Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-20T09:32:12.222Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Urban empty spaces. Contentious places for consensus-building

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2008

Monica L. Smith
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

As a relatively recent human phenomenon, cities are the physical culmination of many pre-existing psychological, social and cognitive capacities. The persistent presence of deliberately empty spaces in urban areas both past and present signals the conscious creation and maintenance of those locales at various levels: household, neighbourhood and civic/centralizing. Domestic empty space, in particular the space between and among habitations, was likely to have been curated and managed at the household level. However, neighbourhood-level and urban-level empty spaces were subject to multiple demands and levels of oversight; as a result, this publicly available emptiness was flexible in its use but also potentially ‘expensive’ to govern. The presence of empty spaces in an urban setting may serve as a proxy for understanding the relationship between different levels of urban interaction, from the relative autonomy of the household that used its nearby spaces idiosyncratically, to the larger impositions of authority through urban design in the form of streets and open plazas. Specific examples of empty space are assessed for the ancient city of Sisupalgarh in eastern India, where geophysical surveys and excavations have enabled us to discuss the multiple meanings of nothingness at the household, neighbourhood and urban scales.

Keywords

citiesarchaeologyurban planningempty spaceconsensusIndia
Type
Notes
Information
Archaeological Dialogues , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , December 2008 , pp. 216 - 231
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Allen, P.M., 1997: Cities and regions as self-organizing systems. Models of complexity, Amsterdam.Google Scholar
Ashmore, W., 2002: ‘Decisions and dispositions’. Socializing spatial archaeology, American anthropologist 104, 1172–83.Google Scholar
Baum, A., and Valins, S., 1977: Architecture and social behavior. Psychological studies of social density, Hillsdale, NJ.Google Scholar
Branting, S.A., 2004: Iron Age pedestrians at Kerkenes Dağ. An archaeological GIS-T approach to movement and transportation. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, State University of New York, Buffalo.Google Scholar
Brooks, A.S., Gelburd, D.E. and Yellen, J.E., 1984: Food production and culture change among the !Kung San. Implications for prehistoric research, in Clark, J.D. and Brandt, S.A. (eds), From hunters to farmers. The causes and consequences of food production in Africa, Berkeley, 293–310.Google Scholar
Brugge, D.M., 1983: Navajo activity areas, in Ward, A.E. (ed.), Forgotten places and things. Archaeological perspectives on American history, Albuquerque, NM, 185–91.Google Scholar
Clarke, D.L., 1977: Spatial information in archaeology, in Clarke, D.L. (ed.) Spatial archaeology, London, 1–32.Google Scholar
Colombijn, F., 1994: Patches of Padang. The history of an Indonesian town in the twentieth century and the use of urban space, Leiden.Google Scholar
Crossland, Z., 2003: Towards an archaeology of ‘empty’ space. The Efitra of the Middle West of Madagascar, Michigan discussions in anthropology 14, 18–36.Google Scholar
Deetz, J., 1977: In small things forgotten. The archaeology of early American life, Garden City, NJ.Google Scholar
Hillier, B., and Hanson, J., 1984: The social logic of space. New York.Google Scholar
Hutson, S.R., and Stanton, T.W., 2007: Cultural logic and practical reason. The structure of discard in Maya households, Cambridge archaeological journal 17, 123–44.Google Scholar
Ingold, T., 1987: The appropriation of nature. Essays on human ecology and social relations, Iowa City.Google Scholar
Inomata, T., and Coben, L.S., 2006: Overture. An invitation to the archaeological theater, in Inomata, T. and Coben, L.S. (eds), Archaeology of performance, Lanham, MD, 11–44.Google Scholar
Kolb, M.J., and Murakami, G.M., 1994: Cultural dynamics and the ritual role of woods in pre-contact Hawai'i, Asian perspectives 33, 57–78.Google Scholar
