Abstract
New Urbanists advocate for, among other things, spaces in cities where people of various backgrounds can interact. Yet not all interactions lead to the strong social bonds that make diverse communities more durable. The archaeological record provides rich examples of diverse communities that flourished. This article examines an ancient Maya city—Chunchucmil—where preservation of stone walls and pathways provides an unusual opportunity to reconstruct urban design in great detail. Analysis of neighborhood circulation patterns shows that people of very different wealth levels shared space on a daily basis. We present evidence that Chunchucmil’s diverse neighborhoods were also cohesive, and we identify a number of circumstances—worshipping together, working together, and maintaining local control over neighborhood affairs—that help interactions between different kinds of people develop into strong bonds. These circumstances are germane to contemporary contexts.
Introduction
In the past decade, several archaeologists have compared ancient, historic, and modern cities. 1 Some of this work attempts to show that what we learn about cities in the deep past can be relevant to understanding cities today. 2 In this article, we follow this path by arguing that socioeconomic mixing in an ancient Maya city provides insights into the feasibility of the New Urbanist goal of using design elements to create diverse and integrated communities. 3 Making such an argument rejects the idea that ancient and modern cities are incommensurable. Gideon Sjoberg 4 helped reify this divide by insisting on a stark division between industrial cities (in which the main source of energy is fossil fuels) and preindustrial cities (in which the main source of energy is humans and other animals). Although Sjoberg’s argument provided an important corrective to authors who assumed that all cities shared particular traits (central business districts, secularism, anonymity 5 ), contemporary writers have noticed persistent patterns in both industrial and preindustrial cities.
One of the patterns observed in both ancient and modern cities is that high population density and diversity result in increased creativity, vitality, and productivity. 6 Along these lines, writers often make the case that modern cities are reactors. When multiple and quite different people—different skills, different ethnic backgrounds, different socioeconomic statuses—come together in a relatively small space, connections form. 7 These connections allow the exchange of ideas, which promotes innovation. 8 In this argument, connections will not form if people cannot interact. People need to mix, at least to some degree. A primary goal of New Urbanism is to create physical environments that increase the mixing of diverse people. At the core of New Urbanism is the desire to create vibrant neighborhoods that are “diverse in use and population”, neighborhoods that contain residences, jobs, commerce, and recreation and that house people of different backgrounds and different income levels. 9 Places can benefit from diversity of all kinds. “Like the diverse old-growth forest, a richly differentiated neighborhood with many kinds of shops, entertainment centers, services, housing options, and public spaces is, virtually by definition, a more resilient and durable neighborhood.” 10
Yet a richly differentiated neighborhood does not automatically result in a more resilient and durable neighborhood. 11 In other words, the outcomes of projects that encourage social mixing often do not meet the goals of social mixing. Diversity and socioeconomic mixing are difficult to obtain in practice. As we discuss below, the stakes in making social mixing work on the ground are high, yet the data that inform and guide debates about urban design tend to be limited to contemporary urban contexts. 12 The past is a deep repository for reference points and case studies in urbanism. In particular, research on ancient Maya cities can contribute to discussions of contemporary urban dynamics. This article focuses on socioeconomic diversity in the sense of neighborhoods that house people of a mix of wealth levels. By presenting a case study with qualitative and quantitative spatial data, our study responds to a call for more precise investigations of the degree of clustering in cities. 13 Before moving to the ancient data set at the core of this article, we take a deeper look at the advantages of wealth diversity in cities, focusing particularly on vitality and stability. We then provide more context to why the benefits of diversity are difficult to achieve and to the conditions that might facilitate the realization of these benefits.
