Chapter 11 - Low-Density, Agrarian-Based Urbanism

Summary

The significance of low-density urbanism was articulated for both the industrial and the preindustrial world in the 1950s and 1960s. Jean Gottman defined the industrial megalopolis in his famous analysis of the low-density conurbation along East Coast of the United States of America (Figure 11.1) while Gordon Willey and the pioneering settlement archaeologists who studied the Maya in Lowland Mesoamerica showed that their great ritual centers, such as Tikal, had raised roadways or sacbe and were located within extensive settlements of dispersed housemounds, and plazas (Figure 11.2). Low-density urbanism has now been studied and affirmed for nearly half a century (Sharer and Traxler 2005; Morrill 2006). Settlement pattern studies have “done more to change archaeologists’ views of the Maya than any single new procedure” (Sabloff 1990:68). And Morrill honors Gottman, remarking that the term megalopolis referring to “a string of closely interconnected metropolises was logical and inspired and has become part of the language” (Morrill 2006:155).

Low-density urbanism is, therefore, a vital part of how we understand our social world. It plays a profound role in industrialization, vividly apparent in the conurbations (Hall 1977) of the Ruhr in Germany and the Midlands in the United Kingdom in the early twentieth century as interconnected network of cities and industries enclosing patches of rural land; these are the precursors of the megalopolis as defined by Gottman (1961). Megalopoli proliferate worldwide. In the industrializing societies of Southern and Eastern Asia researchers have, since the 1970s, defined the extensive desakota (“ruralurban”) of urban expansion in the region (see McGee 1991; Davis 2006:9–11). Urban growth occurs rapidly along communication routes and encapsulates the rural world in the mesh of the urban network. Hinterland is incorporated in the urban fabric. Low-density urbanism in the industrial world is recognizably and unavoidably present and highly problematic. Even defining the extent of a low-density urban settlement is an issue for administrators, urban planners, the national census, and theoreticians of industrial urbanism, as illustrated by papers such as “The Edgeless City” (Lang and LeFurgy 2003).