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One of these specified conditions is that the photocopy or reproduction is not to be “used for any purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research.” If a user makes a request for, or later uses, a photocopy or reproduction for purposes in excess of “fair use,” that user may be liable for copyright infringement. This institution reserves the right to refuse to accept a copying order if, in its judgment, fulfillment of the order would involve violation of copyright law. 0 THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES CHAPTER 2 Planetary Agglomeration Chris Otter “There is no readily agreed size or proportion that will distinguish a town from, say, a large village, a royal manor, a self-sufficient temple complex, a ‘mega-monastery’,” argue Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell in The Corrupting Sea, their epic 2000 study of the premodern Mediterranean (92). To solve the problem, they propose trying to “see what results may be obtained when the town is dissolved as a category and the full range of Mediterranean settlement is approached from an ecological standpoint and viewed in its entirety … we are intent on abandoning ‘town’ as a distinct settlement type” (109). The urban, they suggest, is merely “useful shorthand for architectonic agglomerations” (109). Horden and Purcell are not, of course, the only scholars to have drawn attention to the conceptual slipperiness of the urban. In fact, it is practically de rigueur to acknowledge that “the city” and “the urban” are elusive, imprecise concepts. In referring to “architectonic agglomerations,” however, they name another term, recurrent in urban studies, which has rarely been subjected to sustained analysis. What happens if, instead of reducing our discussions of architectonic agglomerations to “the urban,” we expand C. Otter (*) Department of History, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA e-mail: otter.4@osu.edu © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Thelle, M. Høghøj (eds.), Environment, Agency, and Technology in Urban Life since c.1750, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46954-1_2 23 24 C. OTTER urban history to include all agglomerations, of which cities are merely a subset? What if we approach the history of agglomerations as fundamentally ecological, as Horden and Purcell suggest? The result is to incorporate a far wider range of anthropogenic spatial formations into a history of human planetary activity and to extend this analysis far deeper into the past. Agglomeration is a far more inclusive concept than the urban. In the case of the latter, scholars are impelled to draw boundaries between the urban and the non-urban. With the former, there is no such impulse. This chapter unfolds in five parts. In the first, I briefly explicate the concept of agglomeration. In the second, third, and fourth, I explore the two key “revolutions” in urban history: V. Gordon Childe’s Mesopotamian “urban revolution” and Henri Lefebvre’s twentieth-century global “urban revolution.” The former is often regarded as the point of emergence of the city as a distinct, discrete, and socio-economically central entity, while the latter marks the dissolution of this discrete city into a vast, planet-spanning urban texture. I reframe these two revolutions, situating them within a historically deeper and more variegated web of agglomerations and the connections sustaining them. In so doing, their revolutionary status—and its concomitant stadialism—dissipates, leaving a picture that is far more uneven and gradual. Nonetheless, it does have a direction. Agglomerations are weighty, and as agglomeration became more widespread, humans became more reliant and attached to them. Gradually, we came to rely upon a physical world that, in turn, relied upon us for cultivation, maintenance, and repair, in what Ian Hodder calls a “double bind” characterizing the increasing density and complexity of the human niche (2012, 88). Over the very longue durée, these agglomerations play a critical role in the emergence of a new planetary entity, the technosphere, which had tremendous consequences for planetary ecology (Otter 2022). In the final, short section, I offer a brief history of another type of agglomeration—the camp. The ConCepT of AgglomerATion Neil Brenner has cogently argued that in the contemporary world, the “urban variable” cannot be satisfactorily disentangled from any distinct milieu: In the early twenty-first century, the urban appears to have become a quintessential floating signifier: devoid of any clear definitional parameters, morphological coherence or cartographic fixity, it is used to reference a seemingly 2 PLANETARY AGGLOMERATION 25 boundless range of contemporary sociospatial conditions, processes, transformations, trajectories and potentials. (2014b, 185) The terms “urban” and “city” have manifold definitions, relating to physical size; population size or density; architectural splendour; economic, political or religious functions; or cultural development or “state of mind.” They refer to things and to processes (Algaze 2018, 48). Definitions vary culturally and linguistically: in China, “city” just means a municipal government controlling