China's ancient water pipe networks show no evidence of a centralized authority
phys.org
phys.org
Reaction: If the site was "walled" (and not somehow occupied after the builders simply abandoned it), then obviously the engineering skills and social organization for large-scale infrastructure construction did exist.
> The level of complexity associated with these pipes refutes an earlier understanding in archaeological fields that holds that only a centralized state power with governing elites would be able to muster the organization and resources to build a complex water management system.
Reaction: That "earlier understanding" sounds very comfortable and convenient, if you are an archaeologist with elitist social biases, or dependent on support from members of a social elite, or who is a member of his society's social elite. Wealthy and powerful people rationalizing that poor and oppressed people somehow "needed" them was already an old trope when the first pyramid was built.
The fact that construction and some planning took place seems to just be evidence that some planning and construction took place.
It's very plausible journalists (including university PR teams) care more about social elitism than the archaeologists which is why it's the HN headline. The archaeologist is just using the only evidence they have which is some pipes, a cemetery, and few remaining structures to extrapolate about the community.
Anyway, with this specific article social stratification is one of those things with little ability to extract a narrative from a single data point, but whose importance emerges when collated with others. And it does sound a bit editorialized for modern narratives, but that's probably not intended by the researchers.
That's why finding their garbage or where they emptied their latrines is often more insightful than finding yet another written record.
Have a look at very old newspapers or magazines. It's almost irrelevant today who won the latest elections or what scandal happened to whom; the old ads are typically the most fascinating part.
Similarly, we have a treasure trove of old clay tablets with complaints, mundane contracts, letters by normal people etc. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%81...
Those are much better at shining a light on how people lived, then the typical drivel about 'important' events we get in most early writing.
Generally, archaeology is interested in knowing information about past societies.
Poors - WTF do I want a pyramid for?
For instance, if you saw evidence of a successful space program you'd assume that it requires government. That's because there are natural difficulties with these enterprises that require some degree of coordination because you have free-rider problems, transit provider problems, etc.
The coordination mechanisms can be a whole bunch of things: we use markets very effectively today, but we also use governments or religions.
And yes, it could be another mechanism but someone has to postulate one such mechanism and find tests that it does not fail.
What's interesting is that the evidence pointed overall to one mechanism and now it points to another.
This sort of low-brow stuff fills people who read this stuff so much. "the elites", god.
I don't think these archaeologists are interested in worshipping society's elites. Maybe hundreds of years ago when you had to be an elite to be an archaeologist.
The trouble with the present Chinese state is the manner in which it governs and the deeply flawed presuppositions about society, the state, and the individual that it is founded on. And so in this sense, it is clear why they would want to emphasize centralization to argue in favor of their particular vision of statehood, a kind of Tsarist, or as Koneczny would say, Turanian domination.
Societies do need a state, but it does not follow that they need something like the crushing behemoth that bears down on China.
It usually means a bureaucratic, meritocratic, and stable administration.
China supposedly developed the first state as a result of constant warfare early on.
A friend once received a 10 email tirade over several hours by making some benign metallurgical observations that some bronze was likely imported, because it contradicted this narrative for a given location.
Since you’re using a British Egyptologist as an example and we’re speaking English let’s stick to Great Britain.
The divine right of kings was considered on a significant decline by the Glorious Revolution in the late 1600s so that’s off by several centuries for the genesis of early/gentlemen archaeology began.
The last witch trial in England was also in the late 1600s so again off by several centuries.
And while you are correct about Howard Carter and women’s voting rights I think it’d be important to note that in 1902 parliament had not even given the right to representation for men who weren’t property owners either which was a significant if not majority of men.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_archaeology
Following a few links - William Harvey (b. 1578, graduated from Cambridge 1593) both conducted excavations at Stonehenge, and was a prominent skeptic of allegations of witchcraft. But it was 70 years after his death that the last "legal" execution for witchcraft was performed in the British Isles (Janet Horne, 1727).
Meanwhile, Wikipedia also credits Robert Filmer (graduated from Cambridge 1604) with being one of the most famous exponents of Divine Right, and notes that that issue was pretty much settled - at least in Britain - by the English Civil War (1642-1651).
Lots of things aren't published because they don't confirm the author's pre-existing narratives. And on the other side, there's lots of cherry-picking for stories and papers that do confirm a hypothesis, even if they're outliers or extremely rare or the author is clearly reaching for their desired hypothesis.
It's very Soviet-esque and should concern us all.
