urban revolution

urban revolution, in anthropology and archaeology, the processes by which agricultural village societies developed into socially, economically, and politically complex urban societies. The term urban revolution was introduced by the archaeologist V. Gordon Childe.

Childe identified 10 formal criteria that, according to his system, indicate the development of urban civilization: increased settlement size, concentration of wealth, large-scale public works, writing, representational art, knowledge of science and engineering, foreign trade, full-time specialists in nonsubsistence activities, class-stratified society, and political organization based on residence rather than kinship. He saw the underlying causes of the urban revolution as the cumulative growth of technology and the increasing availability of food surpluses as capital.

Although it was later shown that Childe’s exact criteria were not universal, a suite of basic characteristics do appear to be essential to the development of urban life. For instance, there is general agreement among scholars that one of the necessary—but not sufficient—preconditions for the urban revolution is the potential for the production of storable food surpluses. Other important factors include systems for the exchange and redistribution of goods between specialized and interdependent zones, differential control over productive resources such as land and livestock, and the need for defense against raids or other forms of armed conflict. The relative importance of these and other factors is a matter of debate among those who study the origins of agriculture.

The urban revolution occurred independently in many places and at many times. It seems to have developed first in Mesopotamia, in ancient Sumer, as early as 5000 bp. Cities appeared somewhat later in Egypt. In northern China, the peoples of the Longshan culture were the first to urbanize (about 4500 bp). In South Asia’s Indus Valley, Mohenjo-daro and Harappa became major urban centres during the 5th millennium bp. In the Americas the earliest-known urban cultures include the Olmec in Mesoamerica (about 3100 bp) and the Chavín of Peru (about 2900 bp). Urban centres were developed in North America by the Ancestral Pueblo and Mississippian peoples during the 2nd millennium bp. Early African cities included Great Zimbabwe (1000 bp) and Timbuktu (about 800 bp).