Wealth Diversity
Why do New Urbanists desire socioeconomic mixing? Beyond the points about innovation and increased productivity mentioned in the introduction, writers of various backgrounds identify several benefits of income diversity within neighborhoods. These benefits overlap in many ways, but three salient themes emerge: economy, justice, and vibrancy. 14 Regarding economy, an area with people of various wealth levels, as opposed to one with concentrated poverty, strengthens local business. 15 Also, personal income and the ability to get a job are powerfully affected by social networks. 16 Thus, when social networks contain people with a mix of resources, this boosts bridging capital—ties between people who are different—which in turn provides increased economic opportunity for everyone in the network. 17 Economy clearly intersects with the second salient benefit: social justice. As spatial segregation of the rich and the poor increases, the disadvantaged experience more disadvantages and the advantaged experience more advantages. 18 Income diversity in a single place ensures better access to resources for those who need them most. 19 For example, in contrast to poor neighborhoods, neighborhoods with people of varied wealth levels ensure a larger tax base for schools, and better funded schools offer avenues of social advancement for underprivileged children. 20 Furthermore, wealthier people are thought to demand better local institutions and can deploy more social capital and resources to get them. Thus, having rich people in a neighborhood can be an asset. 21 The third benefit of socioeconomic mixing—vibrancy—refers to the idea that a diversity of actors in the same space generates rich and vivacious fashion, conversation, art, manners, and more. The word “actor” intentionally suggests the notion of drama as elaborated by Lewis Mumford: “only in the city is there sufficient diversity and competition to enliven the plot and bring the performers up to the highest pitch of skilled, intensely conscious participation.” 22 On the other hand, enforced spatial homogeneity dampens the vibrancy of social life. Writing along these lines about Los Angeles, Mike Davis famously laments “the final extinction of the last real public spaces—with their democratic intoxications, risks and unscented odors.” 23 Confronting difference and experiencing heterogeneity can be key to the kind of emotional development congruent with the values of a democratic society: tolerance, mutual understanding, and the elimination of ignorance. 24 Thus, the vibrancy that comes from diversity is said not merely to enhance the richness of experience but also to help sustain the social fabric.
Perhaps the most compelling support that writers give for neighborhoods with mixed wealth is that segregation, the opposite of mixing, can have negative consequences. The spatial separation of the wealthy and the poor each into homogeneous enclaves creates a divided society with divergent political and material interests. 25 When such interests are at odds, maintaining equality of opportunity and resolving problems such as deep poverty become more difficult, resulting in even deeper social dysfunction: increased crime, poor health, declining social capital, and so on. 26 If economic inequality creates social distance between people, and such distance leads to hostility, 27 bringing people of different wealth levels into more frequent interaction might break down stereotypes and prejudices, rebuild trust, and permit collective, and therefore more powerful, solutions to a variety of problems. 28
The difficulty, however, is that bringing people into closer proximity does not necessarily result in frequent interaction. 29 Furthermore, frequent interaction may create weak social ties but does not guarantee the creation of stronger social bonds. Stronger ties may form not simply through sharing the same place but also through other commonalities, such as wealth level, ethnicity, age, and stage of life cycle (e.g., parents with toddlers). 30 For example, middle class “pioneers” who move to lower class neighborhoods state that they like diversity but tend to associate with other middle class people and generally fail to make friendships with lower class people. 31 In such contexts, social mixing, rather than resulting in increased well-being, actually has the kinds of negative social impacts—displacement of the poor and the weakening of preexisting community networks—often leveled as critiques of gentrification. As another example, a recent study showed that households of different socioeconomic status in Los Angeles that live in the same census tract do not actually come into contact with each other very often because they tend to go to different places (different grocery stores, different day-care centers, different places of worship, different places of employment) in the course of their day. 32
Smaller scale studies of individual housing developments, particularly those that were explicitly planned using New Urbanist principles, bring out these patterns most strongly. Two cases—one in Seattle and one in a southern U.S. city of about fifty thousand people—exemplify this pattern. The latter development has 150 housing units, ranging from affordable rentals to two-million dollar homes. Wealth differences affect the degree of social interaction in this neighborhood: neighbors of a particular wealth class are more likely to create social ties with neighbors of their own class as opposed to neighbors from a different wealth class. 33 The example from Seattle is NewHolly, a housing development renovated as part of a U.S. Housing and Urban Development (HUD) program—Hope VI—guided by the architectural and social goals of the New Urbanism. 34 NewHolly contains market rate homeownership for the more affluent, subsidized public housing for low-income families and individuals, and a range of rentals in between. It also contains shared resources such as a library, a youth center, a childcare center, a multifunctional space, and a full-time employee whose job is to create community among the ethnically diverse residents. Although NewHolly received two awards recognizing its “innovation in creating community-wide resources and comprehensive urban revitalization,” Kleit concludes that taking people whose social worlds would not otherwise overlap and placing them in the same neighborhood with multiple shared facilities did not in fact create many social ties between the poor and the nonpoor. 35 The apparent shortcomings of this and other New Urbanist poster children have resulted in cynicism, even among leftists, toward mixed-income housing developments. 36