Do you have sources that compare pre/post or show how non-conforming but equally significant news did not make it? (The "because of their prejudices" is the hardest thing to prove, you super-rarely get proof-of-intention in such matters, so just these facts should help the seal the case.)
It's pretty useless to compare the post-blog/social media era journalism with old newspapers to compare biases.
Today we have journalism that will shameless give into their journalists personal biases, without editors calling out their bullshit. Quite the opposite, the editors probably want to dig in hard into the journos biases BECAUSE they feed into the reader's biases which get Twitter/FB clicks.
And they recruit based on that ability too.
Now that journalism is a low paying job that pretty much only attracts upper middle class kids who spent way too long in some University liberal arts degree and can afford the low paying early years of writing enough to get a gig at a REAL journo job at NYTimes type places (the few left where some basic level of fact checking and editorial professionalism is done)... which would be the type of orgs you're comparing it to historically.
...idk I feel like comparing the orgs to historical journalism simply on their adherence to bias/academic+journalistic integrity is waste of time. The job, market, and orgs have changed too much to go one-to-one.
It's more a realization that we only have a hierarchical, male dominated point of view on history and that there's a ton of backfill work to do because of that limitation.
> A friend once received a 10 email tirade over several hours by making some benign metallurgical observations
Welcome to science? If they were meeting in person someone would have bounced a muffin off his head. People take what they're doing really seriously.
The problem was that they conflicted with a political narrative someone wanted. If someone takes that more seriously than following the evidence where it leads, they suck and should get out of science.
Be careful to over generalize. There's a clear distinction in political divides between STEM departments and the humanities. But both even have inner differences. As an example, if you study Country X, you may or may not have certain conditions required to gain access to historical documents that are controlled by said country. Even if you don't live in that country and aren't leaving, those documents are on loan from said country and they control access.
Long story short, stop over simplifying things and google Simpson's Paradox.
The sample size of the people I've interacted with is admittedly very small.
Our union doesn't give the STEM departments much respect. They seem to particularly hate CS and the Economists...
Admittedly my sample size is small, but it gives evidence that we shouldn't aggregate beliefs about people. I'll admit, I'm frequently frustrated when people hear I'm in grad school that they immediately think I want to lick Stalin's boot. Such an interaction happened just yesterday on here where a user called me a communist when I was calling meritocracy a fool's errand. They didn't see the irony and somehow those comments got removed. Rare occurrence here...
CS and Economics are the departments least influenced by left wing ideology from what I've gathered. I assume Math and Physics are similar in that respect.
If we trace the latter back through Unix and Bell Labs, both of these come together in the person of Alexander Graham Bell, though his vision of communications technology infrastructure was, of course, quintessentially top-down.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/barbed-wire-telephone-...
(I'd put programmers in with the biologists, roughly.)
> Excavations at the town's cemetery likewise found no evidence of a social hierarchy in burials, a marked difference from excavations at other nearby towns of the same era.
Maybe these communities had a different social hierarchy structure that didn't leave much of a trace...
Maybe this is a case of the black swan disproving the "all swans are white" hypothesis.
And that social groups form and get their values/norms/behaviors from being explicitly against certain values/norms/behaviors.
According to them, human beings are not instinctively anything. Hierarchy is just one form of social organization. Due to the way history is made it seems to be dominant, but that may or may not be accurate.
It may be that hierarchy is easier to understand when you're dumb as a rock. And as any student of humanity knows, there are plenty of those kinds of people all over the world.
Every human has their own hierarchies. Hierarchies of need, of goals and of peers (this is basically each individual's social hierarchy). But when these people form large groups they are somehow able to blank the slate and not make it hierarchical?
All mammals that form groups instinctively form hierarchies and constantly validate their own and other's position in it (any dog owner will know first-hand). Arguably the first multi-celled organism formed a hierarchy and pretty much every animal with a few Neurons has Serotonin receptors, which can be described as a pathway to continuously re-order its hierarchy of needs.
The only way in which anything social isn't hierarchical is if you look at a tiny tiny cross-section. Otherwise any "egalitarian" and "flat" organization just swapped one way to determine a hierarchy for another. As a case in point, the Liberal model of the 19th century was a project to replace an aristocratic hierarchy (based on attributes that were no longer a good fit) with a competence hierarchy. This was often called egalitarian, but practically it was just a more adapted way of forming a hierarchy.
We are so adapted to hierarchies that 6-month olds understand physical dominance and 3-year olds easily form more complex hierarchies based on social support, resources etc.
edit: Ironically calling other people "rock-dumb" is a way to signal ones own place in the hierarchy.
