City and Country: The Historical Evolution of Urban-Rural Systems
begins with a simple assumption: every human requires, on average,
two-thousand calories per day to stay alive. Tracing the
ramifications of this insight leads to the caloric well: the
caloric demand at one point in the environment. As population
increases, the depth of the caloric well reflects this increased
demand and requires a population to go further afield for
resources, a condition called urban dependency. City and Country
traces the structural ramifications of these dynamics as the
population increased from the Paleolithic to today. We can
understand urban dependency as the product of the caloric demands a
population puts on a given environment, and when those demands
outstrip the carry capacity of the environment, a caloric well
develops that forces a community to look beyond its immediate area
for resources. As the well deepens, the horizon from which
resources are gathered is pushed further afield, often resulting in
conflict with neighboring groups. Prior to settled villages,
increases in population resulted in cultural (technological)
innovations that allowed for greater use of existing resources: the
broad-spectrum revolution circa 20 thousand years ago, the birth of
agricultural villages 11 thousand years ago, and hierarchically
organized systems of multiple settlements working together to
produce enough food during the Ubaid period in Mesopotamia
seven-thousand years ago-the first urban-rural systems. As cities
developed, increasing population resulted in an ever-deepening
morass of urban dependency that required expansion of urban-rural
systems. These urban-rural dynamics today serve as an underlying
logic upon which modern capitalism is built. The culmination of two
decades of research into the nature of urban-rural dynamics, City
and Country argues that at the heart of the logic of capitalism is
an even deeper logic: urbanization is based on urban dependency.
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