An Agroecological Perspective on Early Urban Forms and their Sustainability in Western Eurasia

Here I frame agroecological expectations for different urban forms, building on Roland Fletcher’s model relating settlement population scale and density. I consider the hypothesis that low-density urbanism accommodates labour-intensive approaches to arable land management despite increasing scale, whereas high-density urbanism imposes lower inputs per unit area (‘extensification’) and a focus on stress-tolerant crops with increasing scale. In this perspective, low-density urbanism is more ecologically flexible and buffered from environmental deterioration than high-density urbanism. But low-density aggregation may be fragile politically, as a negotiated balance between centralization and household autonomy. I consider these expectations in connection with early urban forms in western Eurasia. Evidence for diverse farming strategies despite the constraints of high urban density, together with flexible low-density urban agroecology, offer lessons for future urban farming.