Seite - 126 - in The Power of Urban Water - Studies in premodern urbanism

126 AdamRogers weknow that thiswas also the case for Rome itself. Other areas, such as in theNear East and AsiaMinor,weremuchdrier andeachsettlementwill havehad itsownrelationshipwithwater andnature. Thismeant that each townwouldhavehadadifferent experience ofwater,which will also have included anxieties associatedwith toomuch or too little water in their vicinity. Witheachtown,however,wecanapproachtherelationshipbetweentheurbanfabricandwater from similar terms, bringingmaterial and nature together to examine urbanism in a holistic manner. Studies such as these prioritised a very hierarchical viewof urbanism,where cities are re- gardedas settlements at the topof thehierarchyandare regardedas themost civilised formof settlement.Analysesof these settlements alsohavea tendency todrawonWestern concepts of urbanism,which cancreate abiasedperspective of urbanismandsettlement archaeology. These archaeological studies of urbanism can also be seen as part of amuchwider range of urban studies across the disciplines, especially in geography and sociology. The Chicago SchoolofUrbanResearch, founded in the 1920s, isoftenseen tohavebeen themost influential in shaping the development of interest in the study of cities and theirmodern history. One of the early influential publications was Robert Park, Ernest Burgess and Roderick McKenzie’s volume ‘TheCity’, in 1925,whichcontained this first chapterbyPark, ‘TheCity:Suggestions for the InvestigationofHumanBehavior in theUrbanEnvironment’. Thiswork representeda style and approach to studying the city that created a homogenous, static and fixed framework for understanding cities.11 The early studies originating from the Chicago School often sought to define and characterise the nature of urbanism, but in so doing created a specific view of the city based on theWestern perspective and also one that emphasised city hierarchies based on the presence of features regarded as representing urbanism. Park wrote that he saw cities as ‘the natural habitat of the civilizedman’.12We can see these perspectives in LouisWirth 1938 and Lewis Mumford’s 1961 work.13 Mumford saw cities as synonymous with civilisation, and linkedwith thiswasalso a strong influence frommodern concepts of capitalism. The influences from these traditions, however, also encouraged other perspectives that sought toengagewithurbanism,and theexperienceofurbanspaces,differently. Frenchschol- ars, such as Guy Debord of the situationist movement, developed a perspective of studying urbanismwhichcame tobeknownaspsychogeography.14 It sought toavoidWestern capitalist perspectives of urbanism and thinkmore about cities as lived spaces. Such approaches have alsohad some influences onarchaeological approaches toplace and landscape. Inmore recentyears, therehasbeenamassiveexpansion in the rangeof themesexamined in urban studies, especially through the influences of post-modernism and post-colonialism. These influences have seen attempt tomove away from the focus on hierarchies and defining characteristics of urbanism, and instead to look at the human experience within settlements and the way in which human activity constituted these settlements. We can see this across disciplines suchasgeography, sociologyandcultural studieswithwork that examines cultural perceptionsof cities,15 foodand identity, and sensory experiences of cities.16 Romanarchaeologyhasnever been separate from the influences of developments in other areas of archaeology or influences fromother disciplines.We can see this in theway inwhich themes developed inRomanperiod urban studies and especially in the study of the processes of conquest andurbandevelopment in provincial contexts such asBritain. Themajority of ac- counts relating to urban development in Britain, and other provinces, have tended to be con- 11 Cf. Lathamet al. 2009, 2. 12 Park 1952, 14. 13Wirth 1938;Mumford 1961. 14 Debord 1967. 15 E.g.Highmore 2005. 16 E.g. Edensor 2017.