a specific area, which often includes rural regions (Shepard 2015, 40–41). Urban scholars routinely introduce alternative terms to grasp the complexity of urban formations: megalopolis and conurbation, for example. Herbert Gans, in a perceptive summary of these problems, suggests, simply, “settlement,” or possibly “aggregation” (Gans 2009, 214). Agglomeration can be used not as a replacement for the urban but as a more general category, of which the urban is a subset. The term “agglomeration” has a ghostly presence in urban theory, often appearing as a rather undefined synonym for the urban (e.g., Brenner 2019, 355; Müller 2016, 7; Ur 2014, 251). Brenner draws attention to the “extraordinary scale and diversity of agglomeration processes that are associated with contemporary forms of urban development around the world” (Brenner 2014a, 20). Alternatively, the city can be seen as a particular type of organized agglomeration. Ian Farrington, writing on Cusco, makes this point very clearly. “In general,” he writes, “a city can be defined as a large, dense, and permanent agglomeration of public buildings for economic, administrative, and religious purposes and residences that house people from a diversity of social grades who service those functions” (2013, 9). These metabolic and cultural connections link cities, economically and politically, to larger tracts of space, often referred to as “hinterland.” “The urban” and “agglomeration” are not synonyms: the former is a hyponym of the latter, denoting its greater specificity and narrowness. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “agglomeration” as “a mass or assemblage formed by union or approximation, often without assimilation; a loose collection; a clustering or cluster.” The term is clearly far broader in scope than “urban,” referring to a “clustering” of any type of entity, which may or may not be organized, or “large, dense, and permanent.” From the perspective of human history, an agglomeration is any cluster or mass of entities (particularly buildings or containers) grouped together to form a larger assemblage. Cities are obviously agglomerations, but so are many 26 C. OTTER other assemblages: temples, palaces, fortification systems, “megamonasteries” (see Fig. 2.1), barracks, oil refineries, home bases, cable stations, warehouse complexes, labour camps, caravan parks, economic zones, nuclear power plants, persistent places, villages, farms, airports, ICE detention centres, nomadic caravans. The agglomeration perspective is capacious, heterogeneous, indeed generous. The concept scales easily. Agglomerations can be very large or very small; they can be organized or disorganized; homogeneous or wildly heterogeneous; permanent or evanescent. They can stand alone or overlap and nest one within the other: large urban agglomerations always contain other agglomerations: housing developments, shopping malls, prisons, industrial estates. Agglomeration is, crucially, a process: agglomerations come into being, expand, endure, shrink, merge, coalesce, and dissipate. Agglomerationism opens spatial analysis to smaller, specialized clusters of containers, as well as large-scale assemblages that palpably lack the sociocultural dimensions of urban life. Agglomerations collect and contain: they do not just contain human beings, but also the many things humans corral and control: animals, raw materials, commodities. Hence the term is less Fig. 2.1 Medieval monastic agglomeration: Rievaulx Abbey, England. (Wikimedia Commons) 2 PLANETARY AGGLOMERATION 27 anthropocentric than another generic term, settlement, which has sometimes been preferred to the more specific term urban (e.g., Doxiadis, 1967, 6). The process of enfolding domesticated animals into concentrated feeding operations is a clear case in point, as are the clusters of warehouses and large single-storey buildings which act as logistics hubs for global trade. In Ezhou, China, a new 26-storey abattoir will slaughter 1.2 million pigs annually (“26-Storey Pig Skyscraper” 2022). Deep Time perspeCTives In Man Makes Himself (1936), V. Gordon Childe introduced the idea of the “urban revolution,” which has become central to our inherited idea of what cities are, and where and when they first appeared. The urban revolution is particularly associated with fourth-millennium BCE Mesopotamia. His argument was developed further in his 1950 article, “The Urban Revolution.” The city, he argued, was “the resultant and symbol of a ‘revolution’ that initiated a new economic stage in the evolution of society,” made possible by the rising productivity of agricultural land (3–4). Childe identified ten criteria which distinguished cities from other forms of human settlement. Cities were larger and more densely populated than earlier settlements; they included non-agricultural workers, generated taxes, and possessed monumental buildings (11–13). Cities imported those raw materials “needed for industry or cult and not available locally” (15). The surplus was absorbed by a ruling class who did not perform manual labour (12–13). The city was the cradle of writing, science, and art, while its organization was “based on residence rather than kinship” (14–16). The urban revolution, for Childe, inaugurated a specific stage in world