Urbanism in the past and present remains hotly debated in academia and the media. We can think of a series of successfully conducted projects in the last few years: for example, the Copenhagen Polis Centre project; the Reception of the City in Late Antiquity ERC project (Cambridge, UK); the ongoing UrbNet project (Aharus, Denmark); the Social Reactors Project (Colorado USA). To these now the Dutch Universities OIKOS network can also be added, and if this was not enough the Guardian has recently launched a series “Guardian Cities” in the UK media. Yet fundamental questions such as “What is an ancient city? when can we say that a nucleated settlement has become a city? Why sometime a city prevails over others and why eventually it declines?”; are still widely open and lively debated question, that have not received a definitive answer yet especially with reference to central Italy, and Rome in particular. The long-term trajectory of Rome is quite well-known and established from the early supremacy within Latium vetus in pre-historic and early historic times, to the emerging power in Italy, during the Republican period, and finally the dominance over the Empire, in the first few centuries of our Era before the final collapse around the end of the fourth century AD. However, the contributory factors and the determinants of this trajectory, which took “a slightly shabby Iron Age village” to become the “undisputed hegemon of the Mediterranean” are still very much questioned1. In this editorial I will discuss features of urbanism/urbanization by presenting the current debate on the ancient city, also with reference to the recent Cambridge University Press book by Arjan Zuiderhoek2, which summarizes and discusses extensively previous approaches. Then I will discuss the contribution of this special Research Topic and I will indicate further possible points of debate. Already in the Bronze Age, but more commonly with the advent of the Iron Age, in the Near East, in Europe but also in the Americas, many regions become organized in small independent political units, generally defined as city-states3. Since the classic work by Fustel de Coulanges, La Cité Antique, published in 18644, the debate on the characteristics and the origin of the ancient
In the past numerous concepts of urbanity have been discussed and a variety of criteria for towns have been developed. They include size, population, legal aspects, way of life, structural and functional approaches. However, since the mentioned criteria cover only a part of the phenomenon and partly use fixed and arbitrary thresholds, they are not sufficient for analysis. We turn to an understanding of urbanity as a process that creates and shapes the scenery of the buildings and people and that is mainly driven by complexity. In this sense, we understand urbanity as a process of adaptation to changing conditions or contexts in a complex settlement system, which is triggered by size, attracted by exemplary solutions and characterized by the emergence of new structures. In this paper we address the issue of relative centrality as proposed by Christaller in the urbanity process as well as centrality within a network sciences approach. Our aim is to interweave different concepts of urbanity, centrality, interaction and connectivity, combining different concepts and research traditions as well as expanding them, resulting in a collection of different terminological frameworks. In the context of adaptation, urbanity is relative in the sense that different places may have gained better or worse adaptation under different conditions. The urbanity process is always shaped by the threat of too much complexity and too little connectivity. Above all, it is a certain surplus of connectivity that characterizes urbanity. This surplus is mapped by the variant of centrality proposed by Christaller. While Christaller's models can be transferred into network sciences frameworks, Christaller does not offer an adequate centrality measure. Therefore, his concept of centrality cannot be transferred correctly without being translated carefully into the network research context. In this article, we argue why this is necessary and explain how it can be done. In this paper the above concept will be applied to the Early Iron Age Princely Seats with a special focus on the Heuneburg. In order to represent similarities and interaction between different nodes a very limited part of the material culture can be used. For this purpose we use fibulae which allow for fairly accurate dating and hence ensure a narrow time slice for the network analysis. Using Fibulae the research will be limited to a certain social segment, which we refer to as “middle class.” This paper is intended to deal with the rather complex issue of urbanity using more simple approaches such as network analysis. In this context, we pursue a tight integration of theory and methodology and we consider certain conceptual issues. This paper has two main results. Firstly, we develop a consistent approach in order to apply social network centrality measures on geographical networks. Secondly, we will analyse which role the above mentioned middle class played in the course of urbanity processes.
This paper examines the patterns of Etruscan urbanism by the innovative use of newly available rural data, employing rank size, and indices of centralization. The detailed case study looks at the development of urbanism of pre-Roman Etruria where both robust and delicate urbanism were present alongside one another. To achieve this end, the paper will draw on the complementary features of two recent articles—Redhouse and Stoddart (2011) and Palmisano et al. (2018)—to provide a synthesis that both examines the large places and the supporting rural settlement. The territorial boundaries of the major urban places were predicted by the XTENT model in the first article. The cumulative numbers of rural settlement (and other proxies of population) over time were examined in the second article. This paper will look at the regional variation in landscape organization within the predicted territorial boundaries of the major robust centres and the more delicate transitory centres, as well as the buffer zones in between. At least three phases of boundary development can be examined, equivalent broadly to the Iron Age, Orientalizing/Archaic and Post Archaic periods, seeking to match these with the correspondingly dated rural settlement. The results will be critically examined in terms of broader knowledge of the economic and political development from current fieldwork in Etruria. The ethnographic analysis of Kopytoff (1989) will also be applied to assess the application of the internal African frontier to the central Italian context. In this way, the quantitative will be matched with the qualitative to provide a deeper understanding of urban development in an under-assessed example within the Mediterranean world.