It's your claim thats is extraordinary. Humans are beholden to a single form of organisation?
I feel that you are so stuck in this mode of thinking that you struggle to see these other forms of organisation despite the fact that they surround you.
Markets dominate the world, they are not a hierarchy.
Social networks form a web, they are not a hierarchy. If you try to organise any data, you will find it cannot be fit into a hierarchy, it is either relational or a graph.
Relationships dominate the world, hierarchy is an illusion
Strong claim.
I don't see what's so unbelievable about our massively unique cognitive ability vs instinct ratio leading us to also have different forms of social organization, or that this could lead to our social organization being detached from instinct almost entirely.
I feel like this whenever people try to do that Lobster argument. "right, but we aren't lobsters."
If you're referring to the whole "alpha" thing, remember that was shown to be invalid and only occurred in captivity. Wild dogs are pretty communal.
Correct. But markets are downstream from hierarchy. The hierarchy determines the access to its rewards, those rewards can then be used to participate in the market, either by directly spending them or by influencing other to do so.
> Social networks
Social networks are most certainly a hierarchy. They distribute rewards proportional to a user's success and prominently show the metrics underlying that success. They are a kind of turbo-hierarchy where your position is always obvious to everyone and changes instantly. If everyone unsubscribes from your YouTube channel everyone will know, but if nobody reads your book you can still derive status from your 1982 bestselling book.
On a more general note, a hierarchy is just a mechanism for aligning an agent's actions towards group goals via the distribution of rewards. I don't know how or why there are so many people that associate it only with the Caste system or hereditary aristocracies. Funnily enough, the hereditary aristocracies were quite adept at changing their hierarchies in response to external events.
Nope, the bazaar does not need the cathedral. Example: "Silent Trade"
Group A would leave trade goods in a prominent position and signal, by gong, fire, or drum for example, that they had left goods. Group B would then arrive at the spot, examine the goods and deposit their trade goods or money that they wanted to exchange and withdraw. Group A would then return and either accept the trade by taking the goods from Group B or withdraw again leaving Group B to add to or change out items to create an equal value. The trade ends when Group A accepts Group B's offer and removes the offered goods leaving Group B to remove the original goods.
I don't mean facebook, I mean real networks of real people.
Relationships do not form hierarchies. Suppose I respect you, and you respect your boss. That does not mean I must respect your boss, maybe he lost to me in poker and I laugh at him.
Even when it comes to social networks, when researchers visualise what's happening on twitter, they don't a hierarchy, they use a graph. Social network analysis uses graph theory.
Even a family tree is not a hierarchy, and not a tree. Ancestry forms a directed acyclic graph.
I'm probably being silly in doing so, but just pointing out that neurodiversity is a thing, and I don't know if you've noticed, but rarely do people simply do what they're told.
A hierarchy is necessary to allows society to adjust rewards to its needs. It isn't necessarily some oppressive force keeping people caged in their circumstances (though a dysfunctional one quickly becomes that, see the CCP aristocracy in China).
If we want more renewable energy installed, we necessarily have to adjust the hierarchy by increasing the rewards (status, money ...) for the entities and people installing it.
I don't quite get how you can reduce it to "someone is above someone". While that is obviously an aspect, you cannot have a society that does anything without having a hierarchy. If you can show me a society with no hierarchies I'm all ears.
I Stil get your point and I sign that hierarchy is mostly needed to archive goals in society. But that most society’s rule on hierarchy is mostly coincidence in my view.
Edit: also interesting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterarchy
Tangent: Violence seems to be the only way to test and validate this hierarchy. That is, we haven’t found a way past it.
Here's an example: The best way to do this is by constantly waging small wars and battles, which the US has done for decades. Now whether the US can wage a drawn-out war is a different matter; that hasn't been tested in a very long time (and for the record, that worries me).
Specifically, Primates species (that's us) very much do so. I've seen texts examining the similarities between Human and Chimpanzees in that regard.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374157357/thedawnofeveryt...
any dog owner will know first-hand
Having trained working dogs and frequently having random mixes of dogs at home when friends go on holiday, dogs do have hierarchies but they are nowhere near as rigid and stratified as human ones can be.
Graeber was a smart guy, but also had a pretty clear, and strong ideological position regarding power structures.
Hierarchy is natural because of natural limitations like "Dunbar's Number". The human brain can effectively track only so many relationships, and at some scale it is advantageous to consolidate them into abstractions like "authority" or "organization".