history conceived in stadial fashion. Man Makes Himself plots a history of two revolutions: Neolithic and urban (Childe 2003, 66–104, 140–178). Becoming urban meant becoming civilized: “more often than not, urban is associated with the cultural phenomenon of civilization” (Gaydarska 2017, 179). Urbanization meant a revolution in sociological and economic organization. This involved crossing not one but ten thresholds simultaneously. His model of the urban is fundamentally socio-cultural, linked to the division of labour, class formation, and the development of new knowledge systems based on writing (Smith 2009, 7). The model has little to say about the urban as an ecological phenomenon. In the decades following Childe’s article, other archaeologists developed, refined, and critiqued his theory. In The Uruk Countryside (1972), 28 C. OTTER Robert Adams and Hans Nissen described what they saw as a “general, decisive, irrevocable urbanization in the late fourth and early third millennia,” marking a shift from scattered settlements to a definite urban core (11). Much of the southern Mesopotamian population was absorbed “within the walls of many contending city-states” (11). Jean-Luis Huot even argued that Mesopotamian cities were intentionally planned: “all the cities where we can examine the initial stages of development are the result of a deliberate act” (2014, 66). The result was revolutionary, producing a “new type of life, life in a city” (2014, 64). By the end of the third millennium BC, according to one estimate, 90% of the southern Mesopotamian population inhabited cities (Leick 2002, xviii). However, because they were searching for the origins of “the city,” archaeologists inevitably confronted a problem. Childe had, perhaps wisely, failed to define the precise size threshold for urban settlements, leaving to others the task of defining what was, and what was not, urban. Anthropologist Guillermo Algaze suggests 25 hectares as an appropriate size (Algaze 2018, 27–28). Adams and Nissen suggested 50 for urban centres (1972, 18). Many sites displayed some, but not all, of Childe’s criteria, while the urban revolution did not appear to unfold at the same rate everywhere. The development of cities, for example, appeared to be more sudden in northern than southern Mesopotamia (Van de Mieroop 1997, 84–85). Hence there has been a gradual withdrawal from the application of strict Childean principles to late Neolithic sites, and an emphasis on gradualism, ambiguity, and anomaly. The Mesoamerican anthropologist George Cowgill suggested that the urban-nonurban dichotomy should be conceived as a spectrum (Al Quntar et al. 2011, 171). Urbanization is an ongoing process with little in the way of clear thresholds and planning (Ur 2020; Al Quntar et al. 2011, 151). This is surely a sensible approach. Al Quntar, Khalidi, and Ur, in a study of Mesopotamian sites, avoid Childe’s “trait-list approach” and “envision urbanism as a variable phenomenon consisting of a range of different criteria, not all of which will be apparent in all sorts of ancient cities” (2011, 152). Hence the use of the concept of “proto-urban” sites (Al Quntar et al. 2011, 153). One example is the Syrian site of Khirbat al-Fakhar, a large trade hub with an artefact scatter exceeding 300 hectares which lacked nucleation and looked more like a group of “semicontinuous” villages (Ur 2020, 46). However, such approaches, while more nuanced than Childe’s original formulation, still adhere to the idea that the urban definitively “emerged” 2 PLANETARY AGGLOMERATION 29 during the late Neolithic period and that earlier aggregations are at the most “proto-urban.” An agglomeration perspective does not deny that significant change took place in late Neolithic Mesopotamia. However, it regards this change as simply one of many in the deep, planetary history of agglomerations. Mesopotamian urbanism is not a singular break in the history of agglomeration. Moreover, positing such a break reduces tens of thousands of years of earlier agglomerative activity to a “proto-urban” prelude to real urban history. In fact, the history of agglomeration before Uruk is rich, complex, and variegated. Archaeologists and anthropologists have, again, produced multiple terms which are synonyms for such settlement: “home bases,” “special places,” “core areas,” “super sites,” “persistent places,” and “technocomplexes” (Rolland 2004, 261–252; 2018, 1; Gamble 2013, 144; 2018, 4; Ji et al. 2016). These concepts are also, of course, yet more hyponyms for agglomeration and, like the similar set of terms used for later settlements, suffer from inevitable conceptual slipperiness. Nonetheless, a rough 2-million-year history of “nonurban agglomeration” can be sketched. The concept of the “core area” refers to sites of concentrated stone tools and animal bones, which can be distinguished from the spatial practices of ancient primates (Rolland 2004, 260). Core areas were key locations for diurnal subsistence activities; nights, by contrast, would be spent in safe locations away from signs of carnivory (Rolland 2004, 262). Between 800,000 and 200,000 years ago, such agglomerations became areas “which consume and accumulate vast sets of artefacts and materials” (Gamble 2013, 144). Human agglomeration thus