchy can exist side-by-side as well as shift from one form to the other depending on circumstances.

Chen makes one claim about the archaeology of ancient cities that’s problematic. He suggests that my study has “overlooked the need for archaeology to be corroborated by other disciplines.” As Chen suggests, indigenous textual sources, where available, should be consulted. However, insisting on corroboration by other disciplines misses a key point of my book: that archaeology can be a unique contributor to our body of accumulated knowledge about how humans build and occupy cities. The significance of archaeology is that it has the potential to reveal urbanisms that have no analogues in the present or recent (historically recorded) past. That’s what allows us to imagine alternative visions of urban society and the built environment, something that today’s world clearly needs.