Editorial: Where Do Cities Come From and Where Are They Going To? Modelling Past and Present Agglomerations to Understand Urban Ways of Life

Urbanism in the past and present remains hotly debated in academia and the media. We can think of a series of successfully conducted projects in the last few years: for example, the Copenhagen Polis Centre project; the Reception of the City in Late Antiquity ERC project (Cambridge, UK); the ongoing UrbNet project (Aharus, Denmark); the Social Reactors Project (Colorado USA). To these now the Dutch Universities OIKOS network can also be added, and if this was not enough the Guardian has recently launched a series “Guardian Cities” in the UK media. Yet fundamental questions such as “What is an ancient city? when can we say that a nucleated settlement has become a city? Why sometime a city prevails over others and why eventually it declines?”; are still widely open and lively debated question, that have not received a definitive answer yet especially with reference to central Italy, and Rome in particular. The long-term trajectory of Rome is quite well-known and established from the early supremacy within Latium vetus in pre-historic and early historic times, to the emerging power in Italy, during the Republican period, and finally the dominance over the Empire, in the first few centuries of our Era before the final collapse around the end of the fourth century AD. However, the contributory factors and the determinants of this trajectory, which took “a slightly shabby Iron Age village” to become the “undisputed hegemon of the Mediterranean” are still very much questioned1. In this editorial I will discuss features of urbanism/urbanization by presenting the current debate on the ancient city, also with reference to the recent Cambridge University Press book by Arjan Zuiderhoek2, which summarizes and discusses extensively previous approaches. Then I will discuss the contribution of this special Research Topic and I will indicate further possible points of debate. Already in the Bronze Age, but more commonly with the advent of the Iron Age, in the Near East, in Europe but also in the Americas, many regions become organized in small independent political units, generally defined as city-states3. Since the classic work by Fustel de Coulanges, La Cité Antique, published in 18644, the debate on the characteristics and the origin of the ancient