began with caches of materials. Home bases were more permanent, earthbound places where groups slept at night, protected themselves against weather and predation, shared food, and transmitted knowledge (Shaw et al. 2016, 1439). These became evident around 400,000 years ago. Controlled fire-making was integral to this shift (Rolland 2004, 259). The “technocomplex”, a site of gathered tools and structures, proliferated in the Upper Palaeolithic, the critical period when Homo sapiens became the earth’s sole species of hominin (40,000–10,000 BP) (Holt and Formicola 2008, 70). This putative core area-home base-technocomplex sequence is highly schematic, but the clear, if glacial, agglomerative trend is apparent. Such early agglomerations were, critically, sites of accumulation of materials, culture, and building: they oriented hominin life towards encapsulation, accumulation, and persistence and entangled it with places and artefacts (Shaw et al. 2016, 1440). They were also, unquestionably, sites where 30 C. OTTER social organization was negotiated and perpetuated, and cultural practices (sharing food, for example) undertaken, over long periods of time (Shaw et al. 2016, 1440). Humans became “increasingly habituated within landscape,” using specific routes and locations, and amassing more material (tools, e.g.) (Shaw et al. 2016, 1440). The cognitive consequences of agglomeration were highly significant. These sites were built on memories distributed among more people and “once established, the super-site niche set the stage for thinking differently about places. They now formed part of the hominins’ distributed cognition” (Gamble 2013, 171). Agglomeration, then, create centres of culture, social bonding, control of fire, and material accumulation. Agglomeration history is cumulative and accretive, not stadial. There are many points in time and space where significant transition takes place, but none is the privileged, critical transition dividing agglomeration history into some kind of definitive “pre” and “post” formations. Another example comes from the history of settlements in the Natufian and PrePottery Neolithic periods in the Levant and upper Fertile Crescent, in the late Palaeolithic and early Neolithic (c.11,500 BP-8500 BP). During this period, well before Childe’s urban revolution, we see tremendous growth in the size and population of agglomerations. At 11,500 BP, the five largest such Late Natufian settlements were each around 2000 square meters. By the Late Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (around 8500 BP), some agglomerations, such as Basta, covered nearly 140,000 square metres (Kuijt 2000, 80). Population rose per settlement, on average, from 59 (c.11000 BP) to 3822 (c.7500 BP) (Kuijt 2000, 81). Thus, settlement size increased by around 5000% over a 2000 to 3000-year period from the Late Natufian to the Late Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (Kuijt 2000, 85). Cyprian Broodbank refers to this as “a veritable population boom” (2013, 169). This is a very significant scalar leap, roughly approximating to that between Uruk and early-Victorian London. During these years, there is evidence of the increasing use of two-storey structures and compartmentalization of buildings. Such transformations allowed density and privacy to co-emerge, leading to zones of restricted access and potentially spaces of atmotechnic control (cooler areas for storage) (Kuijt 2000, 93). Verticality, partition, and atmospheric management were significant developments, unfolding over a similar period of time as those in Mesopotamia, and they were palpably as transformative. The emergence of verticality, for example, is an essential development and part of a long history including the construction of gothic cathedrals, skyscrapers, masts, 2 PLANETARY AGGLOMERATION 31 and chimneys (Graham 2016). Urban scholars should regard such scalar transitions as part of a vaster, much more variegated, nonlinear, and morphologically complex history of human containment, accumulation, and persistence, not a definitive rupture creating a new urban age. We should perhaps recast developments in late Neolithic Mesopotamia as simply one significant historical shift among many, massively distributed in time and space. We cannot neatly align phenomena such as sedentism, storage, spatial partition, state-formation, temple-construction, urban consciousness, and a ruling class with the emergence of the so-called first city. In The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow argued that “in some regions … cities governed themselves for centuries without any sign of the temples and palaces that would emerge later; in others, temples and palaces never emerged at all. In many early cities, there is simply no evidence of either a class of administrators or any other sort of ruling stratum” (277). In the spirit of their work, agglomeration history contains clues to alternative modes of existence and social organization. globAl AgglomerATions The normative Mesopotamian model has posed problems for those analysing urban form in other parts of the post-Neolithic world, where agglomerations are often less dense, and assume very different forms. Such Low-Density Urbanism (LDU) is “very different from the Childean highdensity