What urban design tells us about democracy

Archaeologists can use the design of ancient temples, plazas, and cities to piece together the story of how a place was governed.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:20Flora Lichtman?

  Hey there. This is Flora Lichtman, and you're listening to Science Friday. Today, we are hitting the streets, the dusty, ancient streets, looking for clues about the origins of democracy. Researchers writing in the journal Science Advances explain how the design of ancient temples, plazas, cities can tell us how a civilization was governed. So what does ancient architecture reveal about democracy? And do the democratic design principles hold true today? Here to chip away at some of these big questions is Dr. Jake Holland-Lulowitz, anthropologist and assistant professor at the Pennsylvania State University. Hey, Jake, welcome to Science Friday.

• 1:02Speaker 02

  Hi, guys. Thanks so much for having me.

• 1:04Flora Lichtman?

  What does democratic design or democratic architecture look like?

• 1:10Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. I don't know if we can call the architecture democratic, but it certainly reflects ethos in our institutions, which themselves are democratic. And so when we're thinking of democracy, I think what we're thinking of are places that are inclusive, that can hold a lot of people, that are designed to facilitate deliberation and conversation.

• 1:38Flora Lichtman?

  Give me some examples from the sites that you looked at.

• 1:41Speaker 02

  Sure. At least where I work, in southeastern North America, we're looking for big, huge, round structures. They're much bigger than a house, right? They can fit more than one important family. Maybe they can fit everyone in the village. Maybe they can fit family representatives from lots of villages coming together. And the shape, the circle, is really important, too, because when you're sitting in a circle... And we find evidence for benches around the walls. You can see everyone else, right? No one is necessarily front and center, right? You're not, it's not like a classroom where all of my students are, are looking at me. And I'm telling them stuff that they, they maybe need to know.

• 2:27Speaker 02

  But it really reflects basic logic of decision making in that deliberation and consensus being more important than top down action.

• 2:39Flora Lichtman?

  What about plazas or like the big piazza? How do you read that?

• 2:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, plazas are, are, are really interesting. And I think they're really complex too, because they can serve, I think, lots of different purposes. I work on societies who are the descendants of the Muskogee Creek Nation. And square grounds are, you know, centered to social and political life. They're where people gather to reaffirm, you know, relationships and strengthen bonds between people and, and, and eat great food. And looking at things like the size of plazas, again, can tell us, you know, who's meant to be in that space? How many people are meant to get together?

• 3:28Speaker 02

  You know, is the whole village around the plaza or is the plaza associated maybe with a palace? Right? Which could maybe tell us something different about what the purpose of this open space is, right?

• 3:40Flora Lichtman?

  Yeah, I know I'm getting into the dusty details here, but like, is it a correlation? Like you see, you know, round buildings and open plazas that are not associated with a palace with democracies? Or is it that you're like, oh, these kinds of spaces tell us that there was, there were democratic principles at play?

• 4:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think they certainly

• 4:07Speaker 02

  are a great feature for us to identify and begin as archaeologists, begin to interpret these societies as more collectively or democratically oriented. You know, on their own, they don't tell us everything, but I think they're really great hints.

• 4:25Flora Lichtman?

  And what about on the flip side? Is there architecture that suggests autocratic government?

• 4:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I think it looks like, number one, it looks like the absence of those kind of big spaces that can fit a huge percentage of the population. And is the prominence and centrality of palaces. It may be things like the wildly unproportional size of a ruler's house compared to everyone else in the society's house. Those are the kinds of things we might look for to start making an argument that maybe this isn't the most collective or bottom-up decision-making system that we have going on here.

• 5:14Flora Lichtman?

  How would the White House read?

• 5:16Speaker 02

  This is interesting. I was actually thinking about this this morning. Because I think if we just found the White House, we might say, well, actually, we might say a few things. We might say, oh, the guy who lives there, he has a lot of power, right? And this is not unlike how archaeologists have approached the past in many ways, right? We find a big pyramid or a huge palace, maybe, and we're like, wow, they have a lot of power, right? But once we start maybe looking broader and contextualizing this, we find like, hey,

• 5:56Speaker 02

  right down the road from this White House, there's actually a much larger building and it has way more seats. And this is the same where I work in the southeast, where, okay, we have maybe earthen mounds where there may be important people living on top of them. But you know, right next to the mound, there's a big round structure. And so we find, with the White House, obviously, we know about our system of governance. We know it's based on checks and balances and these different arms of the government. And we actually find those same kinds of checks and balances in the archaeological record, too.