Thus, even in cases when people of different income levels live relatively close together (not just in the same census tracts, but within the same housing developments), they can drift apart, keeping company with those most like them. Archaeologists debating the merits of different models of community (natural, constructed, imagined, etc.) have arrived at the same realization: sharing space does not always result in strong bonds. 37 There is nothing new here: the first wave of urban sociologists at the University of Chicago recognized this in the 1920s, and New Urbanists understand the problem as well. 38 Sorting into homogeneous groups in the face of the desire for mixing is a common tension in broader studies of diversity. Diversity in the workplace, for example, has been documented to create tension and conflict while generating more creative and innovative ideas. 39 It is common for a researcher to hold these two positions simultaneously, as does Putnam, who notes that immigrants of different ethnicities boost the economy but that bringing different ethnic groups into contact fosters distrust and hostility. 40
At the root of this paradox is the not yet resolved debate between conflict theory and contact theory. According to conflict theory, people tend to categorize others as same or different on some level and then create in-groups and out-groups along the lines of those categories. In times of competition over resources, contact between groups leads to conflict. In contrast, Gordon Allport, a central figure in contact theory, argued that contact fostered mutual understanding and positive regard across ethnic lines. Yet Allport, whose 1954 book The Nature of Prejudice 41 was so popular it could be purchased in airports, began from the same position that underwrites conflict theories. He argued that humans are naturally prejudiced toward outsiders, those unlike themselves, but that if people of different backgrounds interact and come to know each other under certain circumstances, they can learn to abandon their prejudices.
Some of the circumstances that improve the chances that contact will lead to positive social bonds between diverse groups include sharing a common goal, participating on equal footing, and interacting in a context where a recognized authority encourages harmony. Sociologists working in this tradition claim that when contact increases, group prejudice decreases in the vast majority of studies that look at face-to-face contact between groups in situations that meet some of the circumstances highlighted by Allport. 42 Research on Collingwood, a large, ethnically diverse area in Vancouver, provides a mixed urban housing case study that highlights the importance of the circumstances enumerated by Allport. 43 One of the major reasons that mixing led to cross-group ties and intergroup harmony in Collingwood was that local and regional authorities actively embraced and pushed for diversity to help boost Vancouver’s international economy.
Anthropologists are nothing if not the archivists of varied circumstances. By illuminating circumstances salutary to the cultivation of enduring social ties among different groups, anthropological archaeology can contribute to understanding the ways in which social mixing can be made to work. The case of Chunchucmil, an ancient Maya city in the northwest corner of the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, illustrates that neighborhoods containing people with quite diverse levels of wealth can be stable. Chunchucmil is a remarkable case study because in many ancient cities neighborhoods were more homogeneous in terms of wealth. 44 As a commercial center, Chunchucmil may have housed people of diverse ethnic backgrounds, but we do not explore this because the data have not allowed us to detect ethnic differences with any level of confidence. Before analyzing these neighborhoods and the circumstances that helped them endure, we provide background on ancient Maya cities.
Socioeconomic Mixing in Ancient Maya Cities
Research on Classic period (250–900 CE) Maya urbanism shows that there is no typical Maya city. 45 Some were walled, some were garden cities, and some were market centers. The majority of people in most cities were farmers. Most urban centers were city state capitals with fewer than twenty thousand people, though a few cities had broader geopolitical aspirations and held more than fifty thousand inhabitants. Over half had settlement densities well under two thousand people per square kilometer, making them examples of low-density urbanism as defined in other parts of the tropical world. 46 Several had densities exceeding three thousand people per square kilometer. Although not as densely occupied as many old world cities, 47 the more densely populated Maya cities do not fit the category of low-density urbanism. Some cities were uniformly dense while others had pockets of unbuilt land within them. Others had causeways extending to the edges of the city and beyond.
