Check out the episode:

You can find the shownotes through this link.

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Are you interested in urban evolution across time?

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Our summary today works with the article titled Cities through the ages: One thing or many? from 2019, by Michael E. Smith and José Lobo, published in the Frontiers in Digital Humanities journal.

This is a great preparation to our next interview with Howard Bloom in episode 328 talking about urban evolution from the bacteria to space exploration.

Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see the nature of cities throughout the ages. This article investigates cities as energised crowing, also known as one thing, and many things, such as political sites and economic environments.

[intro music]

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Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today we will introduce a research by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original investigation, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole documentation. This conversation was produced and generated with Notebook LM as two hosts dissecting the whole research.

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Speaker 1: You ever see a picture of like ancient Babylon and then one of modern Tokyo and just. Are these even the same thing?

Speaker 2: It’s a really fundamental question, isn’t it? That’s what we’re digging into today based on some really interesting new research.

Speaker 1: Research that tries to get at what a city actually is. Mm-hmm. Because my first reaction is no way. They seem totally different.

Speaker 2: Absolutely. You look at Burr, maybe focused on a temple versus say, Mumbai driven by global finance. Feels like comparing, I don’t know, apples

Speaker 1: and spaceships. Exactly. Just wildly different. But this research we’ve been looking at. It suggests there are maybe two useful ways to organize all this urban variety. First, you could look at the city’s main job. You could say, yeah, this is mainly about power administration, a political city,

Speaker 2: like maybe ancient Rome or something.

Speaker 1: Or is it driven to markets, trade, economic stuff. An economic city.

Speaker 2: Okay. Political versus economic. That’s one lens. What’s

Speaker 1: the other? The other one zooms out. It looks past those functions to something more basic. Just the sheer intensity of social life. When you cram lots of people together, they call it energized crowding.

Speaker 2: Energized crowding. I like that term. It captures something real about cities.

Speaker 1: Our mission really is to unpack these two ideas, the different drivers, political versus economic, and also this underlying constant of human interaction. The city has two things, political or economic. This is about the main engine, right? The thing that makes it grow.

Speaker 2: Exactly. So a political city think power is the currency. It’s shaped by a ruler, maybe an elite group. Their decisions about running the place, defense, religion, sometimes that’s what dictates the city’s form and future.

Speaker 1: We saw that a lot in the ancient world, you said.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Very common then, and you still see aspects of it today in some places.

Speaker 1: And the economic city is the flip side

Speaker 2: pretty much that it’s mostly about money, goods, services, where people decide to live or set up a business, how communities form how the city grows. It’s mainly economic logic driving

Speaker 1: it, which is most cities today, basically.

Speaker 2: Most. Yeah. Not all cities today, and there were definitely some economic leaning cities way back when too.

Speaker 1: Now, the researchers are careful to call these Liberian ideal types. Why that label? What should we understand from that?

Speaker 2: They’re conceptual boxes. They’re pure models, not perfect descriptions of any single real city.

Speaker 1: So like a platonic form of a city.

Speaker 2: Yeah. It helps us analyze things. A real city might be mostly political, but have some economic elements or vice versa. They’re ends of a spectrum really.

Speaker 1: Gotcha. Helpful for thinking even if no city is a hundred percent one or the other. And this idea of classifying cities, it’s not brand new, is it?

Speaker 2: Definitely not. People have been noticing these kinds of differences for ages. The research even mentions a bunch of older ways people tried to categorize cities.

Speaker 1: But the political economic split is maybe broader or fundamental.

Speaker 2: That seems to be the argument. Yeah. That it gets at a core driver across a huge sweep of history. They even bring in Adam Smith

Speaker 1: from the 18th century. What did he say?

Speaker 2: Smith talked about government towns. He used Rome, Madrid, Versailles as examples places clearly built around the rulers and administration.

Speaker 1: Okay. Political cities basically.

Speaker 2: And he contracted them with commercial towns. Glasgow Dutch cities where trade and making stuff was the main event. Economic cities. Exactly. And interestingly, he thought some cities like London or Edinburgh, after the union with England had elements of both.

Speaker 1: So even back then, this distinction felt relevant. What about other contrasts, like consumer versus producer cities? How does that fit?

Speaker 2: That’s another related idea. It focuses on how the city gets its food primarily. Consumer cities often in the classical world relied on elites extracting wealth like rents from the countryside to feed the city.

