Institutet för studier in Malmös historia bjuder in till öppet föredrag vid urbanhistoriska seminariet:

Kan forskning kring urbant jordbruk i det förflutna normalisera den globala stadsodlingsrörelsen?

Med: Christian Isendahl, lektor vid Institutet för historiska studier, Göteborgs Universitet.
Tid: den 26:e maj, kl 15-17.
Plats: Sal D222 i Orkanen vid Malmö högskola.

Text om seminariets innehåll:
Archaeological research demonstrates that urbanism as a global phenomenon has a considerable time-depth. On most continents, people have for more than a millennium organized settlements in ways that we in some sense can recognize today as distinctly urban. Research also shows that different historical ecological pathways have created considerable spatial diversity and temporal variation in urban systems, and yet this is overlooked in contemporary urban scholarship. Although urban scholars and planners often reference the past, the scope of the frame of reference is spatially and temporally limited in relation to the wealth of the data. Isendahl & Smith (2012) suggest that urban scholars and planners should draw from as wide a range of cases and models as possible when considering options to inform the development of sustainable and resilient future cities. In this view, urban archaeologists have a distinct role to play in broadening the frame of reference, complementing recentist biases. Recent comparative archaeological research shows that many pre-industrial urban settlements can be characterized as ‘low-density cities’ (Fletcher 2009). A straightforward definition of this term is that urban settlement components are relatively dispersed in the landscape. Documented cases of early low-density cities include those of the Maya lowlands and the Khmer civilization, but the phenomenon is inadequately defined and under-investigated. Presenting the Maya case in this talk I argue that land-use strategies which intersperse agricultural production with urban functions account for the spatial distribution of architecture in Maya cities, and justify the term ‘agro-urban landscape’ as an appropriate designation for this type of site.