Maya cities had appreciable amounts of inequality within them. Wealth in ancient Maya cities is most often measured in terms of domestic architecture. Housing is a strong indicator of wealth in agrarian societies as it reflects control of both labor and physical resources. 48 Wealthy households often construct larger and more elaborate houses as a way of displaying their wealth. Volume of construction materials is one of the best proxies for household wealth at Maya ruins. 49 Near the cheap end of the spectrum are small, single-room houses made with perishable materials (sticks for walls, palm leaves or thatch for the roof) and built on top of stone platforms rising less than half a meter from the natural ground surface. Near the most costly end of the spectrum are large, multiroom houses with stone walls and stone roofs constructed above stone platforms rising well over a meter high. Gini coefficients for household architecture range from 39 to 71 at the cities where they have been calculated (Palenque, Dzibilchaltun, Sayil, Chunchucmil; Figure 1). 50 Such a range closely resembles other agrarian societies as well as contemporary cities. 51
Map of Maya area showing sites mentioned in the text.
Archaeologists have debated the degree to which wealthier households cluster together in Maya cities. A Spanish missionary claimed that the concentric pattern like the one later discussed by Burgess 52 —an inner loop of upper class housing separated from more distant rings of the lower classes—characterized the towns he saw in Yucatan in the 16th century shortly after European conquest. Archaeological data show that such a pattern is in fact quite rare. 53 Although royal palaces and other noble houses do cluster in the immediate site core at Tikal, 54 households of various wealth levels intermingle in the rest of the city, 55 as is the case at several other cities. Some cities show no correlation whatsoever between the costliness of houses and the distance from the site center. 56 Chunchucmil is one of these cities. Thanks to the presence of low stone walls that demarcate pathways and houselots within the site, we can explore the degree of socioeconomic mixing with great precision at a finer scale: the neighborhood.
Chunchucmil: Neighborhoods and Wealth
Chunchucmil is located in the driest area of the entire Maya world (Figure 1). Furthermore, soils are very shallow in this area. In fact, about a third of the ground surface is bedrock. With thin soils and low rainfall, agriculture could not have supported many people. The Pakbeh Regional Ecology Project (PREP), directed by Bruce Dahlin with co-directors Traci Ardren and Scott Hutson, conducted fieldwork at Chunchucmil and its surroundings between 1993 and 2006. PREP researchers determined that Chunchucmil reached its peak in the sixth century AD with a population between thirty thousand and forty-five thousand 57 in an area of about 15 km2 (Figure 2). The density of occupation in the central 6 km2 exceeded four thousand people per square kilometer. At the very center of the site was a marketplace and sixteen contemporary monumental architectural complexes named quadrangles. Although these complexes are not all the same size, no single quadrangle towers over the others. This suggests that Chunchucmil lacked the dynastic type of leadership that was typical at other Maya centers. 58 The people of Chunchucmil supported themselves through commerce, the exploitation of coastal and savannah resources such as salt, and some degree of farming. 59
Map of central 9.3 km2 of Chunchucmil. The enlarged map in the upper right-hand corner shows a set of typical houselots with houselot walls and paths (delimited by parallel houselot walls). The gray box in the central right portion of the main map indicates the location of these houselots with reference to the site as a whole.
Within the residential areas of the site, walls made of stacked courses of uncut stone once rose up to a meter high and encircled houselots (Figure 2). These walls resemble the stone fences seen in contemporary villages in Yucatan. Houselots contain the residences, workplaces, and other facilities of extended family households united by strong bonds of kinship. Each household had a distinct identity and was therefore a basic unit of social organization. Houselots usually contain three to seven buildings (houses, kitchens, storage sheds, shrines) facing onto a patio or two. Unbuilt space (usually 80% of the area inside the encircling walls) dedicated to gardening (as inferred from botanical evidence and soil chemistry) and other outdoor activities surrounds the buildings and patio(s). Houselot walls encircle approximately 900 of the 1250 architectural groups mapped at Chunchucmil.
Houselots are the level of social organization at which we measure wealth inequality. As mentioned above, we will use architecture, specifically the total construction volume of all buildings in the houselot as well as the human-made platforms which support the buildings, as a proxy for wealth. We also use houselot area (amount of land encircled by the houselot walls) as a potential indicator of wealth. Although houselot area is not as strong an indicator of wealth as construction volume, land for gardening was a valuable asset at Chunchucmil. There is a positive correlation between these two variables (True = .43, p < .0001). 60 At other sites, wealthy households tend to have more and better fertilized land around them. 61 Portable goods are strong indicators of wealth, but a representative sample of such goods can only be acquired by extensive excavations. Relatively few of Chunchucmil’s houselots have received such excavation.
