Angkor – a name thought to be derived from “nagara”, the Sanskrit for “city” – was a low-density urban settlement, its population spread out owing to agricultural land being part of the city. This was a pattern of urbanism found in several ancient metropolises, including the Mayan cities of central America, and Sri Lankan cities such as Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa. Angkor was flourishing in the late 13th century when Zhou Daguan visited; a little over a century later, it was all but abandoned. Researchers are beginning to see similarities in how these ancient low-density cities failed – and this is of particular interest today because, even as our cities grow in extent and population, their densities are falling. “Almost all cities are dropping to extremely low density,” says Roland Fletcher, professor of theoretical and world archaeology at the University of Sydney. “For example, the middle of New York may be very crowded, but Greater New York is a vast, sprawling landscape with huge amounts of open land which are never out of sight of buildings.” A similar pattern repeats with Greater Shanghai, Greater Tokyo, and the larger American and European agglomerations. The phenomenon of urban sprawl has largely been seen as a consequence of industrialised urbanisation: the availability of cars, outrageous real estate prices close to city centres, suburban aspirations of the middle class. But as Fletcher points out, there is nothing new about low-density cities. He recalls delivering a talk in 1996 about pre-industrial cities at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. Someone asked him at the end of his talk if he’d seen radar imagery of Angkor taken from the space shuttle Endeavour. Fletcher had the image within a week, and the first thing he noticed was something that had been speculated to exist – “this whacking great canal coming down from the north”. The area with the temples proved to be just the centre of Angkor: “There were lines and patches and tanks and features all over the place. The immediate revelation was that this place was huge.”
Posted on: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 00:19:55 +0000
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