A Long History of Home-bases, Huts, Houses, Villages, Towns, Cities and Megacities

This review traces the lengthy record of human habitation on our planet. So long has the process of homemaking been that it includes constructions made by prehuman ancestors, upwards of a million years ago. Efforts towards the building of shelters and the founding of settlements have involved lengthy periods of relative stasis, punctuated by leaps to new and more complex systems. The first home-bases were simple fireplaces, around which our ancestors gathered, prepared food, and made tools. During the Pleistocene, occasional vestiges of curvilinear huts are found, and during the Late Glacial period, substantial groups of houses appear on the plains of Eurasia. The transition to sedentary life was accomplished by Natufian hunter-gatherers in the Levant, near the end of the Ice Age. There followed the establishment of village life across the Middle East by Pre-Pottery Neolithic farmers in the early Holocene, and the first cities around 3,500 BCE in southern Iraq and south-western Iran. Urban systems had spread across the globe by 3000 BCE, from China, to Peru in the Americas. The Classical cities of the Mediterranean developed regular urban grid plans in the fifth century BCE and introduced new types of civic amenities. In terms of complexity and size, the ancient city reached its zenith in imperial Rome. Occasionally, premodern cities such as Angkor became much larger than it in area through the establishment of low-density residential populations. New sources of energy were unleashed by the technological revolution of the nineteenth century that utterly transformed the city. In short order, they led to the mega-conurbations that currently spread over large tracts of the earth. This review considers factors of community interaction and communication that have both retarded and permitted breakthroughs in settlement strategies through time. It also examines the idea of non-verbal syntactical grammars that govern the patterning of human settlements, and the relative contributions of adventitious organic growth versus deliberate planning and retention of community ideals in settlement planning.