Without the first, many large scale achievements of the human race would have been more difficult or perhaps impossible. Without the second we would have lost a valuable check on the power of the leaders, and a much reduced propensity to explore and experiment.
So the city wall were also planned and built in a decentralized fashion, all by the community?
James C Scott used to say, that city walls were all designed to keep their own people from running away, sort of like the Berlin Wall, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2ukte-je8k
He also wrote a well known book on the subject: 'against the grain', where this argument is put forth. Wikipedia has a summary of the book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_Grain:_A_Deep_Hist...
There are examples of large scale public engineering works with and without observable central authority throughout archaeological record around the globe. So just "having walls" is not sufficient implication of central authority attempting to control the population.
IMO in the specific example of Against the grain the central authority thesis is pretty solidly framed. But, it does not aim to be a generalizable theory, nor IMO should it be viewed as such.
Now it always possible to argue against the applicability of any rule, there are exceptions to rules. However here you would also need to give some argument, as to why this kind of reasoning could not be applied to this case.
I could understand a community getting behind the construction of a water pipe, a place of worship (or even an operating system for personal computers). However a city wall is a slightly different kind of entity - this one is defining the boundaries of authority, it's a kind of us versus them entity.
Interesting thought and depending on time period and culture I can imagine that. But this is not how city walls were described in classic greek text? (Case in point: Sparta, famously the only greek city without city walls, had tons of slaves) or how cities worked in medieval age (where "city air" freed you from serfdom).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadtluft_macht_frei
Also walls build on defensive terrain (hills) point to protection as its usage. There is the case that walls are useful to tax trade because you can funnel wares only through a gate which doubles as a custom house.
Didn't the Helots live outside the city of Sparta, and mainly worked the fields?
As an aside, the Spartans famously claimed that they were their wall. But I wonder: Spartan construction was very simple, and they despised those with expertise or a craft (the small class of free noncitizens who along with the helots did all productive work). Maybe the truth is that a project with the scope & complexity of a good city wall was simply beyond them. They couldn’t do it, so they told themselves a sour grapes story about how they never wanted a wall to begin with. Just a hunch but I like it.
One of the biggest mistakes that people tend to make is looking at the current population and using it to fill in the gaps in the archaeological record. An example my book gives is Lake Mungo in Australia, where researchers tried to demonstrate that life was much the same in the prehistoric period as it was in the historic period just after British colonisation by proving that grindstones were in use in both the historic period and 15000 years ago, and thus that food sources hadn't changed. This was demonstrated to be wrong by later findings showing changes to technology and food sources over time, particularly in response to conditions of abundance due to higher rainfall during the last ice age.
In this case the factual evidence is (paraphrased) "The village of Pingliangtai had no big houses, no obvious social hierarchy in burials, and a system of ceramic drainage pipes". It's tempting to read this as evidence for having no hierarchy; it's also tempting to think about the obvious ways in which a hierarchy could exist without leaving any record, like a leader who lived one town over, and conclude the opposite; but I think my book would caution against believing either interpretation. Small houses, matching graves, and pipes are the truth and everything else is an educated guess.
This was also a center point in Historiography, and how, when analysing old documents by historians, one needs to be aware of possible bias, not only of the writers, but also of one self.
People would do well not to rely too heavily on this asinine little phrases. They make us feel smart, sure, but they are very simple minded.
Is a structure missing because it didn’t exist, or is it missing because it was made out of useful materials repurposed for something else.
Similarly people dig up the remains of ancient towns because they got buried, if the location had erosion instead there would be nothing obvious left to investigate.
I mean, "lots of houses, all of them quite small and all nearby burials without ceremony" could describe a hierarchy free anarcho-syndicalist utopia. But it could also describe a monastery, a barracks, a ghetto, a town built for subjects of the undiscovered nearby imperial palace or a slave colony, all of which are usually associated with particularly rigid hierarchies. If apartheid era Soweto was buried under a volcano, it would probably look like a settlement organised on relatively egalitarian lines by late twentieth century standards...
When in archeology is that ever true? Frankly, outside of archeology when is that ever true?
That how the Europeans never found the Amazon lost cities, because earlier explorers were looking for cities like European cities.
Wrong mathematically, at least if you care to define A as evidence of B to be the same as P(B|A) > P(B|not A), and intuitively if you think about fairies and other things. But sure, it's right if you instead think of evidence as being the same thing as proof, or an inequality as expressing an insurmountable magnitude. As a way to guard against hubris I can understand the repetition.
