Neolithic Privacy?
Moving on from my previous post on “The First Smart City…And So It Began…” — Ideally, read this first…
Looking at the way our forebears lived, is something that archaeologists are pretty good at. Of course there is a degree of conjecture about it. However, analysing the architecture of buildings from neolithic settlements, gives us an insight into the minds of our ancestors and lets us understand how they viewed their own personal privacy. Neolithic houses seem to be the first to have the concept of ‘privacy’ built into the structural design (1). A house would be part of a group of other structures within a larger settlement. The Neolithic house would have separate sections for storage of family food and other resources. There was also an enclosed area that allowed a small group, perhaps family, to congregate away from the main other areas of the settlement. Research at Çatalhöyük (2) has shown that privacy of property and food storage was increasing over time — protection of private property becoming important and more secluded within private households. As settlements increased in size and population grew, you can imagine that this privacy of living would have become increasingly important and prized. Of course, privacy, is a compromise and this compromise is something we will meet as we look at modern smart cities.
Çatalhöyük was an egalitarian society, a rare thing indeed, But this social structure started to fall apart as the settlement grew in size (2). And size is something that we need to be cognizant of as we grow our modern cities and smarten them up. At our current rate of reproduction, planet Earth will reach around 11 billion human souls by 2100 (3). By 2050, 66% of the world’s population is expected to live in urban areas (4). We will be ‘packing them in’ to these urban areas as our planet starts to reach its carrying capacity. It is this carrying capacity that is one of the fundamental drivers pushing for a better and more sustainable way of living. My posts on smart city privacy, will look into these drivers in more detail later, but going back to the carrying capacity of our blue planet, just what should we expect as our population grows?
The agricultural revolution was a key turning point in the history of human population growth by allowing us to add a finer level of control over our food resources. Sedentary living in settlements allowed us to develop stratification in society and we improved healthcare, children survived into adulthood, and women survived childbirth more frequently. In the past 1000 years, the world’s population has literally exploded (5) and we are now at a juncture where we need to balance this with available resources to avoid hitting the limits of the planet’s capacity.
Resource availability is one of the drivers of the smart city, but pushing the other way is privacy. Smart living may help us optimize our environment, but we have to be aware that we are human beings who need space. As the 66% move into the city - will we end up as trapped rats in a cage or will utopia reign?
Closer Still? A Sense of Personal Space
From agriculture to stratified societies, we are now moving into a new era - that of sustainable and close living with a smart edge to achieve optimized lifestyles. Studies on close quarter living should give us some idea of what to expect as we increase our city size. Evolutionary medicine may hold the key to understanding and perhaps finding a way to live closely and in health. A number of studies have looked at interpersonal space across cultures. One study, by a Sorokowska, et.al., (6) which is perhaps the most comprehensive to date, looked at how different cultures have different views on what constitutes breathing space across different cultural divides. The research was carried out across 42 different countries and across different social contexts. The results covered a number of variables including climatic temperature and sex of the participant. The results showed that women and older people felt the need for a larger personal space. The most interesting results from the study was those that looked at the mean distance needed for ‘social distance’, that is, space from strangers; the minimum being around 80cm (Argentina) and the largest being around 130 (Romania) — we all need our space it seems.
Our cities and our personal space is something that smart city designers need to be cognizant of. But this isn’t just about the physical. We have, to some degree, accepted that in overcrowded cities our personal space is diminishing. In the semi-rural village I am writing this from, I walk outside my door and with every passerby a cordial “good morning” is offered and warmly received: Not so in our large cities. If you were to say “hello” to a stranger in a city like Hong Kong, London, New York, or other overcrowded cities, you would be looked on as odd, even threatening. In many of our great cities, being polite means ignoring those around you — keeping the space, not just physically, but verbally too. It is possibly a way that we exchange privacy — giving privacy an almost commodity like status. In a city where your neighbor can hear every word you say, one way to give back personal dignity is by respecting privacy, even if this means pretending that you didn’t see or hear anything.
Is this behavior within our cities a natural way to manage unnatural living conditions? Our ancestors, like those in Jericho and Çatalhöyük built their nascent cities with privacy and personal space in mind. We are perhaps emulating this by creating invisible protective walls of silence to cope with urban life. But, will our smart cities break down these invisible walls in their thirst for our data?
In my next post I’ll look at “The City of the Future”
References
(1) Hofmann, D., Smyth, J., Tracking the Neolithic House in Europe: Sedentism, Architecture and Practice, 2013, Springer
(2) Wright, K. I., Domestication and inequality? Households, corporate groups and food processing tools at Neolithic Çatalhöyük, June 2013, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology
(3) United Nations, DESA, Population Division, World Population Prospects:
(4) United Nations, DESA, Population Division, World Urbanisation Trends 2014, https://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/Publications/Files/WUP2014-Highlights.pdf
(5) UNEP,Global Environmental Alert Service: June 2012: https://na.unep.net/geas/archive/pdfs/GEAS_Jun_12_Carrying_Capacity.pdf
(6) Sorokowska, A., et. al., Preferred Interpersonal Distances: A Global Comparison, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, Vol 48, Issue 4, pp. 577–592, March 22, 2017