Theme:
Archaeology and the future of cities and urban landscapes
Session format:
Discussion session: We propose a Regular Session of papers (10-15) followed by a Round Table to invite wider views from beyond the speakers and their archaeological area of the world. This format could be labelled as a Discussion Session for the programme, but the discussion element will be concentrated in the latter blocks.
Title:
Leaving No Stone Unturned: What Archaeology Means to Unsustainable Urban Growth
Content:
People face global challenges unprecedented in human history. The complex system of human-environment interactions highlights problems resulting from crucial interconnected trends. These include population growth, rapid urbanisation which is alarmingly outpaced by the expansion of urban land cover, a decreasing ratio of food producers to food consumers, and increasing soil degradation. These conditions create a truly critical developmental dynamic that casts our future in a bleak light. Calls that emphasise the need to develop knowledge-based plans for sustainable urban growth are not only urgent and understandable, but will prove to be ill-informed pipe dreams if negative trends are not reversed.
One way to counteract the quandary that global processes confront us with is to design solutions at the local scale that are appropriate to local conditions. Archaeology is increasingly revealing past tropical urban development patterns. These alert us to long histories of radically different kinds of urban planning, design, life and ecological relations. In this session we invite contributions that seek to critically operationalise current insights and evidence from the archaeology of tropical cities across the globe. What do ancient tropical urban conditions have in common? How are alternative social and ecological relations manifested in distinctive developmental trajectories and do they display causal consistencies in urban form? How has past tropical urbanisation affected long-term environmental dynamics, and how were changes managed in urban life and governance? Ultimately, how can we present and use the distinctiveness of the archaeological-material evidence-base for indigenous urban vernaculars to inform global sustainable urban development debates?
Keywords:
Sustainable Development;
Urbanism;
Tropical Archaeology
Session associated with MERC:
no
Session associated with CIfA:
no
Session associated with SAfA:
no
Main organiser:
Dr Benjamin Vis (United Kingdom) 1
Co-organisers:
Dr Christian Isendahl (Sweden) 2
Prof. Elizabeth Graham (United Kingdom) 3
Affiliations:
1. University of Kent
2. University of Gothenburg
3. University College London
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