norm”, and its identification was precluded for many years by the hegemony of the Childean model (Chapman and Gaydarska 2016, 82; Fletcher, 2019, 10). LDU is apparent at every stage of human history (Fletcher 2012, 286–287). In LDU, the distinction between the city and its outside is often far from clear, with farming composing a significant part of urban space. (Isendahl and Smith 2013, 133). Boundaries are of limited consequence or interest, and such cities do not necessarily rely on hinterland (Graeber and Wengrow 2021, 283). Roland Fletcher, whose work has done much to establish the LDU thesis, argues that this pattern is “a usual feature of human behaviour” as opposed to something anomalous (2019, 2). LDU is found in many places around the world: Mesoamerica, Africa, South Asia. One classic example is Angkor, in present-day Cambodia, which was capital of the Khmer empire from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries. For many years, the enclosed temple space of Angkor Wat was thought to be an urban island within a hinterland, along Mesopotamian 32 C. OTTER lines. It was, however, actually integrated into the low-density urban complex of Greater Angkor (Fletcher et al. 2015, 1390). Temples were not separate from but part of a vast urban formation, containing as many as 750,000 people, which has been described as “the largest ritual and urban phenomenon the world would see for 700-800 years” (Fletcher et al. 2015, 1398). Rice fields ran all the way to the giant temple of Angkor Wat (Fletcher 2019, 17). Fletcher suggests that categorizing such agglomerations is difficult, since they are not “the same kind of places as the conventionally defined compact, early cities” (Fletcher 2019, 18). Fletcher also emphasizes the tendency of such LDU formations to dissipate after a few centuries, although scholars should avoid sensational tropes of collapse (Scott 2017, 185–211). As Fletcher argues, “no large, agrarian-based, low-density urbanized settlement has existed during the past five hundred years” (2012, 289). Many LDUs had very impressive infrastructures, particularly for the collection, storage, and distribution of water. Anuradhapura’s Padiwaya tank, in Sri Lanka, possessed 13 million cubic metres of earthworks, but this hydraulic system was later overwhelmed by altered environmental conditions, including those caused by humans, and ultimately may have contributed to ecological stress (Fletcher 2012, 303, 306). However, the last couple of centuries has seen the rise of industrialized LDUs, those palaeotechnic conurbations like the English Midlands and the German Ruhr Valley. These industrial LDUs were born from the new energy relations forged by coal. Fletcher certainly regards such places as LDUs, meaning a new phase of low-density industrialization began unfolding from the nineteenth century (Fletcher 2012, 285). Jean Gottmann’s megalopolis concept captured the twentieth-century trend towards vast, low-density urban sprawl: When driving from Boston to DC, he argued, “one hardly loses sight of built-up areas, tightly woven residential communities, or powerful concentrations of manufacturing plants” (Gottmann 1964, 5). Such agglomerations are far larger than individual cities, which are dwarfed and engulfed by sprawling and often uncontrolled growth (see Fig. 2.2). Every agglomeration, from the smallest campsite to the most massive megalopolis, is forged out of an ongoing, dynamic, and irreducible relationship with its surroundings: trees, waterways, rocks and soil, and, later, fields, mines, and forests. To build, power, feed, and equip agglomerations, new metabolic relations must be forged with the earth, plants, animals, water, trees, and minerals. Hunting, fishing, food-sharing, and fire made early home bases possible; agriculture, in turn, made possible the 2 PLANETARY AGGLOMERATION 33 Fig. 2.2 Bosporus megalopolis. Note how actual cities are submerged and connected by massive agglomerative growth. (Wikimedia Commons) scaling-up of agglomeration size in the Neolithic. Agglomeration history must take account of such ecological issues, like the domestication of crops and animals; the potential reduction of biodiversity; the evolutionary pressures created by dense agglomerations; the modification of landscape geometry; the new disease burdens of dense, sedentary life; and the rising amount of waste as agglomerations grow. Agglomeration is thus among the most basic acts of niche construction. For our species, this involved the creation of durable, persistent, and dense settlements—or ecologies—which were spaces where genes and cultural norms were transmitted. Hence, “the assertion that preindustrial societies had only local and transitory environmental impacts is mistaken and reflects lack of familiarity with a growing body of archaeological data” (Boivin et al. 2016, 6393). Erle Ellis makes a similar point, noting how niche construction and material accumulation were well underway “long before the rise of cities and urban lifeways” (Ellis 2015, 310). For millennia, most humans have been born into a world where they have inhabited containers, handled tools, and refashioned the landscape. This has usually taken place at a small scale, at a home base, a village, or a camp, and such agglomerations retain their significance today. 