Public Space and Cultural Resilience: Urbanism in the Near East in Late Antiquity

The fate of public spaces has loomed large in discussions of what happened to Roman cities in the Near East in Late Antiquity. Much has been made of the way that temples, fora, bathhouses and other amenities went out of use and shops, workshops and domestic premises encroached into squares and streets. Scholars who have seen this as evidence of vitality have made their case in largely economic terms with less attention to culture, thereby implicitly accepting the idea of a privatization of the city and a decline in public space. Ironically, for earlier periods, those same public spaces have often been seen as largely existing for the benefit of the local elite, a veneer of urban splendour that meant little to most inhabitants. This article challenges the simplistic way in which this approach has used ‘publicness’ as a label to be applied, drawing anthropological theory to see ‘publicness’ as a quality to be explored. Taking Scythopolis and Jerash as case studies, it makes the case that public space provided a cushion for absorbing the stresses of economic and political change in Late Antiquity and was, therefore, a key contributor to the resilience of the culture of urban life.