A Model for Urbanism from the Neotropics?

Summary

Drawing from our own research on food, water, and waste management, we describe the development and characteristics of settled life in the humid neotropics with a view to isolating features or patterns that reflect sustainable trajectories. Because mainstream concepts of “the city” tend to be structured by urban experiences that lie outside the tropics and are recentist in outlook, we suggest that there are urban (and peri-urban) phenomena in the deep past of the neotropics that tend to be ignored as criteria for urbanism, such as the nature of greenspace, or the way “density” is conceptualized and measured. Bringing archaeological data on neotropical cities to light broaden the comparative frame of reference on the constitution of cities as a global phenomenon.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Comparative Approaches to Complexity in the Tropics

Keywords

Spatial Coverage