Congrès, colloques, réunions
15-17 avril 2016
Durham University
Durham Conference 2016
The British conference of the AHRC-sponsored Early urbanism in Europe?: the case of the Trypillia mega-sites, Ukraine Project.
There has been a loss of nerve in studies of early urbanism, with an inability to define the term leading to an analytical paralysis which has stopped archaeologists from making a strong contribution to global narratives of cultural change. Can we change this state of affairs? How can we best transcend Gordon Childe’s criteria for urban sites which still, often implicitly, dominate the urbanism agenda? Will low-density urbanism, as proposed by Roland Fletcher, make a distinctive contribution? And what is the status of the very large, if rather undifferentiated, Trypillia mega-sites of Ukraine – the largest sites in 4th millennium BC Europe, if not the world?
This conference aims to bring together some of the key thinkers in recent urbanism studies to define a new agenda for urbanism and to assess the contribution of the Trypillia mega-sites to this emergent debate.