The variability among cities, from the ancient world to the present, can be organized usefully in two ways. First, a focus on the dominant urban activities and processes leads to the recognition of two basic urban types: economic cities and political cities. Most cities today are economic cities in which growth proceeds through agglomeration processes. By contrast, most cities in the ancient world (and some today) are political cities, in which power and administration play a major role in structuring cities and generating change. Second, an alternative focus on processes of social interaction within the urban built environment leads to the recognition that there is only one kind of settlement that includes all cities—economic and political; past and present. Cities in this sense are settings for "energized crowding." Processes of interaction generate both economic and political growth, and they produce and influence the built forms and social characteristics of all cities. Our model helps scholars distinguish the unique from the universal traits of cities today and in the past.
Comparative studies of cities throughout history are one of the greatest sources of insight into the nature of change in human societies. This paper discusses strategies to anchor these comparisons on well-defined, quantitative and empirical characteristics of cities, derived from theory and observable in the archeological and historical records. We show how quantitative comparisons based on a few simple variables across settlements allow us to analyze how different places and peoples dealt with general problems of any society. These include demographic change, the organization of built spaces, the intensity and size of socioeconomic networks and the processes underlying technological change and economic growth. Because the historical record contains a much more varied and more independent set of experiences than contemporary urbanization, it has a unique power of illuminating present puzzles of human development and testing emergent urban theory.
The conventional history of urban growth defines agrarian-based cities prior to the 19th century CE as densely inhabited and commonly bounded by defenses such as walls. By contrast industrial-based cities are viewed as more spread out and without marked boundaries. Since the 1960s a trajectory towards extensive, low-density urbanism with sprawling, scattered suburbs surrounding a denser core has been formally recognised and given various names such as megalopolis in the West and desakota in southern and eastern Asia. These sprawling industrial cities have been regarded as a unique derivative of modern phenomena such as mechanized transport and the commercial property market. However, this set of premises are not valid. The agrarian-based world also contained dispersed, low-density urbanism - on its grandest scale, the vast circa 1000 sq km urban complex of Greater Angkor and the famous Maya cities of lowland Central America with maximum areas of about 200 sq km. The Maya only used pedestrian and riverine transport so the conventional transport explanation for industrial dispersed urbanism is at best partial. There was another trajectory to extensive, low-density settlement forms for places which were generally less than 15-20 sq km in extent but could on rare occasions reach areas as large as 40 to 90 sq km. Famous examples are Great Zimbabwe, Chaco Canyon and the European oppida of the late 1st millennium BCE. No-formally agreed term is available to refer to them. I will refer to them by default as "Giants". The three trajectories to low-density settlement form redefine the history of settlement growth and the meanings of the term "urban". Worryingly, none of the successive low-density settlements derive from any of the low-density cases of the preceding trajectory. Neither Angkor nor the Classic Maya cities have any connection to the industrial low-density cities. By contrast compact cities, the epitome of the obsolete definition of cities display continuity to succeeding urban forms over several thousand years. The implications for modern, giant, low-density cities are ominous.
The rise of the state in Ancient Italy went hand in hand with an increase in infrastructural power, i.e., settlement centralization and urbanization. The paper discusses theoretical challenges and introduces a modeling approach to a case study, one of the earliest cities in Southern Italy, Pontecagnano, with the aim of understanding the community dynamics at the time of the earliest urbanization (ca. 900–600 BC). The model is a two-mode model that derives from social network analysis, an approach that has been fruitfully adapted to archaeological research. The model is applied to detect trends in burial contexts from the community involved. Burial was, at that time, in the region, a key instrument in the creation of memory and display of status and thus for building and consolidating state power. The analytical network model is able to detect the dynamics in the community over time very well: network Cohesion is expanding and contracting, and points to the existence of tension and a tight control of funerary behavior. The study of Centrality of selected nodes provides a good understanding of the strategies in terms of the circulation of key resources. The latter is particularly significant for studying urbanization because the appropriation of resources was not possible without centralization and the development of infrastructure, as well as an ideology. Based on the study of selected resources, it is suggested that an increase in crop storage has played a particular role in the development of state power and the urbanization process at Pontecagnano. In due course, the paper also addresses methodological challenges of working with fragmented datasets when applying models to study the past.