The person you're replying to is not using the same meaning of "evidence" as you are. You're meaning it in the strict sense of "holding all things equal, increases probability estimate of perfect bayesian reasoner" while they're using "given actual sociological conditions amongst the advanced monkeys and the eay they interpret words and labels, this should not be given the label Evidence".
I think this is good to keep in mind but let's be real, humans have tended to make hierarchy be one of those things they push backwards in time. So yeah, it's best to be as impartial as possible but in this case, the authors are the ones contradicting the common anachronism.
But it is. It's not _proof_ of absence, but it's certainly _circumstantial_ evidence of absence.
> people tend to make is looking at the current population and using it to fill in the gaps in the archaeological record.
Well, ok, but that's not the same as opposing the principle you cited.
> tempting to read this as evidence for having no hierarchy
You're again switching up arguments. What you're demonstrating is that evidence to the absence of some expression of X is weaker than evidence for the absence of any aspect of X. (And at the same time conceding that absence of evidence is evidence of absence.)
How about "This town built a drainage system on its own, independently from other towns"? Sounds more factual / less wooly.
That water infrastructure was built by a government. Especially in china
I am also not sure if the article's claim is merited - it sounds a little too convenient and I struggle to find the watertight case for it in the article. It could be a case of us simply not knowing either way, and thus should avoid making a strong claim for either A or not(A).
Perhaps because of the law of excluded middle. It's either communal or centralized...
> "Among the prominent scholarly advancements on water and society, the hydraulic origins of state and coercive power proposed and developed by Wittfogel and some other scholars have come under rigorous scrutiny in recent studies in East Asia and beyond..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_empire
This has some present-day relevance, as there's an ongoing battle over privatization schemes for water systems which would tend to place control of water in the hands of the ruling oligarch class, from Enron's Azurix c.2000 up to present-day efforts related to how to rebuild America's aging water infrastructure e.g.
https://www.bondbuyer.com/news/presidential-council-advises-...
Note that this study seems to address flood control more than anything else; hydraulic despotism might have been more of a feature of dry land irrigation-based civilizations.
Imagine how cultures could be built up simply on water management.
Finally a recent culture with a flood story has a funny twist. None of the normal words for flood like events were used to describe the event. Instead there is a a unique word that describes the event and is used in one other location in the whole collection. The second occurrence doesn't describe a flood at all.
I only bring up the ideas becuase I think communal water management is fun and if there are always enough resources could be communal with each member doing their small part for the whole.
The second is just how big water catastrophe was in the older worlds.
I included a link to a reference. (not the reference I wanted the one I could find).
https://reformedreader.wordpress.com/2020/02/21/the-hebrew-t...
Making the claim that the archaeologists are self-evidently wrong here is definitely begging the question. They may well be wrong, but not from logical inevitablity
There is only one UCL researcher, singular, credited in the paper's affiliations section [0]. The other ten authors split between four different Chinese institutions. The UCL press release kind of erases this and feels misleading to me.
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44221-023-00114-4#affiliati...
Earliest ceramic drainage system and the formation of hydro-sociality in monsoonal East Asia
But also the bewilderment of "how could they do this 4000 years ago???". Imagine you didn't have a day job, you didn't have to or couldn't do things for your immediate survival - food is growing, stores are full, everything is fine.
I remember as a child I loved to build canals and the like at the beach, or dam off rivers, or play with clay. Turning play into something useful - like drainage - sounds like it'd come natural to a lot of people. Turning boredom into inventions to make your life easier as well. It's probably one of the main thing that differentiated human from primates, finding solutions to problems.
For the projects for the average peasant to fill their spare time the amazed reaction tends to be the opposite: "how could they not see fit to extend their tiny hovels, build separate quarters for the livestock, put floors on their muddy paths or consider tidying up and not literally shitting on their own doorsteps. Though much of that explanation lies with vastly overestimating how much spare time people who had to make virtually everything they used and owed service to more powerful people actually had...
In fact engineering solutions came long before Newtonian physics. Bill Hammack aka engineerguy has a good video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ivqWN4L3zU
Possibly even on an individual level - that learning to read and write may allow each of us to become more "clever" than if we hadn't. But especially on a societal level, where the ability to read and write has meant that education isn't (as) bottlenecked as when the only learning possible was direct from someone who had learned directly from someone else - even before communication technologies like phones and the internet, the ability to write down scientific research and send it to other non-local researchers sped up a lot of scientific progress. And while people of today may not have an intrinsic better ability of understanding specific things than people of 500 years ago, people in politics do study historical politics (both recent and ancient) to learn from and form new ideas around, so while it's not quite as easy as science to see trees of research where learning/understanding X led to the possibility of also discovering Y, it's surely equally plausible in social subjects that without as much written thinking on the subject, people were also less capable of thinking about it to today's levels?
