{"id":3963,"date":"2026-11-13T08:02:56","date_gmt":"2026-11-13T15:02:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=3963"},"modified":"2026-11-14T06:53:24","modified_gmt":"2026-11-14T13:53:24","slug":"review-of-first-cities-in-urban-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=3963","title":{"rendered":"Review of ‘First Cities’ in Urban History"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Samuel Chen, in the department of history at the University of Hong Kong, has reviewed<\/a> First Cities: Planning Lessons for the 21st Century. His review appears in the journal Urban History<\/em>. I\u2019m grateful for the review. Chen describes the book as a \u201cworthy synthesis\u201d of archaeological research on ancient urbanisms. He also appreciates the work as part of a discipline-wide effort to \u201cstimulate alternative visions\u201d of city-making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Chen rightly notes the book\u2019s limitations. These were largely produced by the limit of 30,000 words that\u2019s placed on Elements<\/em> 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\u2019t go into as much depth with the selected cases as I would have liked. That\u2019s why I sought to support my claims with many<\/em> references to published scholarship that readers could consult on their own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chen notes my \u201cproclivity for heterarchical models of governance\u201d for interpreting cases where the urban population was demonstrably cosmopolitan. That\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chen makes one claim about the archaeology of ancient cities that\u2019s problematic. He suggests that my study has \u201coverlooked the need for archaeology to be corroborated by other disciplines.\u201d 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\u2019s what allows us to imagine alternative visions of urban society and the built environment, something that today\u2019s world clearly needs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019m grateful for the review. Chen describes the book […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[22,5,18,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archaeology","category-books","category-intercultural-city","category-urban-studies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1H2bI-11V","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3963"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3963\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3983,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3963\/revisions\/3983"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}