Landscapes of Preindustrial Urbanism

"The use of the word "landscape" to describe the formation and infrastructure of cities seems to express contemporary preoccupations with the postindustrial urban condition. The Industrial Revolution is often seen as a turning point in the emergence of the urban landscape of the modern metropolis, and the large city as commonly experienced today in the world is certainly dependent on a range of recent (or quite recent) breakthroughs in construction technology, climate control, communication, and transportation. In this view, urban landscapes are a historically late development and are, therefore, seen to embody an essentially modern and Western concept. But features associated with contemporary urban landscapes-most notably the forms of human adaptation to and reshaping of the sites where cities develop and expand-can also be found in preindustrial contexts in different time periods and geographical regions. Preindustrial urban settlements generally occupied land that had been used for other, mostly productive, purposes, and their development involved complex and dynamic relationships with the management of natural resources. Such cities are traditionally studied as the centers of commerce, trade, and artisan production as well as the seats of secular and religious authorities; the essays in this volume to examine how the original clusters of agrarian communities evolved into urban formations"--