Roland Fletcher will give a lecture series, containing three lectures and three discussion-seminars during his stay at UrbNet.

Title of lecture series: Material Behaviour and the Dynamics of Settlement Trajectories from the Upper Palaeolithic to the Present.

- Lecture 1 (11 June 2019): Mobile Communities and the Transition to Sedentism - 15th to 3rd millennium BCE.

- Lecture 2 (18 June 2019): The Transition to Agrarian Urbanism - 4th millennium BCE to 1st millennium CE.

- Lecture 3 (25 June 2019): The Transition to Industrial Urbanism - 2nd millennium CE. 

Abstract

The Transition to Agrarian Urbanism - 4th millennium BCE to 1st millennium CE

The transition to agrarian-based urbanism is conceptualised in very varied terms, predominantly focused on socio-economic interpretations. These are both globally generalised and committed to regionally unique perspectives. Comprehending the phenomenon is complicated by the degree to which the category “urban” is now defined in many diverse, contextually unique regional terms.

The Interaction-Communication matrix redefines the settlement phenomenon inherent to the conventionally identified “First Civilisations” in material terms, places them in the context of long-antecedent, material prerequisites, decouples the phenomenon from economic transformations and provides a consistent analytic milieu for engaging with the differences between regionally unique and deeply insightful socio-economic perspectives. The approach also enables low-density, dispersed settlement patterns to be coherently integrated into a globally consequential model of settlement growth trajectories and enables appraisal of the divergent outcomes of compact and dispersed trajectories and their associated networks.