Urban revolution

In anthropology and archaeology, the urban revolution is the process by which small, kin-based, illiterate agricultural villages were transformed into large, socially complex, urban societies.

Overview

Australian archaeologist V. Gordon Childe introduced the term "urban revolution" in the 1930s. Childe also coined the term "Neolithic Revolution" to describe the earlier process by which hunter-gatherer societies domesticated crops and animals and began a farming lifestyle. Childe was the first to synthesize and organize the large volume of new archaeological data in the early-20th century in social terms. Whereas previous archaeologists had concentrated on chronology and technology, Childe applied concepts and theories from the social sciences to interpret archaeological finds. Childe first discussed the urban revolution in his 1936 book, Man Makes Himself,^[1] and then in his 1950 article in the journal Town Planning Review^[2] brought the concept to a much larger^{[citation needed]} audience. In that paper, he presented a 10-point model for the changes that characterized the urban revolution:

1. In point of size the first cities must have been more extensive and more densely populated than any previous settlements.
2. In composition and function the urban population already differed from that of any village … full-time specialist craftsmen, transport workers, merchants, officials and priests.
3. Each primary producer paid over the tiny surplus he could wring from the soil with his still very limited technical equipment as tithe or tax to a deity or a divine king who thus concentrated the surplus.
4. Truly monumental public buildings not only distinguish each known city from any village but also symbolise the concentration of the social surplus.
5. But naturally priests, civil and military leaders and officials absorbed a major share of the concentrated surplus and thus formed a "ruling class".
6. Writing.
7. The elaboration of exact and predictive sciences – arithmetic, geometry and astronomy.
8. Conceptualized and sophisticated styles
9. Regular “foreign” trade over quite long distances.
10. A state organisation based now on residence rather than kinship.

Childe's own work highlighted the urban revolution which he identified as occurring in Mesopotamia in the course of the 4th millennium BCE.^[3]

Although sometimes interpreted^{[citation needed]} as a model of the origins of cities and urbanism, Childe's concept in fact describes the transition from agricultural villages to state-level, urban societies. This change, which occurred independently in several parts of the world, is recognized^{[citation needed]} as one of the most significant changes in human sociocultural evolution. Although contemporary models for the origins of complex urban societies have progressed beyond Childe's original formulation,^[4][5] there is general agreement^{[citation needed]} that he correctly identified one of the most far-reaching social transformations^[6] prior to the Industrial Revolution, as well as the major processes involved in the change.

See also

• V. Gordon Childe
• Sociocultural evolution
• List of oldest continuously inhabited cities
• Cities of the ancient Near East
• Proto-city

References

1. Childe, Vere Gordon (1936). Man Makes Himself. London: Watts & Co. OCLC 1188965191.
2. Childe, Vere Gordon (1950). "The Urban Revolution". The Town Planning Review. 21 (1). Liverpool University Press: 3–17. doi:10.3828/tpr.21.1.k853061t614q42qh. ISSN 0041-0020. JSTOR 40102108. S2CID 39517784 – via JSTOR.
3. Chant, Colin; Goodman, David (2005) [1999]. "The Near East". Pre-Industrial Cities and Technology. Cities and Technology. Abingdon: Routledge. p. 2. ISBN 9781134636204. Retrieved 3 April 2023. Any introduction to this issue falls under the long shadow cast by the archaeologist V. Gordon Childe (1892-1957), and his concept of a technologically driven 'Urban Revolution' in Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium, persuasively presented in Man Makes Himself, first published in 1936.
4. Adams Jr., Robert McCormick (1966). The Evolution of Urban Society: Early Mesopotamia and Prehispanic Mexico. Chicago: Aldine Pub. Co. OCLC 1161113332.
5. Johnson, Allen W.; Earle, Timothy K. (2000). The Evolution of Human Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State, Second Edition (2nd ed.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-4032-6.
6. Smith, Michael E. (2009). "V. Gordon Childe and the Urban Revolution: A Historical Perspective on a Revolution in Urban Studies". The Town Planning Review. 80 (1). Liverpool University Press: 3–29. doi:10.3828/tpr.80.1.2a. ISSN 0041-0020. JSTOR 27715085 – via JSTOR. Childe [...] employed two key concepts to organise his discussion: the Neolithic Revolution and the Urban Revolution. Childe's models for these revolutions largely created the modern understanding of two of the most fundamental and far-reaching transformations in the human past.