This book seeks to synthesize recent archaeological research on early urbanisms from c. 7500 BC to AD 1500 and explore how this may contribute to our understanding of city-making and its historical processes and to the debates concerning urban sustainability. The study is structured in three parts. First, two ‘philosophical and theoretical paradigms’ for the study of ancient cities, ‘scientific realism’ and ‘interpretivism’, are discussed, before ‘an engaged pluralism’ is proposed. Second, 23 case-studies from ancient Western Asia, Europe, the Indus Valley, Africa, and the Americas are examined and compared for their ‘general principles and strategies of urban planning, placemaking, and governance’. These are also assessed according to the modern criteria and aspirations (e.g. walkability, connectivity) and the Gini index for measuring inequality. Finally, lessons are presented thematically for contemporary urban and planning scholarship and practice.

Several arguments are proposed. One is that ‘today’s urban growth’ worldwide is ‘not unprecedented’ (p. 56). Nor are ‘any of popular urbanisms that currently surround us, whether called Smart, Creative, Green, Sustainable, Regenerative, or especially, “New” urbanism’ (p. 57, also pp. 45, 51), new. Most of these, the author argues, were already practised at the early phases of our global urban experiences. Furthermore, diverse early urbanisms and their pathways challenge conventional understanding about the emergence and evolution of cities. Instead of social hierarchy, the author stresses the importance of the first cities’ success in integrating immigrants of diverse cultural backgrounds through the practice of social mixing, which ‘fuelled civic creativity and socio-economic prosperity’ (p. 57). The increase of settlement scale, density, complexity and order is not inevitably linked with social stratification, but could be found in heterarchy. By focusing on ‘general principles and strategies’ from ancient cities through comparative urbanism, the author concludes that we could extract relevant lessons that may help ‘act on a small-scale via seed planning or what the visionary urbanist Jamie Lerner described as “urban acupuncture”’ today ‘in ways that generate greater urban equity, prosperity, and sustainability’ (p. 58).

This study is a worthy synthesis of archaeological research on pre-modern urbanisms, exploring their relevance for cities today. Modern urban and planning theories and models are heavily influenced by urban experiences and perspectives from the industrialized and capitalist West and the Global North in the past 400 years. If time is the ultimate measure of sustainability, the increasing amount of empirical data and case-studies from pre-modern urbanisms and sustainable urban practices will provide valuable insights and stimulate alternative visions. They could also enhance the analytical capacity and the predictive power of modern theories and models. One of the most valuable lessons from the ancients is their ability to integrate their knowledge of local ecological conditions and social composition with their cultural traditions (e.g. ‘narratives’, ‘history, art, iconography, monumentality, and wider “sacred landscapes”’, and their cosmological worldviews with ‘a conservationist ethic’, pp. 43, 52), to create unique, mystic and alluring cityscapes with a host of sensory and cognitive effects. These ‘theatrical exercises’ through planning and placemaking provided ‘affective experiences’ for urban dwellers ‘with a shared sense of purpose and cosmological connectivity’ and ‘made people want to be there and motivated them to travel long distances to do so’ (p. 44).

The ambitious attempt to curate relevant findings from diverse regions within 9,000 years, however, is constrained by the limited book length. The study risks oversimplifying city-making and its processes. In several instances, the ancient practices are merely referred to, without sufficient explanations or illustrations: for example, how the non-hierarchical organization and material design contributed to the longevity of Tres Zapotes (p. 28); also see his discussion about the Maya Lowlands (pp. 34–41). Neither has the study given due attention to how lessons from pre-modern urbanisms could be realistically applied in cities today. Key concepts, for example ‘seed planning’ and how a paradigm of ‘sacred civics’ may serve as an alternative to the ‘smart city’ model (p. 54), need to be elucidated. Keen to draw parallels between ancient and contemporary urbanisms, the study lacks a critical differentiation between the two in nature and scale, for example ‘garden city’, ‘walkable city’ and ‘informality’ (pp. 35–7, 47).

The author displays a proclivity for heterarchical models of governance. He claims that ‘there is…compelling evidence that the more collective the governance of these cities, the more resilient and durable they were’ (p. 52, also pp. 56–7). This can hardly be substantiated by the evidence the author presents, for example, ‘We now have a variety of hierarchical and heterarchical governance systems stacked under the lab table in close to equal numbers’ (p. 52). The claim also raises the question why certain urban settlements evolved from collective models to hierarchical models (pp. 34, 55–6). Furthermore, the existence of hybrid models (pp. 29–32, 34–45) challenges the author’s preference. The author’s tendency to attribute inclusivity, diversity and cosmopolitanism to heterarchical models should be tempered by the evidence that these could also be produced under hierarchical models (p. 41). Instead of projecting ideological preferences, comparative scholarship should critically assess the resilience and vulnerability of both models and investigate factors and processes contributing to the dialectical relationship between the two.

Lastly, cities are complex systems, and analysing their complexity and historical processes requires multi-disciplinary approaches. In highlighting the contributions of archaeological research, this study has overlooked the need for archaeology to be corroborated by other disciplines. Planning deals with more than just physical and spatial layouts. It involves multi-dimensional and multi-objective decision-making processes. Indigenous textual sources are critical for planning history research as they reveal the intentionality of key stakeholders. Though relevant textual evidence is often unavailable from many early urbanisms, ancient Mesopotamia and China are exceptional due to the long-standing written traditions and the large corpora of extant written remains concerning city-making from these regions. Unfortunately, the study has ignored these valuable sources. It has also failed to refer to any archaeological cases from China, where significant proto-urban and early urban settlement sites have been uncovered in the past several decades and could help illuminate our understanding of ancient planning.