• 6:38Flora Lichtman?

  Yeah, in theory. In theory, that's.

• 6:41Speaker 02

  In theory, yeah.

• 6:43Flora Lichtman?

  Okay, so you looked at over 30 places. Did you have big take homes about the origins of democracy or how it was practiced?

• 6:51Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, I think so, yeah. And I think. Maybe for a lot of people in other disciplines and even the public, I think what we found is really exciting and really fun, and I think really hopeful, too.

• 7:02Flora Lichtman?

  Hit us. Hit us with some hope.

• 7:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, we found that, you know, democracy has really deep roots, right? It's not a modern invention. You know, the Greeks may have come up with particular kinds of institutions and particular forms of collective governance, but all over the world, societies everywhere have figured this out, right? We find examples, at least in our paper, for democracies in Asia, democracies in North America, democracies in Mesoamerica and Central America. And alternatively, we find autocracies in all those places, including places like Europe, right?

• 7:45Speaker 02

  And I think we could take this farther, and in the paper we cite this quote from Applebaum, where they note that, you know, autocracy isn't a genetic trait. It's culture and language and religion. They don't produce autocracy or democracy, right? No person or nation is condemned, you know, to autocracy just by, you know, their nature of geography or religion. And the flip side of that is that no nation is guaranteed democracy, right? We have to work really hard at it, but I think the archaeological record shows that people have always worked really hard at this and have been really successful at it.

• 8:27Flora Lichtman?

  Well, which came first? I mean, does design for, you know, people being in a collective lead to democracy, or does democracy determine design?

• 8:37Speaker 02

  I think the design is purposeful, and it's meant to facilitate an idea of a system. I approach these kinds of things as, you know, why was this structure built? Like, what was happening at this time? Like, why is it now? Where I work in the southeastern United States, you know, the earliest council houses are, we've dated them. In central Georgia, and they seem to pop up at a time and begin to be used at a time when there's migration happening. So you have immigrants coming into this

• 9:18Speaker 02

  region from far away. And the argument that I've been trying to make and making is that council houses and deliberative collective governance was a response. Like, that was the solution to now living with new families and people with different ideas. You know, instead of defaulting towards the easy, you know, the quote unquote, easy route of autocracy, they decided, like, we're going to, you know, build new institutions as a response to immigration and population growth and living with diverse peoples in our community. And the way we're going to make sure that this works, and the way that we're going to be able to quell tension

• 10:03Speaker 02

  is through deliberation and consensus.

• 10:07Flora Lichtman?

  Hmm. That's a hopeful note to end on.

• 10:10Speaker 02

  I, yeah, like I said, I like to come at a lot of this as like, very hopeful.

• 10:14Flora Lichtman?

  Look, I'm never going to look at a circular building the same way. So, thank you.

• 10:19Speaker 02

  Excellent.

• 10:21Flora Lichtman?

  Dr. Jay Collin Lulowitz is an anthropologist and assistant professor at the Pennsylvania State University. Coming up after the break, what do modern spaces tell us about ourselves?

• 10:39Speaker 03

  Support for Science Friday comes from the William K. Boas Junior Foundation.

• 10:47Flora Lichtman?

  Moving from ancient cities to modern ones, what role does design play in democracies today? Do those ancient design principles hold true?

• 10:58Flora Lichtman?

  Joining me now is Dr. Jeff Howe, Head of the Architecture Department at the National University of Singapore. Hey Jeff, thanks for talking today.

• 11:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, thank you. Nice to join.

• 11:08Flora Lichtman?

  Do you feel like the role of public space in democracy has changed over time? I mean, how do you think about it now as compared to what we were talking about just thousands of years ago?

