Ch. 1: Theory of Urban Genesis

URBAN GENESIS AT CHACO: Case Study of the Origin of Civilizations Chapters: 1 2 3 4 5 6

1.34 The City: a Nexus of Institutions

Several valuable ideas are embedded in this model of urban genesis. First of all, and perhaps most importantly, Wheatley arrives at a working definition of the city:

Common to all these approaches is the view of the city proper--by which is meant pre-eminently the societal entity that develops within the environs of the built form--and the critical locality within which are located the institutions that establish and maintain order within the subsystems of society. To that extent, the structure of the city can be said to epitomize the pattern of society at large. (Wheatley 1983:2)

Urban form, then, is the product of a constellation of social processes. The city as a physical artifact is generated by, and subsequently transformed by the emergence and differentiation of various social and cultural institutions; the city is in fact a sociocultural product that is continuously formed and reformed for as long as it is inhabited.

This conception of the city redefines our understanding of the formative agents of built environments even at the scale of specific structures. Buildings are not created by designers, owners, or even the workers who assemble them. Buildings, and every other designed feature of a material culture, are producedby social institutions, the "users" of the building type at the level of cultural analysis. Thus the most common building type--domestic architecture--should be understood as the product of the social institution we call the family, and not as the product of the individuals who design and build it. In societies with highly specialized and differentiated institutions, the array building types is considerable: temples, libraries, town halls, post offices, police stations, et cetera. These public building types are often named for the institutions that produce them, such as churches, courts, and banks. Note also that formally-established economic institutions, for the purposes of this type of analysis, should also be considered public.

Using this conception of the institutional generation of buildings--or, more generally, the cultural production of the built landscape--one can link cultural change directly to changes in the built environment. As institutions emerge, transform, and differentiate, they require new or altered building types. However, building type must be distinguished from building form in this analysis. Particular forms may persist long after the conditions in which they were created have disappeared, such as the Classical Greek orders of column design. Building types, on the other hand, are defined or inferred by evidence of patterns of use. Functional changes in a persistent built form may be subtle and difficult to discern in the archaeological record. Yet functional changes are the most critical indicators of culture change (see Hodder 1993).

In developing this model of primary urban genesis, both Adams and Wheatley are concerned with the early state, which is wedded so closely to its place of origin that the social and physical entities are virtually inseparable. Urban society, as Adams and Wheatley use the term, is virtually synonymous with 'early state' and 'city-state.' City-states and later state forms differ in the degree to which social and political power are tied to place. Subsequent societies often solved the problem of legitimation by basing authority on moral principles and universal ideals such as the divinity of the monarch or the natural rights of the citizen. When power is justified through such abstract ideas, it is no longer strictly bound to place.

The relationship of individuals to place also varies between different cultural traditions. In particular, the difference between Anglo-American and traditional Pueblo ideas of place needs to be considered: in general, Anglos conceive of land as a commodity, stemming from the belief that the world belongs to society and its members. The Pueblo viewed the world literally as their mother, so all the members of the society belonged to the earth as its children. Such divergent world-views derive from very different cosmologies, and result in very different conceptions of space and geography. It is possible, that the Chacoan world-view was similar to that observed in more recent Pueblo cultures. Therefore the Historic Pueblo world-view and its relationship to the Pueblo cultural landscape are the subject of the following chapter. In chapter five I will use the same method, in speculative fashion, to try to explain major features of the Chacoan built landscape.