A Long-Term Archaeological Reappraisal of Low-Density Urbanism: Implications for Contemporary Cities

Roland Fletcher is Professor of Theoretical and World Archaeology at the University of Sydney, Australia. He is the director of the University of Sydney’s twenty-year Angkor Research Program and is an annual visiting research fellow at Centre for Urban Network Evolutions (UrbNet). ABSTRACT Dispersed, low-density urbanism has conventionally been considered as a unique consequence of industrialization and factors such as mechanized transport. Pre-industrial urbanism by contrast, has been perceived almost entirely in terms of compact densely inhabited cities with a strong differentiation between an urban and a rural populace. Evidence demonstrates, low-density settlements were a notable feature of the agrarian-urban world, especially in the tropics, and have been a characteristic of every known socio-economic system used by Homo sapiens. This paper situates past examples of large, low-density, dispersed urban settlements, with their long histories and their distinct patterns of growth and demise, in relation to contemporary low-density cities. This critical reappraisal of low-density, dispersed cities in the context of a long and culturally diverse urban past is significant for addressing urban sustainability challenges.