Empirical studies of ancient cities must break down communities into their component parts, but frequently encounter difficulty with the scarcity of excavated domestic structures (e.g., Kramer, 1982, p. 673). I introduce to the archaeological literature the entropy estimating statistical bootstrap (EESB), a tool developed in information theory and computational social science by DeDeo et al. (2013) which provides a way to assess how representative a small dataset is of a parent population, categorized according to some useful typology. This method can be used to decide when small datasets can add further detail to our quantitative studies of archaeological settlements or when they need to be rejected as too small. I then illustrate its uses within the context of urban demography by examining the distribution of house forms to calculate household characteristics specific to Metapontum, an ancient Greek city. Future applications will include building larger urban datasets that are empirically grounded in the specific evidence for each community, facilitating the work of research programs such as urban scaling.
Traditional ways of doing archaeology impact the world in a variety of ways, but despite recent efforts the practical relevance of archaeology has remained limited. In this paper, I discuss why this is the case and suggest how archaeology can achieve greater practical relevance. I argue, first, that the traditional focus of archaeology on reconstructing the past is valuable but is unlikely to expand its practical relevance because the results are too context-specific. Second, I suggest traditional responses to the problem of historical contingency are also inadequate because the results are too general to connect to the specific issues and solutions society needs. Finally, I make a surprising and perhaps radical suggestion: that a productive way forward is to resuscitate and reformulate elements of the New Archaeology that were never realized by its proponents. I use the example of settlement scaling theory to illustrate that this is both possible and productive, and that additional work in this spirit would enhance the practical relevance of our field.
This article investigates the urban expansion and economic development of ancient Rome through the application of models and theories originally designed for the study of contemporary cities. While the growth of ancient settlements is often difficult to track and analyze, archaeologically observable changes in land use can be read and interpreted as a function of broader economic oscillations over the longue duree. By re-examining the available archaeological and textual evidence pertaining to land use change on Rome’s eastern periphery this article demonstrates how the frameworks selected can be successfully appropriated via a narration of Rome’s urban transformations from the mid-Republic to the later Imperial period. The ultimate goal is to determine if the patterns of urban expansion identified in modern cities also existed in ancient Rome. The findings provided have the potential to produce rich insights on the dynamics of urban and economic growth across time and geographies, thereby opening the door for new and further studies.
The Trypillia megasites of Ukraine are the largest known settlements in 4th millennium BC Europe and possibly the world. With the largest reaching 320 ha in size, megasites pose a serious question about the origins of such massive agglomerations. Most current solutions assume maximum occupation, with all houses occupied at the same time, and target defence against other agglomerations as the cause of their formation. However, recent alternative views of megasites posit smaller long-term occupations or seasonal assembly places, creating a settlement rather than military perspective on origins. Shukurov et al. (2015)'s model of Trypillia arable land-use demonstrates that subsistence stresses begin when site size exceeded 35 ha. Over half of the sites dated to the Trypillia BI stage—the stage before the first megasites—were larger than 35 ha, suggesting that some form of buffering involving exchange of goods for food was in operation. There were two settlement responses to buffering:- clustering of sites with enhanced inter-site exchange networks and the creation of megasites. The trend to increased site clustering can be seen from Phase BI to CI, coeval with the emergence of megasites. We can therefore re-focus the issue of origins on why create megasites in site clusters. In this article, we discuss the two strategies in terms of informal network analysis and suggest reasons why, in some cases, megasites developed in certain site clusters. Finally, we consider the question of whether Trypillia megasites can be considered as “cities.”
Vast in scale and densely inhabited, Late Neolithic Near Eastern megasites have been variously considered in relation to urbanity. Often viewed as failed experiments on the path to proper urbanism or proto-urban sites, these settlements reveal few signs of hierarchical social stratification despite their large size; as such, they represent a challenge for the understanding of early processes of community formation and social integration. Drawing upon a wide range of data and using socio-material network analysis as a methodological tool, this paper explores the way the late Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük was organized internally and specifically the way individual houses were embedded in the wider social fabric of the site. This study sheds light on the nature of the networks of social engagement and affiliation that emerge in the Holocene within large early agricultural communities and the way such networks were manifested.