And that's just thinking about reading and writing, the first thing that popped into my mind. Maybe there's lots of other things that had significant effects too? Maybe diet / available food either had a direct impact on cognitive abilities, or had an impact on lowering the average energy people had leading to lower cognitive function? Etc.
> In China, the tale of the legendary Great Yu’s heroic taming of floods and the subsequent founding of the Xia Dynasty continues to dominate mainstream scholarly narrative on the formation of China’s first state, albeit with great controversy. The importance of state-organized hydraulic projects and elites’ control of water to the evolution of Bronze Age and early imperial societies is also emphasized in recent archaeological studies of water.The drama over King Yu / Xia historicitiy is whether his mythos / achievements was game of telephone. Whether he exists at all and hence whether Xia should be considered as China's first dynasty where ruler successfully tamed water. Whether that comes later is matter of debate, but I don't think anyone has seriously suggested a large culture (i.e. millions of people over vast territory) can self organize huge, sprawling capita projects without centralized authority.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374157357/thedawnofeveryt...
However, if you are intrigued by this, read:
The Dawn of Everything
Graeber & Wengrow
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374157357/thedawnofeveryt... or https://www.amazon.com/Dawn-Everything-New-History-Humanity/...
Great recommendation
Reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26576528
which I will modestly (/s) say if you drill into the link and think about what it's saying, will possibly be the coolest thing you read on HN today imho.
You can see the same "ad hoc"-ratic development "philosophy" at work in Chinese cities today. A very unique aesthetic take on "sprawl". Taipei, definitely has this: not just on a macro level (arbitrary street / burrough layout, overpasses & sidewalks and lack thereof), but on a micro level (placement of stairs, entrances / exits in buildings, consideration (or lack thereof) given to pedestrian flow).
In my experience there's pockets of order amid the rampant chaos, like the more recent well-to-do (read: often too expensive for almost everyone) fancy apartment developments in Taipei, Shanghai (or there, also the old French Concession), etc. Yet even there sometimes they only look nice (good finishing & production value) but are still unplanned (lack of human considerations for access, flow and comfort). But overall it's very much like how an organism would grow. Like coral. I'm sure the Chinese have some kind of pithy phrase to describe this kind of style of accreted urban development without any adherence seemingly to centrally mandated planned urban design standards and codes.
In my experience, the one exception is Hong Kong, which has commendable amounts of order. The design of the subway stations is particularly notable for rational, sensible and practical consideration given to pedestrian flow. There's very few choke/congestion points because opposing streams of flow are clearly delineated and often routed (albeit sometimes circuitously) away from each other. Very well done, HK!
Sometimes what looks to be chaotic, is actually ordered underneath (albeit possessing an organic order): like Jiufen in Taipei, or dense backstreets of Tokyo (both inspirations for the Neo Tokyo in Akira). But mostly, these Chinese-style chaotic urban behemoths are just that: seemingly unplanned chaotic development without order.
I'd be interested to compare this to the particular "flavor" of Sprawl you see in both more structured, a la, Paris, and less structured, a la Sydney, non-Chinese cities.
> You can see the same "ad hoc"-ratic development "philosophy" at work in Chinese cities today.
First, it was 4000 years ago when the Chinese culture was completely different.
Other than that, it's still not entirely accurate. If anything, the planning is very diverse or bumps between extremes in China. You can check out Beijing or any historically important town with walls on the map. Most of those cities are carefully designed in square shape, and every important building is facing towards the south. Things are intentionally majestic. Form over practically sometimes.
Most of the examples you have mentioned are southern cities, which are probably heavily influenced by the Suzhou garden design. The most famous Suzhou garden is the Humble Administrator's Garden [0]. The idea of the garden is to use a lot of obstacles and irregular shapes to segment zones. In terms of practicality, it creates more "rooms" instead of wasting space with empty squares. In terms of aesthetics, it creates discoverability where every turn provides a different scene. But most importantly, it's carefully non-majestical to not offend the emperor - the holy ruler of the absolute monarchy (who can easily execute any a whole clan at will without justification). You can also feel the uneasiness even in the garden's name itself.
