Planetary Agglomeration

This chapter uses the concept of agglomeration to rethink and critique existing historical narratives of the urban. An agglomeration is any collection of buildings, hominins, and things. The history of agglomerations begins deep in the Palaeolithic and continues until today. Viewed from this perspective, V. Gordon Childe’s “urban revolution” appears rather less revolutionary than it appears, and it effectively closes the study of more ancient agglomerations from urban history. It ignores the many forms of “low-density urbanism” that are found in, for example, South America and Cambodia, and it also occludes analysis of other types of agglomeration, such as monasteries, camps, and industrial complexes. The chapter also situates Henri Lefebvre’s twentieth-century “urban revolution” within the history of agglomerations. The so-called end of the city is, instead, merely the end of one particular type of agglomeration: the discrete city in its basically Childean form. What Neil Brenner described as “planetary urbanization” is instead “planetary agglomeration,” not a totalizing phenomenon but merely one scale of the technosphere.