Speaker 1: Ah, so the city consumes wealth produced elsewhere,

Speaker 2: right? Whereas producer cities may be more common later in medieval times had more direct commercial links, city people, trading with farmers. Again, different dynamics.

Speaker 1: It feels like there are layers to this. The research also mentions Roman Britain public versus commercial urbanism.

Speaker 2: Yeah, similar idea. Public urbanism tied to Roman rule, commercial urbanism driven more by commerce. And then there’s Hazel’s idea of generative versus parasitic cities.

Speaker 1: Generative good, parasitic bad,

Speaker 2: basically. Yeah. Does the city boost the whole region’s economy or does it drain it? And others looked at whether a city’s main vibe was traditional and moral or technical and innovative.

Speaker 1: Lots of ways to slice it. But the political economics seems like a really useful first cut.

Speaker 2: Hmm.

Speaker 1: What about those giant cities, primate cities?

Speaker 2: Ah, primate cities, the ones that are way bigger than any other city in their country. Okay. The research connects them more often to the political side.

Speaker 1: Why is that?

Speaker 2: The argument is that political centralization is often a key driver. Concentrating power tends to concentrate population and resources in one place. Sometimes beyond what pure economics would dictate,

Speaker 1: like ancient Rome. Again, it wasn’t just big because of trade.

Speaker 2: Exactly. It was the nerve center of a huge empire. That kind of overwhelming political gravity could actually suppress the growth of other cities nearby. Research suggests absolutist rulers often had that effect.

Speaker 1: Interesting. So political power can really shape the whole urban map. Now, you mentioned commercialization earlier. How does that help gauge where a city falls on this spectrum?

Speaker 2: It’s like a rough indicator. How much is money used? Are there markets, merchants, banking, wage, labour? The more commercialized, the further towards the economic city. End of the scale it might be,

Speaker 1: but there’s a catch. Right? Even highly commercialized ancient cities weren’t like modern. One big

Speaker 2: catch. Yeah. Even Imperial Rome, which was incredibly commercialized for its time, didn’t have the kind of sustained innovation driven economic growth we associate with modern economic cities.

Speaker 1: Why not? What was holding it back?

Speaker 2: The research points to the nature of the wealth creation. Often it was about conquest, extracting rent, slave trading, what one scholar called corrosive forms of enterprise. Not so much about investing in making new things or becoming more productive domestically.

Speaker 1: So wealth was moving around, maybe concentrating, but the pie wasn’t necessarily growing much.

Speaker 2: That’s a good way to put it. Roman financiers apparently didn’t focus much on lending for productive businesses. Empires were often more focused on just holding onto power than driving broad economic progress.

Speaker 1: It really sounds like a different world. There’s a quote calling pre-industrial cities artificial because they needed political structures just to support the non-farmers,

Speaker 2: right? They often weren’t self-sustaining economically in the way we think of cities today, which raises a neat question. What about agglomeration economies? The benefits of clustering, did those exist In political cities,

Speaker 1: we usually think of that economically businesses benefiting from being near each other.

Speaker 2: We do, but the idea here is to broaden that could concentrating, power administration, or even religious rituals create its own kind of synergy, its own form of growth.

Speaker 1: Being the center of power attracts more power, more influence, more skilled administrators.

Speaker 2: Exactly. Or a major religious center draws pilgrims, crafts people, theologians. There are non-economic benefits to clustering too. Some models of early cities definitely include things like ritual centers playing a key role,

Speaker 1: but was the scale of that growth comparable to modern economic cities?

Speaker 2: Probably not even close. The research really emphasizes the Malthusian Trap, pre-industrial limits where population could easily outgrow resources. The Industrial Revolution fundamentally changed that equation. Unleashing a different kind of urban growth tied to economic expansion.

Speaker 1: Okay, that makes sense. Political cities and economic cities operate under different rules, especially regarding growth. So that’s the two things view. Let’s switch gears to the one thing View energized crowding.

Speaker 2: This is about the fundamental experience or characteristic of cities, regardless of whether they’re political or economic. It’s this idea that the core of being a city is intense social interaction.

Speaker 1: And you said this pops up in different ways of defining cities.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Whether you focus on the demographics like Wirth did, emphasizing population size, density, and diversity, or on the functions a city performs for its region like Trigger did. Both implicitly point to interaction,

Speaker 1: density and diversity naturally lead to more bumping into people. More interactions.

