Michael E. Smith wrote:
If we step back from the complexity of individual cases, the world’s cities can be divided into a small number of functional types. Figure 10.4 illustrates one such typological scheme in relation to the major urban functions: economics, politics, and religion. The category “economic cities” describes nearly every contemporary city and some past cities. In this type of city, economic activity has a stronger influence on urban growth than does political or religious activity. These are cities in which economic growth feeds on itself in what economists call agglomeration economies ...
In Figure 10.4, economic cities are contrasted with two types for which economic activity is of lesser importance in generating growth. “Regal-ritual cities” [is a] category for cities dominated by petty kings who controlled only a limited resource base and used elaborate theatrical ceremonies to legitimize and extend their power over weakly centralized polities.The term “theater state”has also been applied to these polities, and Geertz goes so far as to argue that the theatricality was the actual basis of power rather than just a legitimizing process. Most scholars, however, reverse the direction of Geertz’s causality. Classic Maya cities are a good example of Fox’s regal-ritual city type. The term “capital cities” describes capitals of polities in the premodern world and today that have lower levels of public ritual than regal-ritual cities and a lower level of economic activity than economic cities. It may be difficult to distinguish between these two types, and for the purpose of making a contrast with economic cities they can be combined into a type called “political cities”.
The purpose of this limited (yet comprehensive) typology of cities is to highlight important distinctions between modern cities (most of which are economic cities) and premodern cities (most of which were political cities). In most parts of the world, including Mesoamerica, the Andes, China, Egypt, and sub-Saharan Africa, the very earliest indigenous cities were political cities whose economic role was quite limited. Later manifestations of urbanism in some of these areas showed more pronounced economic functions. For example, in Mesoamerica the earliest cities (in the Preclassic period, 1500 BC–AD 200) had very low levels of economic activity; then the Classic Maya cities had somewhat greater economic activity; and the even later Aztec and Maya cites of the Postclassic period had more heavily commercialized economies.
Mesopotamia was the only region whose earliest indigenous cities may have had a significant economic component … For present purposes, my goal is to emphasize the close connection between political processes and urbanization in early complex societies. Although economic processes were important in most early cities, the actions of rulers and elites had a much stronger influence on cities and urbanism …
… There is no single best definition of urbanism nor any single best approach for analyzing early cities and urban societies … I argue that a reliance on definitions of urbanism is not the best way to identify and understand the earliest cities. Definitions lack flexibility, and there is no clear way to choose between the two dominant definitions (functional and demographic/sociological) or the many other definitions found in the literature. Instead, I argue for the usefulness of an attribute-based approach to early cities. I present a provisional list of twenty-one archaeological urban attributes whose presence or level can be investigated for individual archaeological sites. However, these attributes neither lead to a clear definition of the city nor to an obvious identification of which sites were urban and which were not. What they do allow is a comparative analysis of the nature and scale of urbanism, an analysis that is both broadly comparative and sensitive to specific regional and temporal contexts. Modern urbanism is fundamentally an economic phenomenon, whereas most premodern cities were political capitals in which political activity played a larger role than economic activity in urban growth. [END]
The Source:
Michael E. Smith, ‘How Can Archeologists Identify Early Cities?’, in Manuel Fernández-Götz and Dirk Krausse editors, Eurasia at the Dawn of History: Urbanization and Social Change, Cambridge 2016 [pp. 153-166]
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.