34 C. OTTER plAneTAry AgglomerATion In The Urban Revolution (1970), Henri Lefebvre analysed a very different form of revolution to Childe’s Mesopotamian event. Lefebvre’s urban revolution is a twentieth-century, planetary phenomenon. The argument here is that while society has not become a single city, it has, in Henri Lefebvre’s words, “become completely urbanized” (2003, 1). “Urban society can only be defined as global,” he argues, since the entire planet has become a necessary resource for sustaining urbanization. “Virtually,” he continues, “it covers the planet by recreating nature, which has been wiped out by the industrial exploitation of natural resources (material and ‘human’), by the destruction of so-called natural particularities” (2003, 167). If Childe’s work plotted the emergence of the discrete city, Lefebvre presided over its dissolution and explosion. However, these two conceptions of “urban revolution” form the alpha and omega of a particular narrative of urban history: a Mesopotamian birth and a twentieth-century planetary expansion. Lefebvre’s work has been most creatively, substantively, and brilliantly furthered by Neil Brenner, particularly in his theory of planetary urbanization. By this, Brenner means that: Even spaces that lie well beyond the traditional city cores and suburban peripheries—from transoceanic shipping lanes, transcontinental highway and railway networks, and worldwide communications infrastructures to alpine and coastal tourist enclaves, “nature” parks, offshore financial centres, agroindustrial catchment zones and erstwhile “natural” spaces such as the world’s oceans, deserts, jungles, mountain ranges, tundra, and atmosphere—have become integral parts of the worldwide urban fabric. (2014b, 196) “Even the biosphere itself” forms part of this fabric: the same “urban stuff”, albeit in numberless states, combinations, and forms, is found everywhere (Brenner 2014b, 196). The “urban fabric” is sometimes thick and knotted, sometimes thin and frayed. The driving force of planetary urbanization is capitalism, albeit heavily mediated by technology and the built environment. If urbanization is thus coextensive with the earth’s surface, then it makes no sense to regard “the city,” in its Childean form, as the object of urban analysis. Brenner refers to this intellectual move as the abandonment of “methodological cityism” (Brenner 2019, 13). Instead, urban formations have become inseparable from wider infrastructures, 2 PLANETARY AGGLOMERATION 35 landscapes, extractive zones, and so forth: “peripheries, the underground, the skies, mountains, oceans” (Brenner 2019, 76). Lefebvre and Brenner’s work has pushed urban studies in exciting new directions, but their focus is almost exclusively on the twentieth century. What if we further Brenner’s work and abandon “methodological cityism” for the pre-twentieth-century world? A deeper historical focus might reveal that the discrete city, in its Childean formulation, is historically rather exceptional, and that agglomerations of all sizes have always forged metabolic relations with their surrounding ecosystems, even before the emergence of agriculture. These broader ecosystems, however, should not be conceptually conflated with the urban or the agglomerative. Arguing that urban formations are inseparable from the earth, the oceans and the sky threatens to collapse the entire world into an unending, monoscalar urban system. Here, the metaphor of the “urban fabric” occludes as much as it reveals. A better way to conceptualize this phenomenon is to regard agglomeration as merely one scale of a more heterogeneous and complex entity, the technosphere, defined as the sum total of everything humans have ever built. While the technosphere is sometimes viewed as a vast, planetary system of recent origin, it is in fact a multiscalar phenomenon emergent over the past 2 to 3 million years (Otter 2022). The tool is the smallest and oldest dimension of the technosphere, a process beginning at least 3 million years ago (Gamble et al. 2011, 121). We were tool-users before we self-contained, accumulated, and agglomerated. Machines and containers are two other smaller scales with their own historicity. Three scales are larger: the scales of network, anthrome (humanly modified biomes), and anthropogenic sink (terrestrial, hydraulic, or atmospheric repositories for human waste). Planetary agglomeration, then, has a long history, stretching back to Homo sapiens setting foot in the Americas (c.15000 YA). But it is not the only “planetary” process forming the technosphere, as the history of networks, anthromes, and anthropogenic sinks suggests. Brenner regards the “hinterland question” as central to any rethinking of critical urban theory (2019, 356). An agglomeration perspective is ecological and involves thinking through the connections between agglomerations, anthromes, and anthropogenic sinks. Agglomerations need networks (tracks, roads, rivers, sea lanes, airports) to coordinate the influx of useful energy (and, increasingly, of information) and the escape and dispersal of waste and effluent. The agglomeration-technosphere model explores these dynamic and productive relations with soil, water, minerals, 36 C. OTTER