The same stone boundary walls that encircle houselots also delimit narrow (usually 3-5 m wide) pathways in between houselots (Figure 2). In broad outline, the pathways link houselots to the site center; they radiate out from the center like spokes radiating out from the hub of a wheel (Figure 3). We see all of the households that share a single spoke as constituting an ancient neighborhood. 62 Archaeologists define neighborhoods as areas that are home to people who interact with each other on a face-to-face basis and come to see their area as distinctive. 63 The spokes at Chunchucmil structure interaction in such a way that the households on the same spoke have frequent face-to-face interactions. Since there are almost no paths that crosscut spokes, getting from one spoke to anywhere else in the site required a person to walk their own spoke first, either to the site core or to the edge of the site. Thus, the boundedness of the spokes ensured that people saw their neighbors much more frequently than if the city were laid out in a grid plan. The lack of paths that cross-cut spokes also gave Chunchucmil’s neighborhoods clear boundaries, an important design principle of New Urbanist neighborhoods. 64 Since there are fourteen major spokes, there are fourteen neighborhoods and probably others in the areas where spokes are absent. Nearly all spoke neighborhoods articulate with a quadrangle that is large enough to host everyone in the neighborhood. Attending the same ceremonies at these temple complexes allowed people living along the same spoke to form a distinct neighborhood identity. The fourteen neighborhoods in Figure 3 range in size from 8 houselots (representing about 120 people) to 148 houselots (representing about two thousand people) with a median of 54 houselots.
Map of Chunchucmil showing only the pathways (thin black lines) and stone causeways (thick black lines). The location and extent of Neighborhoods 1 and 7 are shaded. Other spoke neighborhoods are numbered.
To get back to the central concern of this article—mixing of people of different wealth levels—we examined Neighborhoods 1 and 7 in detail (Figure 3). Neighborhood 1 contains 79 houselots and is located to the northwest of the site core (Figure 4). Neighborhood 7 contains 67 houselots and is located to the east of the site core. Kinship was an important principle of social organization among the ancient Maya, and one could propose that neighborhoods represented descent groups or Levi-Straussian houses. 65 If this were the case, then bonds between neighbors would have been strong to begin with, perhaps mitigating potential tensions arising from differences in wealth. Yet there are strong reasons to believe that Neighborhoods 1 and 7 were not kin groups. First, compelling arguments can be made that the houselots themselves, which normally contained three to four families but often many more, represent major kinship units. Second, Neighborhoods 1 and 7 each contained more than thousand people (they are the fourth and fifth largest of the fourteen spoke neighborhoods), too many for kin relations to form the basis of strong bonds.
Map of Neighborhood 1 (red spoke) showing portions of Neighborhood 14 to the south (blue spoke) and Neighborhood 2 to the east (green spoke). The orange-shaded houselots pertain to Neighborhood 1. Houselot boundaries with black dots are conjectural.
We chose these Neighborhoods 1 and 7 for analysis because they come from two different parts of the site but are approximately the same size and because preservation of houselot boundary walls in these two neighborhoods was good enough to measure houselot area precisely for most houselots. The descriptive statistics for construction volume and household area (Table 1) show that these two neighborhoods are nearly identical in terms of central tendencies and dispersion for these two variables. The descriptive statistics for these two neighborhoods are also close to the descriptive statistics from a sample of 392 enclosed houselots taken from throughout the site. 66 On average, the values for construction size and houselot area in the sample of 392 are larger than those for Neighborhoods 1 and 7, but it should be noted that the sample of 392 contains a slight bias toward more wealthy houselots. In sum, the houselots found in the two neighborhoods examined here appear to be quite representative of those from the site as a whole.
Quantitative measurements for Spokes 1 and 7 at Chunchucmil.