But indeed, a lot of Chinese cultured towns are chaotic by nature. My personal take is regions like Europe and Japan with feudal backgrounds are sufficiently decentralized with proper hierarchy, making every piece of land plan things for themselves, the lords, the church, and the guilds can design and interact back and forth. However, China is purely top-down and lacks organizations between the imperial court and individual levels (the feudal system was brutally wiped out 2000 years ago and made very few unsuccessfully comebacks). Any non-imperial organizations like mansions guides are highly discouraged as those are seen as potential threats. Chinese society in modern terms is a "flat organizational structure", and its people are just individuals (clans and families are often forced apart, and shuffled between lands). As a result, we can see towns as official projects are built in orthodox ways, which are the rest are littered with ad-hocness.
Actually, in the South, there were also quite some fortresses that were well-designed and typically resided in difficult terrains such as Tulou [1] (man, they look like Apple Park). Because they were large clans living in remote provinces, the imperial court had a hard time dealing with them so often the court didn't bother.
> In my experience, the one exception is Hong Kong
As a guy who spends most of my time living in Beijing, my first impression of Hong Kong is its chaotic (in a good way, I love it). You probably know Hong Kong is the most important reference for those cyberpunk concept artworks. Singapore, IMO, is more well thought out beforehand in terms of urban planning.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humble_Administrator%27s_Garde... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujian_tulou
> But indeed, a lot of Chinese cultured towns are chaotic by nature.
See we agree? :) I told you I was right. Thanks for sharing your perspective, anyway! I learned something about the background, it's good to know! :)
> First, it was 4000 years ago when the Chinese culture was completely different.
I'm saying, in this way, it wasn't.
> ... Things are intentionally majestic. ...
The majesty you mention accounts for imperial buildings, right? Those are indeed well designed. But that is not how "the people" live. It is not the culture overall. It is a testament and symbol to an ideal and a governing system. But outside of these glorious compounds, it's Chinese culture's inherent urban chaos, not the Emperor's aesthetics, that reigns. No?
A point you seem to support in ...
> ... it's carefully non-majestical ...
This is very interesting. Thank you for that education. It has added to my knowledge and perspective! Very interesting.
Also, but I wouldn't really consider Shanghai a southern city, would you? I think there are plenty of undeniably northern cities that would be chaotic: there's so many, pick one--Tianjin? The downtown and main places are gorgeous for sure, but what about the suburban places, the crowded developments and residential skyscrapers, is the urban design of the streets around these places highly ordered? How about the subway? I don't know. My bet is no, tho, based on my extensive experience in Chinese cities--but in truth, I really do need to collect additional experience with more of the very many mainland cities I have yet to visit!
> ... But indeed, a lot of Chinese cultured towns are chaotic by nature ...
I think to be honest there you need to say cities not towns, to not artificially misrepresent that this ad-hoc chaoticness is only a provincial thing, not something seen in the bit cites, when in my experience it very much is so! It permeates the very fabric of Chinese culture (rich fabric to be sure, but this thread cannot be denied). You seem to provide extensive additional support for this idea by your invocation of the deliberately a-majestic Suzhou Garden, and the non-threateningly 'flat org chart' of Chinese society, both very illuminating for me to hear (but also reinforcing of my aforementioned contemplation upon my extensive experience).
Yeah. I was trying to explain why the chaotic parts are there and there are quite some notable exceptions.
> I think to be honest there you need to say cities not towns
TBH I was very hesitant to pick the word town or city or any others because in my mind it was the generic "城/Cheng" in Chinese. I find the nouns are often culturally specific as cities, castles, churches, and towns are European-oriented and more specific than "Cheng".
> Also, but I wouldn't really consider Shanghai a southern city, would you?
It's a southern city. Geographically speaking, China was divided by the Yangtze and the Yellow River into three 1/3 parts. Shanghai is located on the Yangtze so it's in the South. The south/north divider is the Qin Mountain range and Huai River line [0]. That's the line where the culture, climate, and pretty much everything differs drastically.
> pick one--Tianjin
Well, that's a sophisticated example that I happen to know about (I just realized there's even a wiki but in Chinese [1]):
- Almost every taxi driver in Beijing who has been to Tianjin told me how they got so frustrated with the road system. It's not hard to guess, since the roads are around the river and not as perpendicular as Beijing.
- But the old Tianjin was a squared town before the Western countries moved in. The town resides to the west of the river, exactly within today's north, east, south, and west roads (Dong, Xi, Nan, and Bei Malu). In the center it's the drum tower. Outside there were walls and moans and all that.
