ANCIENT CITIES ARE CLOSER TO

MODERN CITIES THAN YOU

MIGHT THINK

FEBRUARY 20, 2015 LUCY INGHAM

The way that cities grow and develop is the same now as it was thousands of years
ago, according to new research.

It has been known for a while that our modern cities exhibit something known as
‘urban scaling’; as their populations grow, so does the level of productivity and
efficiency.

For example, if a city’s population grows at a faster rate than its infrastructure
development, the production of goods and services will grow at a faster rate than the
population does, thus maintaining an overall balance.

This is such a predictable feature of modern cities that it can be mathematically

measured, and future changes can be predicted with a fair degree of accuracy.

Until now this phenomenon had only been demonstrated in modern, industrialised
cities. However, researchers have found that ancient cities that existed thousands of years
ago in the area now occupied by Mexico City were also subject to urban scaling,
suggesting the concept is a basic concept of all urban human societies, and will continue
to be so in the cities of the future.

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 The researchers, from the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) and the University of Colorado
Boulder (CUB), undertook extensive archaeological research to analyse thousands of
ancient structures in Mexico to determine everything from population size and density to
construction rates and site use intensity.

They found that the bigger the settlement, the more productive it was, making
these ancient pre-contact Mesoamerican cities subject to urban scaling in the same ways
as modern cities.

“It was shocking and unbelievable,” said Scott Ortman, assistant professor at the
CUB Department of Anthropology. “We were raised on a steady diet telling us that,
thanks to capitalism, industrialization, and democracy, the modern world is radically
different from worlds of the past.

“What we found here is that the fundamental drivers of robust socioeconomic

patterns in modern cities precede all that.”

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 The findings indicate that human social networks have fundamental features that
shape cities, no matter when in history they occur.

“Our results suggest that the general ingredients of productivity and population
density in human societies run much deeper and have everything to do with the
challenges and opportunities of organizing human social networks,” explained Professor
Luis Bettencourt, lead investigator of SFI’s Cities, Scaling, and Sustainability research
program.

The findings also prompt some interesting possibilities for the cities of the future.
Many concepts for future cities have seen robots, AI and other technological
developments result in a major skewing of city scale, however this research suggests that
this will not be the case.

http://factor-tech.com/future-cities/16709-ancient-cities-closer-
modern-cities-might-think/