Speaker 2: Exactly. And the specialized functions cities perform. Those rely on networks of people interacting to get things done. So this argument says, interaction is the deeper layer, the thing that fuels both political and economic cities.

Speaker 1: Makes sense? It’s the human element underneath the structure. What are the key factors that make this energized crowding happen?

Speaker 2: Size, density and heterogeneity. Difference. Diversity. More people closer together from different backgrounds. That’s the recipe. Thinkers like Jane Jacobs celebrated this, how it sparks creativity. Glaser argues it tribes growth and change.

Speaker 1: The research mentions stor venables on face-to-face contact.

Speaker 2: Yeah, they really zero in on that direct person to person interaction. They talk about how it helps communication, builds trust, helps people figure out who’s who and where they fit in.

Speaker 1: And the argument is that those functions, communicating, trusting, sorting people out, we’re just as vital in ancient earth as they are in Tokyo.

Speaker 2: Pretty much you needed to talk to people, decide who to trust for trade or alliances, understand the social rules. Face-to-face was key.

Speaker 1: Okay. And this idea gets a boost from something called settlement. Scaling theory sounds mathematical.

Speaker 2: It is a bit, it looks for predictable relationships between a settlement size and other features like its economic output or how much land it covers, or even things like crime rates.

Speaker 1: And what does it find?

Speaker 2: Here’s the really striking thing. Researchers are finding remarkably similar mathematical patterns, scaling laws across vastly different types of settlements across history and geography, modern cities, ancient villages, medieval towns, pre-Columbian settlements.

Speaker 1: So despite all the surface differences, there’s an underlying mathematical order related to size,

Speaker 2: it seems. So, for instance, bigger settlements tend to be denser. Crucially, things like economic output tend to increase faster than population size,

Speaker 1: meaning more interactions per person, more bang for your population buck.

Speaker 2: That’s the interpretation. Larger settlements seem to facilitate higher rates of social interaction leading to disproportionately greater output, whether that’s economic wealth or maybe even political influence or cultural innovation. It supports the energized crowding idea,

Speaker 1: and that connects back to trusting community, right? More face-to-face helps build those things.

Speaker 2: Definitely thinkers who study cooperation like Eleanor Ostrom emphasize local interaction. Urban planners try to design for it. And the fact that neighborhoods seem to be universal in large settlements,

Speaker 1: everyone needs their local patch, their smaller community within the big city.

Speaker 2: Exactly. It suggests this need for manageable face-to-face social connection. It’s just. Fundamental to human, urban life, whatever the city’s main purpose.

Speaker 1: So it’s also about cities being places for social learning, passing on culture.

Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s another layer. Cities as hot houses for cumulative culture for learning from each other. Of course, energized, crowding isn’t always positive. It can also concentrate poverty, disease, crime. But the core mechanism, the interaction is constant.

Speaker 1: So the scaling laws, the universality of neighborhoods, the importance of face-to-face, it all points to this city as one thing. A container for intense social interaction.

Speaker 2: That’s the essence of the second perspective. It suggests a deep continuity in what cities are at a human level, despite the massive changes in their economic or political structures.

Speaker 1: Okay, let’s try and wrap this up. We have these two powerful lenses, cities as distinct political or economic engines with different growth logic,

Speaker 2: right? Analyzing them separately often makes sense, especially for things like economic development.

Speaker 1: But then we also have cities as fundamentally one kind of phenomenon. These arenas of energized, crowding, intense social interaction, showing surprising similarities in scaling laws across millennia.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And that perspective allows for comparison across time on things like social organization, community life, maybe even innovation.

Speaker 1: So using both lenses helps avoid traps like assuming ancient cities work just like ours. Assuming they were so alien, we can’t compare them at all.

Speaker 2: Exactly. It’s a more nuanced approach. Avoids the modernist trap of seeing the past only through today’s eyes. The primis trap of seeing it as completely disconnected.

Speaker 1: The core message seems to be the engines might change, but the social hum, the interaction, that’s the constant

Speaker 2: understanding that energized crowding is key. The research suggests maybe even for figuring out how to make cities work better in the future.

Speaker 1: So a final thought for you listening, think about these two ideas, the political economic drivers versus the constant social buzz. How does that change how you view your own city or places you visited? What stands out now? What seems less critical?

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What is the future for cities podcast?

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Episode and transcript generated with ⁠⁠Descript⁠⁠ assistance (⁠⁠affiliate link⁠⁠).