Planetary Agglomeration: Scale, Deep Time, and the Urban Question

TRANSITION Lecture with Chris Otter, Ohio State University

The field of urban studies has always struggled to define its object. This paper explores what happens if we use a different concept – agglomeration – instead of that of the urban. Three consequences follow.

First the term agglomeration encompasses a vast range of other assemblages which are characterized by dense clusters of capsular structures that persist through time: not just towns and cities but also camps, temples, detention centres, shopping malls, and warehouse complexes.

Second, an agglomeration perspective has consequences for our understanding of deep time. Historians and archaeologists no longer need to identify a “first city.” Instead, settlements existing thousands of years before putatively “first cities” are brought into focus: those “special places,” “super sites,” “persistent places,” and “technocomplexes” of the Paleolithic.

Third, agglomeration is regarded as one scale or layer of a larger structure or hyperobject: the technosphere. This paper provides a synthetic sweep of the history of agglomerations, beginning with the deep human past and extending to today’s planetary agglomeration.

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