Intercultural Urbanism by Dean Saitta

Author:Dean Saitta [Saitta, Dean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, Urban, Architecture, Urban & Land Use Planning, Business & Economics, Urban & Regional, Development, Sustainable Development, Political Science, Public Policy, City Planning & Urban Development, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Archaeology, Human Geography, Education, Higher, General, Science
ISBN: 9781786994127
Google: 63z1DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
Published: 2020-07-23T04:18:01+00:00

The Gini coefficients calculated by Hutson for Chunchucmil average around 0.58, suggesting economic inequalities between households. As noted, the average Gini for a number of other ancient Mayan cities is 0.53. These Gini values are in line with the values that have been generated for modern cities including those marked by strong residential segregation of people based on wealth. For example, Chicago’s Gini coefficient hovers around 0.52, St. Louis’s around 0.50, and New York City’s around 0.54. However, Chunchucmil’s neighborhoods departed from the modern norm in that they mixed residents at different income levels. It is also likely that the neighborhoods mixed occupations and perhaps even ethnicities. But interestingly enough, all households at Chunchucmil appear to have enjoyed roughly equal access to important commercial goods like salt and obsidian. These commodities were widely distributed across house lots in every neighborhood at Chunchucmil. This suggests that regional commerce linked all of Chunchucmil’s households, despite their inequalities and differences of kin and culture, into overlapping and interdependent social networks or, perhaps, what Hutson and his co-authors call ‘cooperative associations’ (Magnoni et al. 2014:167).

Like Caracol, Chunchucmil’s long-term prosperity may have depended upon equitable inclusion of its citizens, however unequal they were in other ways, into the urban and wider regional economy. Evidence for this is the extension of the practice of albarrada construction in the urban core outwards to the city’s residential periphery. Here, there was no particular need for residents to delineate house lots with stone walls. Yet they did it anyway, perhaps as a symbolic marker of shared identity (and a shared urban imaginary) with those living closer to the city center. If so, residents at Chunchucmil may have participated in a shared materiality akin to the veneers that we have already described for Mohenjo-daro and Caracol.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.