Before we can assess the degree of wealth mixing, we need to establish which houselots are considered wealthy and which are not. Figure 5 shows histograms for construction volume and houselot area for both neighborhoods. Two extreme outliers have been removed from the right-hand tail of the histogram of construction volume for Spoke 1, and one extreme outlier has been removed from the right-hand tail of the histogram of construction volume for Spoke 7. For both of these construction volume histograms, there is no single, obvious, natural break separating the most voluminous houselots from the rest. This is also the case for houselot area in Spoke 1. The lack of natural breaks in these three histograms echoes a pattern found by other researchers: a lack of wealth-based social classes with distinct boundaries. 67 A possible natural break can be observed in the houselot area histogram for Spoke 7. In that histogram, only one household falls in the gap between houselot N2E3-M, with 5,427 m2, and houselot N2E4-M, with 7,262 m2.
Histograms for two different measures of wealth for houselots at Neighborhoods 1 and 7 of Chunchucmil. Two outliers have been removed from the right-hand tail of the histogram of construction volume for Spoke 1, and one outlier has been removed from the right-hand tail of the histogram of construction volume for Spoke 7.
Given the inability to assign houselots to natural groups in three of the four histograms, we chose to group the houselots into sets of ranked tiers. The seventy-nine houselots in Neighborhood 1 were assigned to six different tiers (five containing thirteen houselots, one containing fourteen houselots) based on construction volume. We created another set of six tiers for houselot area. Given the strong positive correlation between construction volume and houselot area, seven of the houselots assigned to the top tier for construction volume were also assigned to the top tier for houselot area. We consider the houselots in the top tiers to be “wealthy.” We then went through the same process for Neighborhood 7.
Results
Our data show that the degree of wealth mixing is substantial in both neighborhoods. This can be grasped visually by giving each houselot in a neighborhood one of six shades of gray based on which of the six tiers they inhabit and observing the spatial distribution of richer and poorer houselots within the neighborhoods. The map in Figure 6a features data on construction volume for Neighborhood 1. The houselots shaded more darkly have more construction volume (black houselots represent the top tier); those shaded more lightly have less construction volume (white houselots represent the lowest tier). The map shows that the houselots from each of the six tiers are evenly spread across the neighborhood. In other words, there does not appear to be any clustering by volume of construction. As a qualitative example of this, houselot N4W3-H has a 1-m tall basal platform covering nearly 1,000 m2 and supporting a 3-m tall pyramid and other structures. Together, these structures combine for more than 2000 m3 of construction material. Yet the buildings of the houselot next door to the west amount to only 92 m3. Such spatial juxtapositions of social groups with vastly different resources are common in Chunchcumil’s neighborhoods. Figure 6b shows a map with the same conventions, but this time for houselot area in Neighborhood 1. The maps in Figure 7a and 7b represent construction volume and houselot area, respectively, in Neighborhood 7. Taken together, the four maps in Figures 6 and 7 clearly show a high degree of mixing.
Map of Neighborhood 1 showing (a) volume of construction and (b) houselot area.
Map of Neighborhood 7 showing (a) volume of construction and (b) houselot area. The five black houselots with white dots represent the five houselots at the right end of the histogram for houselot size (Neighborhood 7) in Figure 5.
To quantify objectively the impression of uniform dispersal of wealth given by Figures 6 and 7, we used average nearest neighbor analysis, calculated with Euclidean distance, in ArcMap GIS. In this analysis, ArcMap calculates the expected average distance between each wealthy houselot and its nearest wealthy neighbor given a totally random distribution of wealthy houselots. ArcMap also calculates the observed average distance between each wealthy houselot and its nearest wealthy neighbor given their actual distribution in the neighborhood. If the observed distance is significantly less than the expected distance (i.e., if the ratio of observed to expected is well below 1), then wealthy houselots exhibit a clustered distribution. If the observed distance is significantly greater than the expected distance (i.e., if the ratio of observed to expected is well above 1), then wealthy houselots are uniformly spaced across the neighborhood.
For each of the two neighborhoods and each of the two proxy measures of wealth (construction volume and houselot area), we conducted nearest neighbor analyses with the houselots in the highest of the six tiers. Since each tier contains 16.7 percent of the houselots in a particular neighborhood, 16.7 percent of the houselots (for Neighborhood 1, n = 13; for Neighborhood 7, n = 11) are considered wealthy. We also ran the same analyses after expanding the category of “wealthy” to encompass 33 percent of the houselots in each of the two neighborhoods. Table 2 presents all eight average nearest neighbor results.