Lal, B.B., 1949: Sisupalgarh 1948. An Early Historical fort in eastern India, Ancient India 5, 62–105.Google Scholar
Lal, B.B., 1991: Planned cooperation between archaeologists and scholars of ancient literature. A crying need, Man and environment 16 (1), 5–21.Google Scholar
Laurence, R., 1994: Roman Pompeii. Space and society, London.Google Scholar
McIntosh, R.J., 2005: Ancient Middle Niger. Urbanism and the self-organizing landscape, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Matthews, W., French, C.A.I., Lawrence, T., Cutler, D.F. and Jones, M.K., 1997: Microstratigraphic traces of site formation processes and human activities, World archaeology 29, 281–308.Google Scholar
Meskell, L., 1998: An archaeology of social relations in an Egyptian village, Journal of archaeological method and theory 5, 209–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mohanty, R.K., and Smith, M.L., 2006: Excavations at Sisupalgarh 2005, Man and environment 31, 27–32.Google Scholar
Mohanty, R.K., and Smith, M.L., in preparation: Archaeological research at Sisupalgarh 2008, to be submitted to Man and environment.Google Scholar
Mohanty, R.K., Smith, M.L. and Matney, T., 2007: A preliminary report of the archaeological investigations at Sisupalgarh 2006, Man and environment 32 (1), 57–66.Google Scholar
Mohanty, R.K., Smith, M.L., Matney, T., Donkin, A. and Greene, G., 2007: Archaeological research at Sisupalgarh 2007. An Early Historical city in Orissa, Puratattva 37, 142–54.Google Scholar
Mugerauer, R., 1993: Toward an architectural vocabulary. The porch as a between, in Seamon, D. (ed.), Dwelling, seeing, and designing. Toward a phenomenological ecology, Albany, 103–28.Google Scholar
Penvenne, J.M., 1997: Seeking the factory for women. Mozambican urbanization in the late colonial era, Journal of urban history 23, 342–79.Google Scholar
Robin, C., and Rothschild, N.A., 2002: Archaeological ethnographies. Social dynamics of outdoor space, Journal of social archaeology 2, 159–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shinew, K., Glover, T.D. and Parry, D.C., 2004: Leisure spaces as potential sites for interracial interaction. Community gardens in urban areas, Journal of leisure research 36, 336–55.Google Scholar
Smith, M.L., 2002: Systematic survey at the Early Historic urban site of Sisupalgarh, Orissa, in Sengupta, G. and Panja, S. (eds), Archaeology of eastern India. New perspectives, Kolkata, 109–25.Google Scholar
Smith, M.L., 2003: Urban social networks. Early walled cities of the Indian subcontinent as ‘small worlds’, in Smith, M.L. (ed.), The social construction of ancient cities, Washington, DC, 269–89.Google Scholar
Smith, M.L., 2005: Archaeological research at Sisupalgarh, an Early Historic city in eastern India, in Franke-Vogt, U. and Weisshaar, H.-J. (eds), South Asian archaeology 2003, Aachen, 297–306.Google Scholar
Smith, M.L., 2006: The archaeology of South Asian cities, Journal of archaeological research 14, 97–142.Google Scholar
Smith, M.L., and Mohanty, R.K., 2007: New investigations at an old city. Research at Sisupalgarh, India, Backdirt (Annual Review of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA), 54–59.Google Scholar
Streicker, J., 1997: Spatial reconfigurations, imagined geographies, and social conflicts in Cartagena, Colombia, Cultural anthropology 12, 109–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wells, E.C., Rice, G.E. and Ravensloot, J.C., 2004: Peopling landscapes between villages in the Middle Gila River Valley of central Arizona, American antiquity 69, 627–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Whitelaw, T.M., 1994: Order without architecture. Functional, social and symbolic dimensions in hunter-gatherer settlement organization, in Pearson, M.P. and Richards, Colin (eds), Architecture and order. Approaches to social space, London, 217–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Winklerprins, A.M.G.A., 2002: House-lot gardens in Santarém, Para, Brazil. Linking rural with urban, Urban ecosystems 6, 43–65.Google Scholar
Wiseman, D.J. 1983: Mesopotamian gardens, in Anatolian studies 33 (special number in honor of the 75th birthday of Dr Richard Barnett), 137–44.Google Scholar
Zedeño, M.N., 2000: On what people make of places. A behavioral cartography, in Schiffer, M.B. (ed.), Social theory in archaeology, Salt Lake City, 97–111.Google Scholar