plants, animals, and air. For example, large ancient agglomerations required the transformation of hinterland into anthromes, and taxation was used for the construction of roads and canals. Agglomerations create waste on a mass scale: smoke, ash, rubble, garbage, bones, excrement. The channelling, management, dumping, and dispersal of waste via containers, network, and sinks became the key modality through which agglomerations began to generate large-scale ecological problems. nonurbAn AgglomerATions: The CAse of The CAmp The camp is an excellent example of a nonurban agglomeration, with a deep and complex history which is distinct from, yet intimately connected with, the history of the urban. As Charlie Hailey observes, the twentieth century—the century of planetary urbanization—saw a great proliferation of camp forms, most of which exist at a smaller scale than the urban, and can exist inside cities or even within other structures, like camps within airports (agglomerations within agglomerations) (2009, 87). He breaks these down into three forms: camps of autonomy, camps of control, and camps of necessity. The first form is linked to protest, artistic expression, and escape (Hailey 2009, 19). Such camps can exist in a multitude of places, for example, in trees or space or on ice (Hailey 2009, 90–91, 107, 126). The origins of camps of control have been located in the prisoner-ofwar camp, particularly associated with the Napoleonic wars, by the end of which there were nine purpose-built camps across England (McConnachie 2016, 400). The later nineteenth century saw an explosion of internment camps across the landscape of Western empires, including the Spanish in Cuba (1890s), the United States in the Philippines (1899–1902), Britain in South Africa (1899–1902), Germany in Southwest Africa (1904–1907), and Italy in Libya (1928–1932) (McConnachie 2016, 402). These were followed by the notorious extermination camps of the twentieth century, the Soviet gulag system, and the camp archipelagos of China, North Korea, and Cambodia (Pitzer 2017). Hailey’s third type of camp, the camp of necessity, occupies “a gray area between autonomy and control” (Hailey 2009, 322). Examples here include camps for migrants, refugees, and the homeless. The camp as a response to forced migration has been dated to 1915 (McConnachie 2016, 404). During the 1970s and 1980s, the creation of refugee camps became “a humanitarian industry,” run by a variety of international 2 PLANETARY AGGLOMERATION 37 agencies supplying food, shelter, clothing, and so forth (McConnachie 2016, 405). Today, camps house millions of people (see Fig. 2.3). In 2016, there were several hundred camps globally, housing over 12 million refugees and internally displaced people (McConnachie 2016, 397). Kutupalong, in Bangladesh, created for Rohingya refugees, became the world’s largest refugee camp (800,000 people) (“Inside the World’s Five Largest Refugee Camps” 2021). One line of scholarship, particularly associated with the work of Agamben, views the camp, not the city, as the paradigmatic twentieth (and twenty-first) century space: “today it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West” (1998, 181). Agamben refers to camps of control and necessity. Such camps are physically bounded, impermanent, biopolitical (i.e., aimed at specific populations), and separated from surrounding agglomerations (McConnachie 2016, 399). It has sometimes been argued that this logic exceeds the actual space of camps themselves and suffuses society as a whole (Minca Fig. 2.3 Refugee camp, Chad. (Wikimedia Commons) 38 C. OTTER 2015, 76). This Foucauldian logic marks the camp as a kind of “diagram of power” or blueprint for population management. The camp has a complex relationship to the “urban”: it is often located far from urban settlements and clearly fenced to demarcate its spatial ambit. In practice, the boundaries are considerably more porous (Turner 2016, 141). Camps are clearly less “networked” than urban zones, meaning that food, water, and energy supplies are more precarious. The camp, then, has a rather different metabolic profile, and ecological imprint, than the city. In Shatila camp in Beirut, for Palestinians, electricity was episodic, supplemented by small generators that might power a television or light a room: there was also no potable water (Peteet 2005, 13). Camps often lack the partitions and privacy of urban spaces (Peteet 2005, 119). Here, however, I would suggest that, again, there is a serious note of presentism to these histories. Small, transient settlements are arguably the oldest form of agglomeration on the planet: often dispersed and low density: “this must be an essentially universal human behavioural characteristic” (Fletcher 2019, 2). The earliest hominin settlements are camps: temporary open-air meeting points or clusters of shelters. Huntergatherers lived in camps. James C. Scott refers to the earliest states not as discrete cities, but as “late-Neolithic multispecies resettlement camp[s],” in which humans, animals, and germs crowded together in the same environment (2017, 84). The camp might arguably be the paradigmatic twentiethcentury space, but it was certainly the paradigmatic 35th millennium BC space. Military camps have been vital apparatuses of