Nearest neighbor ratios for neighborhoods 1 and 7 at Chunchucmil.
Regarding construction volume in Neighborhood 1, the nearest neighbor results robustly confirm the impression of uniform distribution of wealth given by Figure 6a. The nearest neighbor ratios are high enough above a value of 1 to indicate very clearly that wealthy houselots do not cluster within the neighborhood. The very low p values in Table 1 show that the degree of uniformity is statistically significant (α = .05 for all tests). The average nearest neighbor results also show a statistically significant tendency toward uniform dispersion of the houselots with the most area in Neighborhood 1. Although Figure 6b shows a cluster of houselots with lots of land in the northwest portion of the neighborhood, houselots with abundant land and houselots with less land are nevertheless rather uniformly dispersed.
Neighborhood 7 has sixty-seven houselots, so five of the six shaded tiers in the map of construction volume (Figure 7a) contain eleven houselots each and one contains twelve. Houselot area (Figure 7b) could not be precisely measured for five of the sixty-seven houselots, so four of the tiers for houselot area contain ten houselots and two contain eleven. The map of construction volume (Figure 7a) shows a relatively uniform mix of wealthy and less wealthy houselots, though with a cluster of three top tier houselots in the north-central part of the neighborhood. The nearest neighbor analysis shows a statistically significant degree of dispersion. The results are similar for houselot area. Figure 7b shows relatively uniform dispersal of the houselots with the most land, though with a concentration to the east, and the nearest neighbor analysis confirms this pattern of uniformity for the top 16.7 percent as well as the top 33 percent. For the top 16.7 percent, the result is statistically significant. As noted above, a gap in the histogram for houselot area in Neighborhood 7 (Figure 5d) helps us isolate the five houselots to the right of the gap as distinct from the others. These five houselots are somewhat clustered: they are marked with white dots in Figure 7b. In both Neighborhoods 1 and 7, there is a slight tendency for the largest houselots to be located at the outer edge of the neighborhood, where settlement density begins to drop and land would have been more copious.
Discussion
The foregoing results underscore a high degree of wealth mixing in both neighborhoods. Chunchucmil therefore meets the New Urbanist ideal of diverse neighborhoods, not to mention other ideals. 68 Nevertheless, the literature cited earlier in this article makes it clear that having different people close together does not necessarily result in the kinds of strong social ties between those of different wealth levels, different skill sets, and so on that make cities vibrant. We know that Chunchucmil was vibrant—it became one of the largest and richest cities in its region—but does this vibrancy have anything to do with the form of its neighborhoods? Given that neighbors moved on foot and shared the same restricted pathways, we know that face-to-face interaction was high, but did mere interaction result in strong bonds, or did social relations sort by other factors (age, wealth, etc.)? Put more basically, how neighborly were Chunchucmil’s economically mixed neighbors?
We do not have strong answers to these questions, but we can build plausible responses. It is tempting to suggest that Chunchucmil’s neighborhoods must have been cohesive because they stuck around for a century or longer. Despite pronounced inequality within the neighborhoods, people of different wealth levels continued to live next to each other generation after generation, implying that they got along well. Yet this argument is not particularly compelling. It carries a whiff of circularity, but, more importantly, people may have stayed put for entirely different reasons than good relations with neighbors. One reason is that the people of Chunchucmil buried their ancestors under the floors of their buildings. Although buried ancestors could be moved in the Maya area and elsewhere in the Americas, doing so was an ordeal. Also, after investing heavily in their homes and gardens, people lose such capital if they choose to move out of the neighborhood.