The promise of digitization of historical archives lies in their indexation at the level of contents. Unfortunately, this kind of indexation does not scale with the speed of digitization if done manually. In this article we present a method to bootstrap the deployment of a content-based information system for digitized historical archives, relying on extant indexing tools. Such indexes were commonly prepared to search within homogeneous records when the archive was still current. We present a conceptual model to describe and manipulate historical indexing tools. We then introduce a systematic approach for their use in order to guide digitization campaigns and to index digitized historical records. Eventually, we exemplify the approach with a case study on the indexation system of the X Savi alle Decime in Rialto, a Venetian magistracy in charge for the exaction - and related record keeping - of a tax on real estate in early modern Venice.
Social network sites enable people to easily connect to and communicate with others. Following the success of generic platforms such as Facebook, a variety of online services launched during the mid 2000s in order to bring the benefits of online social networking to an academic audience. However, it is not clear whether these academic social network sites (ASNS) are primarily aligned with social networking or alternative publishing, and functionalities continue to change. Now ten years since the launch of the three main platforms which currently lead the market (Academia.edu, ResearchGate, and Mendeley), it is timely to review how and why ASNS are used. This paper discusses the history and definition of ASNS, before providing a comprehensive review of the empirical research related to ASNS to-date. Five main themes within the research literature are identified, including: the relationship of the platforms to Open Access publishing; metrics; interactions with others through the platforms; platform demographics and social structure; and user perspectives. Discussing the themes in the research both provides academics with a greater understanding of what ASNS can do and their limitations, and identifies gaps in the literature which would be valuable to explore in future research.
A select small group of people have an amazing opportunity to see the Earth from a unique perspective—from space. The effect this experience has on an individual has been described as extraordinary and profound, consisting of a cognitive shift in worldview that leads to a deeper understanding of the fragility and vulnerability of our planet, and an increased feeling of connectedness. This experience, termed the “Overview Effect,” has been reported by many space-travelers. Its key outcome—an enhanced feeling of interconnectedness—contributes to both one's well-being and the sense of responsibility for the Earth. If this profoundly positive experience could be made accessible to more people than just space-travelers, this might ultimately contribute to a healthier and more caring society, where more individuals deeply feel the interconnection of all living beings and responsibility for our collective future. Given virtual reality (VR) technology's potential to induce experiences affecting an immersant in a similar way as a real experience, we see an opportunity to leverage this technology to attempt to elicit the Overview Effect as a virtual experience. Through a virtual installation, the experience could be made accessible to people around the world, and for researchers to study this otherwise rare phenomenon. This article builds the case for VR as a tool for inducing and studying the Overview Effect. It reviews the psychological research on the Overview Effect and awe, and proposes guidelines for: (1) the design of VR experiences to elicit an Overview Effect and (2) evaluation methods for assessing if, or to what degree, the experience was achieved. Finally, we discuss existing implementations of the Overview Effect in VR. Thus, we are making an applied contribution in the form of design guidelines, and contributions to knowledge in the form of a review of research related to the Overview Effect. We invite researchers and VR creators to utilize and expand on the guidelines proposed in this paper to design transformative VR experiences that induce positive change, and promote a feeling of connectedness and care for each other, and our Spaceship Earth.
Within the last fifteen years, the field of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) has made tremendous progress in the development of algorithms for organizing and analyzing the ever-increasing large and varied amount of music and music-related data available digitally. However, the development of content-based methods to enable or improve multimedia retrieval still remains a central challenge. In this perspective paper, we critically look at the problem of automatic chord estimation from audio recordings as a case study of content-based algorithms, and point out several bottlenecks in current approaches: expressiveness and flexibility are obtained to the expense of robustness and vice-versa; available multimodal sources of information are little exploited; modeling multi-faceted and strongly interrelated musical information is limited with current architectures; models are typically restricted to short-term analysis that does not account for the hierarchical temporal structure of musical signals. Dealing with music data requires the ability to handle both uncertainty and complex relational structure at multiple levels of representation. Traditional approaches have generally treated these two aspects separately, probability and learning being the standard way to represent uncertainty in knowledge, while logical representation being the standard way to represent knowledge and complex relational information. We advocate that the identified hurdles of current approaches could be overcome by recent developments in the area of Statistical Relational Artificial Intelligence (StarAI) that unifies probability, logic and (deep) learning. We show that existing approaches used in MIR find powerful extensions and unifications in StarAI, and we explain why we think it is time to consider the new perspectives offered by this promising research field.