geopolitical control for millennia. Camps can become cities. Vienna and Barcelona started life as Roman camps (Abourahme 2020, 25; Hailey 2009, 178). In fact, one could make an argument that camping—with whatever sense of security it brings—is the archetypal agglomerative practice, not least because of its historical ubiquity, variety, and profound antiquity. ConClusion The field of critical urban theory, notes Brenner, “is in a state of disarray, if not outright crisis,” owing to the collapse of the urban as a discrete object for analysis (2019, 308). Brenner argues that distinguishing between city and noncity is “at once necessary, since it is only on this basis that cities’ distinctiveness as such can be demarcated, and impossible,” since there are no criteria for doing this, and the boundaries between city 2 PLANETARY AGGLOMERATION 39 and noncity have themselves broken down heavily since the 1850s (2019, 318). There are many ways to write urban history, and each one has its advantages and pitfalls. In this chapter, I have suggested that our predominant Western model is one of “double urban revolution.” Childe’s Mesopotamia is the first, and Lefebvre and Brenner’s urban planet the second. As a thesis, planetary urbanization makes no sense without the 6000-year period of discrete cities that predates it. The Mesopotamian model frames the “classic” city as a dense, concentrated, differentiated space with a monumental core, a model which is itself by no means representative of all cities, let alone all agglomerations. Lefebvre’s model charts the dissolution and explosion of these discrete urban spaces into a single, massively variegated, planetary urban texture. Emphasizing rupture can promote a view of urban history that is a kind of punctuated equilibrium, with easily identifiable stages (the ancient city, the industrial city, planetary urbanization) and their global diffusion (Gamble et al. 2011, 115). In this chapter, I have suggested an alternative, more inclusive, less stadial, and more unusual history can be written using the concept of agglomeration. This perspective begins with the heuristic proposition that hominins, and particularly Homo sapiens, like many other organisms, like to cluster, aggregate, accumulate and contain. Unlike the structures of termites, wasps, and beavers, whose architecture is undoubtedly extraordinary, the agglomerations built by humans are immensely varied and ultimately of planetary significance. We create agglomerations not only for ourselves, but for our materials, our animals, and our energy supply. But these agglomerations cannot be reduced to a single urban type. It is fair to say that our planet is typified more by agglomeration than by urbanism per se. The agglomeration perspective perhaps offers one way to think our way out of the crisis of urban theory. It differs from the traditional urban history perspective in two clear ways. First, it does not posit a radical break around 6000 years ago marking the conjoined emergence of cities, writing, civilization, and history. Instead, it views the emergence of those agglomerations we call cities as one significant transformation within a far deeper and more heterogeneous history of how humans cluster, aggregate, accumulate, and endure. The emergence of the urban can be viewed for what it was: a multiple event, occurring in different ways in different places; and only one transition among many. Moreover, the emergence of cities did not erase a longer history of living in smaller settlements. There 40 C. OTTER is no single, linear, stadial model of urban development: “no one trend of density and settlement size is applicable to all human communities” (Fletcher 2019, 16). Second, the agglomeration perspective treats all agglomerations as worthy of study. Aside from vastly extending the temporal sweep of traditional urban history, this also opens up other analytical trajectories. LowDensity Urbanization, for example, complicates the original Childean model of urban development and questions whether the implosion/ explosion model of planetary urbanization is unique to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A focus on nonurban agglomerations calls our attention to other histories, such as those of the camp, the village, the ceremonial complex, the farm, the cache, and so on. This approach directs scholarly focus to all those spaces where humans have lived and worked throughout history (Gans 2009, 215). The agglomeration concept is not opposed to the urban concept. Instead, it is a much more expansive and capacious term that allows us to explore the very deep and complex history of how humans have brought themselves and their things together. It is not a history neatly divided into stages or modelled on a graph. The city is, arguably, simply a particular type of agglomeration to which an immense and perhaps excessive amount of cultural and theoretical weight has been attached. Drawing attention to its putative (Childean) birth and (Lefebvrean) death only serves to force our focus towards the vast range of planetary agglomerations, from Palaeolithic home bases to today’s Pearl River Delta. Doing so also invites us to explore the deeper history of human life on earth. 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