- So it didn't appear to be particularly chaotic to me at that time, at least there were quite some designs as you can see. And it wasn't nearly as important historically until the West started to settle in China. At least compared to Xi'an, Luoyang, Kaifeng, Zhengzhou, etc.,
- Later, the Western countries set up settlements along the river both on the east and west banks. The city started to grow. That's where the messy road system comes from.
> but what about the suburban places
But yeah, many suburban areas are a mess. While I kind of agree there is some chaotic nature, most culture does that without professional modern urban planning departments. Slums are very, very common outside the first world. Back in the old days in Europe, slums were also easy to be seen outside cities and castles.
Another factor is Tianjin was way messier decades ago. In 1976, there was a great earthquake and Mao died. A lot of the buildings were destroyed or damaged, and a lot of people would then rebuild their houses without proper knowledge and skills. Most of those were lost in the cultural revolution. People would randomly put together bunker-like stuff in random places and call it home. The same situation happened in Beijing - you can find Hutongs in Beijing are very chaotic, which should have been less so before the cultural revolution. Here's a video about the Beijing side of the story [2].
> It permeates the very fabric of Chinese culture
Honestly, I'm not very sure of it. On one hand, it's indeed chaotic as we can often see. There are also Chabuduo (good enough) and Meibanfa (there's nothing can be done) cultures. On the other hand, the Chinese also like to pursue regularity such as a lot of things have to be made in the shape of squares and circles. Numbers in designs and shapes have to be "stable" as 4 and 8. Those are not just for nobles, normal people do care and sometimes OCD about that, too.
I don't know man, if anything, Chinese culture is full of contradictions and confusion as always :)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qinling%E2%80%93Huaihe_Line [1] Wiki on old Tianjin (Chinese version only, unfortunately) https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hk/%E5%A4%A9%E6%B4%A5%E8%80%81%E... [2] https://youtu.be/3uo47m-1gQ4
The local government was too slow so the road network was entirely built by companies opening factories there. They just created a road they needed, then other companies added to it, etc.
It actually worked out pretty well considering nobody was regulating or designing it as a whole.
Nature has a journal about all things water. From their website:
> Nature Water covers all aspects of research that are connected to this evolving relationship between society and water resources. We publish in the natural sciences (primarily Earth and environmental science), in engineering (including environmental, civil, chemical and materials engineering), and in the social sciences (economics, human geography and sociology, among other disciplines)
...anthropology/history is another topic covered here I guess. Something about this feels odd
Presumably in a smaller society with abundant water, you can wing your pipes because it doesn't really matter. A larger society in a desert? Well, that's way different. Inefficiencies add up too much.
The real trouble is people who just believe in strong rules when really, you should be looking at your specific situation and using your brain.
1. You can't have Anarchistic societies without advanced technological infrastructure, large production surpluses, group communication etc.
2. You can't have Anarchistic societies with the advent of technology, only primitive Anarchism.
This story seems to help undermine a little of both :-)
I'm not sure about either of these arguments. The most robust arguments, as far as I can tell, are those relative to common goods (where you can't exclude access to goods/services) and externalities. The book tries to answer most of these questions. While I'm not entirely sold (at lest not yet) I recommend the book. It's not a rant about the Government, instead it goes quite in depth by proposing what anarco-institutions might look like and what kind of society those institutions are likely to produce by looking at historical cases (like Medieval Iceland) and parts of the current system.
So how can the authors assume there was no government or central planning? There was clearly some kind of planning! Otherwise, the network of pipes would have been inconsistent.
Clearly this society had different values and priorities that many of the societies that we live in!
I think the lesson should be that we don't need win-lose economics to handle critical infrastructure.
Aside: The Inca had a "command economy" that operated in a very similar manner to communism. They had no poor people. Hunger (as far as we know) didn't exist. But the society fell very quickly when the Spanish arrived.
you-help-me-I-help-you attitude is staple of small, tight knit communities since forever. Can't exactly build barn single handed easily.
Your family is your basic, natural decision making structure. Then your knowledge and know-how was seemlessly transferred between generations.
It's not success of decentralisation but of natural unity of bonds and shared common goals.
One for all, all for one. One as all, all as one.
For 5000 it would still be workable.
What intricate organisation structure, except religious cult rules, did Greek Polis as Athens have?...
surprised phys.org is publishing this rubbish.
Paper itself has:
>In China, the tale of the legendary Great Yu’s heroic taming of floods and the subsequent founding of the Xia Dynasty continues to dominate mainstream scholarly narrative on the formation of China’s first state
There must be pressure on academics to hew to a "we are an ancient civilization" narrative.