Urban planning is something that we as humans have done for hundreds of years and yet it didn’t get its formal name until a few years ago. Luckily, due to urban planning becoming a profession, I am now able to study it. In one of my courses CRP 165, we often learn about many different topics regarding urban planning but something that really stood out to me was two concepts that were presented. The concepts were, “Did a surplus of food come before cities or were cities around before surplus of food?”  Initially, it was thought that a surplus of food came before cities. This idea was brought forward by scientists and anthropologists alike. This is a very wide and popular belief that we believe that cities came about.

 

Let’s break it down: In the beginning, we were hunters and gatherers. In short, hunters and gatherers lived in small groups that consisted of a few dozen. These groups had hunters and gatherers. Each person had one of two jobs. These jobs were very essential to their survival. Hunters were important as they often would bring a bigger reward, calories. Calories were essential as they helped maintain stamina which in turn helped groups live longer and hunter for longer periods of time. Gatherers were equally as important because, though the hunters brought bigger reward hunters also were less successful than gatherers. Gatherers had to learn fairly quickly which plants were edible in order to keep groups from dying of starvation. 

 

In the article, Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherer Societies Emma Groeneveld, a history major, explains the importance of gatherers, “…the plant diet of the people living at Gesher Benot Ya‘aqov, Israel, some 780,000 years ago. A stunning 55 kinds of food plants were found there that include seeds, fruits, nuts, vegetables, and roots or tubers. The diversity shows these people had a good knowledge of which edible things could be found in their environment...” Farming was very transformational in human development as it met the means of the beginning of human civilization as we know it. In his article The First Farmers: Where Did They come From and Where Did They Go? Peter Williamson states, “The introduction of agriculture had an enormous social and genetic impact. Farming led directly to a shift from nomadic to sedentary populations, and eventually gave rise to early civilizations where food security enabled social activities that were free from the daily imperative to find food.” 

 

Instead of living nomadic lives as hunters and gatherers, our ancestors have moved onto farming. Due to people being able to grow large amounts of food, they no longer had to survive day to day and their time spent hunting was now used to create larger communities, eventually leading to cities.

 

On the flip side, Jane Jacobs, a writer, and activist propose that cities came first and helped in the process of food surplus. Though Jacob’s didn’t have any formal forms of education regarding urban planning, she was an admirer of urban planning and loved the complexities of it. In her book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, she brings forward the idea that challenges the traditional belief that food surplus leads to cities. Due to their social nature people in these cities were able to come up with ideas of how to cultivate larger amounts of food at once, the most efficient way to cultivate and how to save it for longer periods of time. Initially, this idea was thought to be preposterous by urban planners, scientists, as well as anthropologists but is it really all that out there? Since scientists cannot say how exactly cities were formed or how ancient civilizations farmed the idea is now up in the air.

 

This topic was particularly interesting to me because, in not only urban planning but also in anthropology, we are being taught that cities were able to develop primarily due to the fact that there was enough food to keep people from dying of starvation. Jane Jacobs’s idea completely challenges everything we’ve been taught as urban planners and her idea really makes me think. I personally still believe in the traditional belief of the beginning of cities, “food surplus lead to cities”. Referring back to my lessons in anthropology, it was taught that our ancient ancestors’ struggled day to day life trying to survive by hunting and when they finally began farming was when population growth began happening and we learned that populations stabilize when populations are no longer dying at early ages and are living for longer periods of time.

 

Now a question to all my fellow urban planners out there and to those of whom are interested in urban planning, what idea do you believe to be true; the traditional urbanism belief or the one proposed by Jacobs?

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Bibliography

• Groeneveld, Emma. “Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherer Societies.” Ancient History Encyclopedia, Ancient History Encyclopedia, 6 Dec. 2016, https://www.ancient.eu/article/991/prehistoric-hunter-gatherer-societies/.

• Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Random House, 1961.

• Williamson, Peter. “The First Farmers: Where Did They Come From and Where Did They Go?” International Milk Genomics Consortium, Oct. 2016, https://milkgenomics.org/article/first-farmers-come-go/.