The plans of ancient cities show how the population, institutions, and industries were distributed within them. From the spatial relationship between these and other urban features we can infer aspects of socioeconomic and political organization. The urban plan also provides clues to how urbanization took place, the role of the central authority, major institutions and "everyday" residents in this process, and how the city changed over time. In this context, "plan" refers to the physical relationship between structures, streets, and features - such as open areas - within the city. An orthogonal urban plan is generally considered the hallmark of a planned city whereas anything less than orthogonal is deemed "organic," that is, natural, emergent, irregular, and unplanned (Castagnoli 1971:124; Smith 2007:5).
In general, evidence for orthogonal planning is assumed to reflect decision making and funding at the highest level of city governance. In contrast, "organic" or unplanned urban growth is deemed to reflect the spontaneous activities of multiple households and institutions in the city. Adam Smith (2003:225) argues that this view of urban planning implies that western notions of rectilinear planning are the ideal when, in fact, "curvilinear" planning may simply reflect a different aesthetic, or a case when a king or ruler does not want to control certain aspects of the urban plan. One could add that topography structures the urban plan since uneven, variable terrain is less susceptible to rectilinear construction than flat, open land (see Fitzsimons, Chapter 7 in this volume). In practice, cities are rarely, if ever, purely planned or organic. Instead, cities contain both planned and unplanned space; even highly planned space, such as aT Pompeii, may be remodeled or redeveloped by a city's inhabitants according to their speciic and changing needs (Laurence 1994:19).
To close the gap between planned and organic descriptions of cities, Michael Smith draws on the work of Simon Ellis (1995) and Harold Carter (1983), among others, to devise a scheme to analyze levels of urban planning in ancient cities. Smith divides urban planning into two main components: coordination among buildings and standardization among cIties. Coordination often involves formal arrangements of structures, such as around a plaza, or with respect to other features such as a temple, palace, street, or city waLl (Smith 2007:9-12). Standardization occurs when we see a similar suite of features and relationships among them at several cities in a region, which suggests that they were built with a common idea about how to construct a city (Smith 2007:25-27) (see Buell, Chapter 8 in this volume, for a more complete discussion of Smith's model). Smith's analytical approach encourages scholars to look for planning principles rather than a single, unified plan and makes it possible to find evidence for planning in otherwise "organic" cities. This chapter attempts to do just that, although I do not adhere strictly to Smith's definItions of coordination or standardization.
PRODUCTION OF SPACE IN MESOPOTAMIAN CITIES
City Size and the Cities Discussed Here
Cities discussed in this chapter range in size from 20 to more than 100 hectares. The relatively larger cities were presumably more populous, wealthier, hosted more institutions, administered more territory, and wielded greater regional power than their smaller neighbors, which may have played subservient political roles within the state. This observation does not diminish the potential political, economic, or ritual importance of even very small cities that may have been the seat of a respected family, produced a desired commodity, or hosted a revered shrine. Although the size differences among these cities can be striking, their basic structure and the spatial principles found within them are very similar. Many of these spatial principles probably predate cites and are rooted in agrarian villages in which nucleated households are the dominant features. Yet, ElizabeTh Stone's remote-sensing research in Lower Mesopotamia has identified monumental architecture aT the smallest of sites (less than 0.5 hectares), indicating that the built environment of small sites included more than simple houses (Stone 2007:231). Stone elaborates:
. . .just as the population of Mesopotamian cities seems to have
Been very agrarian, with well over 50 percent of the population
Making their living through agriculture, so too does the rural sector look very urban. Indeed I will close with the suggestion that Mesopotamian households, and the neighborhoods or villages that they form, were the real building blocks of society, but it was the ability of the urban centers to provide both a larger political arena and an efficient resource base that led to their popularity. (Stone 2007:231)
It may be simplistic to state that Mesopotamian cities, Upper and Lower, were simply villages writ large, but it is clear that the spatial principles we see in cities are not exclusive to large urban environments. These shared principles make it possible to compare cities of vastly different sizes because their urban character does not depend solely on the size of their population or their footprint (see Yoffee, Chapter 12 in this volume for a fuller discussion of "different cities" and the problem of city size).
In my analysis, I examine the structure of several Upper Mesopotamian cities of the third millennium. Although I reference features in many cities, I give several special attention to Beydar, Chuera, Kazane, Al-Rawda, anD Titris because we know more about their built environments. Instead of identifying types of city plans, such as those defined by Heinz (1997), I prefer to identify principles of the production and construction of space in these cities, including multiple centers (in nucleated settlements), conservative notions of space, defensIble space, housing parcels, and armature. Some of these features contain coordination or standardization that is relatively highly planned, according to Michael Smith's (2007) scheme, while others derive from supra-household, mid-level efforts, and others still from the smaller scale, so-called organic efforts of residents. Yet, the latter demonstrate patterned behaviors from city to city that indicate which aspects of city space appealed to residents, and point to cultural norms regarding the structure and appearance of the built environment. Accordingly, these aspects are often executed at a supra-household level. The main difficulties in examining these factors are that we usually lack the full plan of an ancient city, data from different cities are not equivalent, and it is difficult to know if the disconnected parts of the city that we uncover in our excavations are contemporary. Despite these problems, through a careful examination of several cities, we can gain a better understanding of their urban structure. At the close of my analysis, I discuss briefly the
Implications of the results for understanding sociopolitical organizaTion in Upper Mesopotamia.
Production Op space in Mesopotamian cities
World History