Metaphors are commonly used in interface design within Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Interface metaphors provide users with a way to interact with the computer that resembles a known activity, giving instantaneous knowledge or intuition about how the interaction works. A widely used one in Digital Musical Instruments (DMIs) is the conductor-orchestra metaphor, where the orchestra is considered as an instrument controlled by the movements of the conductor. We propose a DMI based on the conductor metaphor that allows to control tempo and dynamics and adapts its mapping specifically for each user by observing spontaneous conducting movements (i.e. movements performed on top of fixed music without any instructions). We refer to this as mapping by observation given that, even though the system is trained specifically for each user, this training is not done explicitly and consciously by the user. More specifically, the system adapts its mapping based on the tendency of the user to anticipate or fall behind the beat and observing the Motion Capture descriptors that best correlate to loudness during spontaneous conducting. We evaluate the proposed system in an experiment with twenty four (24) participants where we compare it with a baseline that does not perform this user-specific adaptation. The comparison is done in a context where the user does not receive instructions and, instead, is allowed to discover by playing. We evaluate objective and subjective measures from tasks where participants have to make the orchestra play at different loudness levels or in synchrony with a metronome. Results of the experiment prove that the usability of the system that automatically learns its mapping from spontaneous movements is better both in terms of providing a more intuitive control over loudness and a more precise control over beat timing. Interestingly, the results also show a strong correlation between measures taken from the data used for training and the improvement introduced by the adapting system. This indicates that it is possible to estimate in advance how useful the observation of spontaneous movements is to build user-specific adaptations. This opens interesting directions for creating more intuitive and expressive DMIs, particularly in public installations.
Despite ubiquitous urbanization and worldwide standardization, there is a lack of better differentiation between cities towards more customized environments. Although current advancements in computational design and digital fabrication technologies have been successfully applied in various architectural scales, they have rarely, if ever, been implemented in a larger urban context that can lead to broader benefit and responses for citizens. This research aims to describe the potential of digital fabrication methods for large-scale urban applications that can subsequently lead to more diverse and unique urban environments. This paper summarizes state-of-the-art principles for large-scale building construction that have been implemented in the past, along with current research and practice, and outlines a conceptual framework for possible future directions for large quantities of automatic and bespoke construction deliveries for future customized urban scenarios. This article also outlines the effects of end-users’ participation on urban developments using online users’ interface to inform building processes. To address aspects of end-users’ engagement in customization of cities, the article elaborates the question of responsiveness, where the citizen actively interacts with the environment and building technology and vice versa in order to customize the urban space. This is theoretically and conceptually explained and illustrated in a case study related to the formerly industrial harbor area of Tanjong Pagar in the city of Singapore, which is a test-bed for new urban developments on 325 ha of waterfront land in the downtown port area within the context of a tropical city.
Over a relatively short period between the end of the fourth and the middle of the first century BC, an unprecedented process of urbanization developed in non-Mediterranean Europe. Among all the factors contributing to the rise of the first agglomerations possessing urban characteristics in this area, this article focuses on the role of commercial interactions. The ability of settlements to interact within the trade network is approached by modeling of interactions. The aim is to provide new material to estimate the extent to which this factor could have impacted the known hierarchy of settlements on the one hand, and its role in the development of the Latenian urbanization process on the other hand.
Immersive technology, such as virtual reality, provides us with novel opportunities to create and explore affective experiences with a transformative potential mediated through awe. The profound emotion of awe, that is experienced in response to witnessing vastness and creates the need for accommodation that can lead to restructuring of one's worldview and an increased feeling of connectedness. An iconic example of the powers of awe is observed in astronauts who develop instant social consciousness and strong pro-environmental values in response to the overwhelming beauty of Earth observed from space. Here on Earth, awe can also be experienced in response to observing vast natural phenomenon or even sometimes in response to some forms of art, presenting vast beauty to its audience. Can virtual reality provide a new powerful tool for reliably inducing such experiences? What are some unique potentials of this emerging medium? This paper describes the evaluation of an immersive installation “AWE”—Awe-inspiring Wellness Environment. The results indicate that the experience of being in “AWE” can elicit some components of awe emotion and induce minor cognitive shifts in participant's worldview similar to the Overview Effect, while this experience also has its own attributes that might be unique to this specific medium. Comparing the results of this exploratory study to other virtual environments designed to elicit Overview Effect provides insights on the relationship between design features and participant's experience. The qualitative results highlight the importance of perceived safety, personal background and familiarity with the environment, and the induction of a small visceral fear reaction as a part of the emotional arc of the virtual journey—as some of the key contributers to the affective experience of the immersive installation. Even though the observed components of awe and a few indications of cognitive shift support the potential of Virtual Reality as a transformative medium, many more iterations of the design and research tools are required before we can achieve and fully explore a profound awe-inspiring transformative experience mediated through immersive technologies.