• 11:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I think the role of public space is still critical to democracy.

• 11:29Speaker 04

  If we look at how democracy work, right? So people have to express their opinion. They need to gather, they need to communicate, need to engage in debate. They need to kind of make their presence known to the state. And so public space still play that traditional role. But it's just that public space now does not just include the actual physical space. It also includes the online forum, the social media. So there's a whole other realm of public space that is exists kind of virtually

• 12:09Speaker 04

  online, on your device. And they are, today, they are just as powerful as the actual physical space. And in some way, it became even more kind of prevalent in terms of how people talk to each other, how they are connected to each other. So it has become more complicated. And also, the technology has allowed authoritarian state to monitor people in the public space, right? Oftentimes, space come with surveillance. So even though the space may be there, people are not able to gather. And so we're at a moment, interesting kind of historical moment

• 12:54Speaker 04

  in which we're experiencing the

• 12:58Speaker 04

  So this disconnect between space and what they're meant to perform. And then how democracy work both in physical realm and in the online kind of realm. And that's the whole kind of purpose of kind of public space become sort of diminish.

• 13:18Flora Lichtman?

  Well, what's that like for an architect? Because I assume you are interested in the physical.

• 13:22Speaker 04

  Oh, absolutely. I think the physical space is still absolutely important.

• 13:29Speaker 04

  And we have seen in recent protest movement that the actual gathering still matters. But a lot of times those gatherings are either facilitated by social media, your digital device. And also at the same time, the same kind of digital infrastructure can also stop people from gathering. So for example, the state can just shut down the internet and that's stop people from communicating with each other. And so things are more complicated today.

• 14:10Flora Lichtman?

  When you're traveling, can you read a new place to figure out any clues about the values of that, you know, of that society?

• 14:21Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think you can look at how your elaborate buildings are, which is an indication of how the society kind of value the importance of that particular building. If you go to Tokyo, obviously, there's a history of the imperial presence. You know, the center of the city is still the palace, right? So you can read into the history of the city in terms of what it used to be, you know, before it became a democracy. You can travel to Beijing, Tiananmen Square. You can understand the history of the place. And then, at the same time, the square is still there.

• 15:05Speaker 04

  But it's not a functioning democracy, right? These places do tell stories. And stories from the past, from the present, and where things are going. They're really fascinating to look at.

• 15:19Flora Lichtman?

  That's so fascinating. I mean, what are the modern, in modern autocratic societies, is there telltale architecture? Is it just cameras? What do you look for?

• 15:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it's hard to tell now. So the line has blurred between, you know, what the, so the appearance and how spaces actually function, right? So if you go to a Chinese city, for example, you know, it's just as vibrant and colorful, in some way even more vibrant and colorful than a lot of cities in sort of liberal democracy, right? But it doesn't suggest how the spaces are actually governed, right? And so there's a disconnect between sort of the appearance of spaces

• 16:14Speaker 04

  and then how they actually function in the active democracy. And this is where, you know, how the state can control a narrative, how they can control what people remembers, what people know. And so I think that come back to, again, the question of democracy is that, you know, a public space, a functioning public space is where this kind of story can be told. And that required not just the actual physical artifact, but also the actual conversation, right? People speaking up about what might have been marginalized, what might have been forgotten.

• 16:58Speaker 04

  And so the actual speech, I think, is still critical. And this is, I think, where we need to be concerned with. You know, when things have been erased, people have been marginalized and stories are not being told.

• 17:12Flora Lichtman?

  That's a great point. And I think it's really interesting because it suggests that, you know, even if a space looks a certain way, like it's colorful or welcoming or democratic looking, you have to ask yourself, who's the author of that story? And what is the story they're trying to tell?

• 17:32Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 17:33Flora Lichtman?

  Dr. Jeff Howe, head of the Architecture Department at the National University of Singapore. Thank you for joining me today. I appreciate it.

• 17:40Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 17:41Flora Lichtman?

  This episode was produced by Rasha Aridi. And if you like the show, please rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. It really does help. And if you listen on Spotify, you can also leave us comments, which we always read. Thanks for listening. I'm Flora Lichtman.