Urban form, infrastructure and spatial organisation in the Roman Empire

Hanson, John; Ortman, Scott G.; Bettencourt, Luís M. A.; Mazur, Liam C.

doi:10.15184/aqy.2018.192

Cited by 25 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 19 publications

(34 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Historians collected data identifying and comparing a large number of sources, continuing the debate about these evaluations. The collections became increasingly more relevant thanks to the combination of archeology, history, demography, environmental science and complex systems that enabled the estimation of each single city's (in general urban agglomeration) surface, population and even infrastructures and richness (Hanson et al, 2019). The very interesting contribution of these approaches relies as much on the questions and doubts they pose as it does on the answers that remain open.…”

Section: Harmonization With Bottom-up Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Extending the Concept of City for the Delineation of Large Urban Regions (LUR) for the Cities of the World

Rozenblat¹

2020

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Cities' delineation remains a hot topic of debate in a time where comparisons between cities are becoming increasingly based on different issues that address various scales of interventions and thus different concepts of cities. Aiming to compare cities and their insertion into globalization, we suggest that the "urban field of influence" is the best way to approach cities for this specific perspective. However, after reviewing the different existing possible concepts, we replace this concept with four different approaches proposed by Pumain et al. (1992): political entities, morphological agglomerations, functional urban areas and conurbations/Mega city regions. We discuss the top-down and bottom-up existing initiatives launched at the world scale and then use a mixed top-down and bottom-up approach to propose a new delineation of a large urban region (LUR), denoting a concept close to the conurbation or Mega city-region concept. The compositions of these LURs are published as an initial incomplete framework, suggesting the need for further critical comments and contributions to improve them.

show abstract

Section: Harmonization With Bottom-up Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Extending the Concept of City for the Delineation of Large Urban Regions (LUR) for the Cities of the World

Rozenblat¹

2020

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…This model suggests that the total area given over to transport infrastructure should expand with N (1−δ) , with the widths of streets increasing slightly slower than their lengths [15]. Given that both theoretical and empirical observations demonstrate that the value of δ for Greek and Roman cities is about 1/3, we would then expect the exponent to be 2/3, with widths taking about 1/6 and lengths around 1/2 [13,15]. We would therefore expect city gates to have increased at about the same rate, given that they were an important part of the transport infrastructure.…”

Section: Theoretical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…As we have shown elsewhere, this can be used to suggest a model for how we would expect the mixing space of cities to change as they increase in size by considering the amount of space required for a community of a certain size to interact in pursuit of their daily needs and how this space will expand as the numbers of individuals involved increases [15]. This can then be used to estimate how we would expect the infrastructural areas of cities to expand with population, helping to explain the quantitative patterns in both public spaces (fora and agorae) and street networks observed in cities in the Roman world in the Imperial period [15].…”

Section: Theoretical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Here, I explore another approach, which is to use the built environment itself to estimate traffic flows. This is only possible because of recent research, which is based on a conception of settlements as social networks embedded in the built environment, allowing us to design a series of models for the relationship between the estimated populations of sites and their infrastructure and socio-economic conditions (and how these attributes change as the number of people involved increases) [9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16]. One of the most important implications of these theories is that we would not only expect there to be a relationship between the populations of sites and various aspects of their built environments and socio-economic conditions, but also for these two sides of urban life to be relatable to one another, allowing transport networks and traffic flows to be considered in the same scheme.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Using city gates as a means of estimating ancient traffic flows

Hanson

2020

PLoS ONE

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Despite the recent flurry of interest in various aspects of ancient urbanism, we still know little about how much traffic flowed in and out of ancient cities, in part because of problems with using commodities as proxies for trade. This article investigates another approach, which is to estimate these flows from the built environment, concentrating on transport infrastructure such as city gates. To do this, I begin by discussing a new model for how we would expect this kind of infrastructure to expand with population, before investigating the relationship between the populations of sites and the total numbers and widths of city gates, focusing on the Greek and Roman world. The results suggest that there is indeed a systematic relationship between the estimated populations of cities and transport infrastructure, which is entirely consistent with broader theoretical and empirical expectations. This gives us a new way of exploring the connectivity and integration of ancient cities, contributing to a growing body of general theory about how settlements operate across space and time.

show abstract

“…As a result, individuals in larger settlements have more social contacts and exchanges per unit time; and there are also increased opportunities for specialization as individuals can meet more of their material needs through human networks as opposed to their own individual effort. This process, which we label the "social reactor process, " induces human networks to grow in consistent, non-linear, and open-ended ways with population (Bettencourt, 2013(Bettencourt, , 2014Ortman et al, 2015Ortman et al, , 2016Cesaretti et al, 2016;Hanson et al, , 2019Ortman and Coffey, 2017).…”

Section: An Examplementioning

confidence: 99%

A New Kind of Relevance for Archaeology

Ortman

2019

Front. Digit. Humanit.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

Urban form, infrastructure and spatial organisation in the Roman Empire

Abstract: Abstract

Cited by 25 publications

References 19 publications

Extending the Concept of City for the Delineation of Large Urban Regions (LUR) for the Cities of the World

Extending the Concept of City for the Delineation of Large Urban Regions (LUR) for the Cities of the World

Using city gates as a means of estimating ancient traffic flows

A New Kind of Relevance for Archaeology

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About