Making place in the ancient city

This special issue explores the potential application of one of the classic — but in our view still underappreciated — concepts of urban studies, namely place-making, as a lens to better understand the very diverse and highly complex interwoven layers of meaning invested in a specific form of settlement characterized by density and diversity, namely the city. ‘Owning’ a particular place in the city was an essential factor in identifying with the city as a whole (Yuval-Davis 2011). Yet in ancient cities, space was a potent and often scarce resource that had to be negotiated among a variety of stakeholders. Just like their modern counterparts, ancient cities also knew a wide diversity of social classes — (female and male) craftsmen, foreigners, enslaved, merchants, soldiers, priests, with even differentiation and competition among the elite — each class had their own image and experience of the city, with their own points of navigation. The feasibility of making place for oneself or one’s own group was constantly shifting, subject to the fluctuations of urban hierarchies and heterarchical processes. As a conceptual approach, place-making enables us to unfold the multivocality of places as it addresses the overlap of power, control, and lived space in urban societies beyond the elite perspective. Place-making is thus part of the social process of identity formation and community building, essential for survival in the urban context, but with an emphasis on the practice of making place, rather than the spatial or physical end-result. For studies of the ancient city, the concept of place-making thus requires us to problematize urban configuration by asking many more questions related to social and spatial belonging: Who made place, for whom, and especially how, what means did they use, and of course why?