A new scholarly paper from Santa Fe Institute (SFI) and University of Colorado, University of North Carolina, and University of New Mexico researchers argues that ancient and modern cities can be usefully analyzed from a comparative perspective. This promises contributions to the social sciences as well as contemporary urban planning and policy. However, what you do with the comps depends on how much you value similarities versus differences in urban form.
In multiple news reports lead author Scott Ortman describes the findings as "shocking and unbelievable." In The Christian Science Monitor he suggests that it would be "astounding" if the results are confirmed by other archaeological data sets. Michael Smith of Arizona State University, who writes a terrific blog calledWide Urban World, suggests in the Monitor that the study’s findings are "remarkable": they reveal "something really fundamental about human interactions—and human interactions in cities—that transcends modern economies."
The Basin study is excellent archaeological work. However, the exuberance about the findings might be a bit over the top. We shouldn’t be surprised that there would be strong, compelling parallels between ancient and modern cities, however variable their political economies. We've known for a while that non-capitalist societies can generate scalar efficiencies of production as well as great social inequality. Another, perhaps more fundamental reason is that we're dealing with the social networks of Homo sapiens sapiens, a species united by its big brain and commitment to life in groups.
Indeed, Ortman et al.'s argument dovetails with an earlier one by Bettencourt and his SFI colleague Geoffrey West (summarized in the Sydney Morning Herald) that trades on analogies from mammalian biology to argue that all cities are 85 percent alike in the way they look, work, and evolve as a function of size. For West and Bettencourt, cities are scaled up versions of each other in much the same way that "a whale is a blown up elephant, which is a scaled up giraffe, all the way down to a mouse and shrew." Like Ortman and collaborators, West and Bettencourt argue that the key to understanding cities, and solving their contemporary problems, depends on understanding these universal properties and not the 15 percent of contextual stuff—local geography, history, culture—that make cities individually unique.