As mentioned above, simply putting people of different backgrounds alongside each other can easily lead to conflict. Nevertheless, following Allport, particular circumstances increase the potential for mutual understanding and positive regard among varied neighbors. Several circumstances conducive to neighborhood cohesion were present at Chunchucmil. The first is group worship. As discussed earlier, nearly all spokes at Chunchucmil each lead to their own temple compounds/quadrangles; each of which could have accommodated the entire population of the spoke neighborhood. Joint participation in ceremonies at these quadrangles would not simply have helped bond neighbors. This is a circumstance where, as Allport would have said, a recognized authority (in this case Maya leaders/priests) encouraged harmony. A second circumstance germane to Chunchucmil is unintentional co-presence. An example comes from NewHolly, Seattle, where people tend to make strong ties with those who were physically close, regardless of wealth levels or ethnicity, in those cases when they unintentionally spent time near each other, such as at the community garden. 69 In lowland tropical settlements, life is lived largely outdoors. 70 This puts neighbors in each other’s sound- and view-sheds, especially at a dense city like Chunchucmil where houselots were packed closely like cells in a honeycomb. Chunchucmil’s pathways add to this. Whereas driving in automobiles seals travelers off from each other, walking along narrow pathways ensures that people interact, at least minimally. It is difficult to avoid one’s neighbors in a city like Chunchucmil. When William “Holly” Whyte wrote that “the street is the river of life of the city: the place where we come together, the pathway to the center,” 71 he had modern cities in mind but the quote might better fit ancient cities like Chunchucmil.
Chunchucmil’s neighbors were not forced to share pathways. They chose to. The pathways were not centrally organized; they were planned (sometimes haphazardly) and built by the people who lived along them. This is important for two reasons. First, it means that neighbors could have built them differently. Instead of the strict spoke configuration, they could have created paths that crosscut multiple spokes—beltways, in other words—if they wanted less tightly-bound neighborhoods and additional travel routes that did not take them by the same set of neighbors every time they left the houselot. The notion that the people themselves chose paths that coherently delimited their neighborhoods does not merely align with New Urbanist design principles, but it suggests that these people were invested in their neighborhoods. This is a clue, albeit faint, that neighborhoods were strong.
The second reason why it is important that neighbors planned and built the pathways themselves is that neighbors were working together. They had to come to agreements and implement them as a group in order to make it possible to get into, out of, and through the neighborhood. The process likely gave rise to disagreements since people had to cede land to make the paths. Neighbors were also working together economically. Following Dahlin and Ardren’s idea that each neighborhood’s quadrangle at the site core was the headquarters of a commercial enterprise, 72 the neighbors who shared the temple compound were not just worshiping together, but they were part of the same economic concern. In other words, they shared a common goal, which is also one of the circumstances that, according to Allport, leads to positive social bonds among diverse groups.
Conclusion
There are many good reasons why cities benefit from neighborhoods with households from a mix of wealth levels, as opposed to homogeneous enclaves segregated by wealth. Neighborhoods with diverse populations achieve their potential if their members interact and form the kinds of strong bonds that lead to advocacy, innovation, cultural and artistic enrichment, and increased productivity. A major goal of New Urbanism has been to employ design principles that encourage interaction. Yet studies of modern cities show that interaction does not always lead to strong bonds, and neighborhoods with diverse populations (even those consciously planned as such) may lack sustained interaction. Although this has led to cynicism among planners, we argue that any verdict on the success of design principles is premature unless it considers examples of cities from a much broader context, including ancient cities.
We therefore examined two neighborhoods at the ancient Maya city of Chunchucmil, looking particularly at the degree to which households of different wealth levels were spatially intermingled. We found a high degree of mixing. In both neighborhoods, average nearest neighbor analysis showed that houselots that were wealthy in terms of the quality of architecture and amount of land were uniformly dispersed among less wealthy neighbors. We are not as certain about the second step of the argument: that Chunchucmil’s diverse neighborhoods were also cohesive. Nevertheless, we presented some evidence for this—people purposefully created pathways in such a way that heightened their exposure to their mixed wealth neighbors—and we identified a number of circumstances that would help interactions between different kinds of people develop into strong bonds. In modern contexts, such as the New Urbanist success story of Collingwood, Vancouver, a critical circumstance was the encouragement of harmonious relations by authorities at multiple levels. At Chunchucmil, these circumstances include extensive co-presence, worshipping together, working together, and maintaining local control over certain neighborhood affairs, such as the system of pathways. This latter point, bottom-up control, contrasts to some degree with the top-down incentives for harmony seen at Collingwood. Yet bottom-up control represents a potential convergence with contemporary cities insofar as authors from Richard Florida to Alan Mallach 73 have recently stressed the importance of allowing decisions to be made at the local scale.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I thank the two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and INAH for permitting the archaeological work.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Dahlin an Ardren received support from the Ntional Science Foundation and National Geographic to conduct fieldwork at Chunchucmil.
