What urban design tells us about democracy

[MUSIC PLAYING] FLORA 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-Lulewicz, anthropologist and assistant professor at the Pennsylvania State University. Hey, Jake. Welcome to Science Friday.

JAKE HOLLAND-LULEWICZ: Hi, guys. Thanks so much for having me.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What does democratic design or democratic architecture look like?

JAKE HOLLAND-LULEWICZ: Oh, yeah. I don’t think we can call the architecture democratic. But it certainly reflects kind of ethos and 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.

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

JAKE HOLLAND-LULEWICZ: 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. 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. No one is necessarily front and center. You’re not– it’s not like a classroom where all of my students are looking at me. And I’m telling them stuff that they maybe need to know.

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

FLORA LICHTMAN: What about plazas or the big piazza? How do you read that?

JAKE HOLLAND-LULEWICZ: Yeah, yeah, plazas 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 Muscogee Creek Nation. And square grounds are center to social and political life. They’re where people gather to reaffirm relationships and strengthen bonds between people and eat great food.

And looking at things like the size of plazas, again, can tell us who’s meant to be in that space? How many people are meant to get together? Is the whole village around the plaza? Or is the plaza associated, maybe, with a palace? Which could maybe tell us something different about what the purpose of this open space is. Right?

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah, I know I’m getting into the dusty details here. But is it a correlation? Like, you see 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 were democratic principles at play?

JAKE HOLLAND-LULEWICZ: Yeah, I think they certainly are a great feature for us to identify and begin, as archeologists, begin to interpret these societies as more collectively or democratically oriented. On their own, they don’t tell us everything. But I think they’re really great hints.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What about on the flip side? Is there architecture that suggests autocratic government?

JAKE HOLLAND-LULEWICZ: 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 it 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.

FLORA LICHTMAN: How would the White House read?

JAKE HOLLAND-LULEWICZ: This is interesting. I was actually thinking about 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. And this is not unlike how archeologists have approached the past in many ways.

We find a big pyramid or huge palace maybe. And we’re like, wow, they have a lot of power. But once we start maybe looking broader and contextualizing this, we find, hey, 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 OK, we have maybe earthen mounds where there may be important people living on top of them. But 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. 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 archeological record too.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah, in theory, in theory that’s–

JAKE HOLLAND-LULEWICZ: In theory, yes.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah, OK. So you looked at over 30 places. Did you have big take homes about the origins of democracy or how it was practiced?

JAKE HOLLAND-LULEWICZ: Oh, yeah, I think so. Yeah. 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.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Hit us. Hit us with–

JAKE HOLLAND-LULEWICZ: Yeah, we found that democracy has really deep roots. It’s not a modern invention. 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. 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. And I think we could take this farther. And in the paper, we cite this quote from Applebaum, where they note that autocracy isn’t a genetic trait. It’s culture and language and religion. They don’t produce autocracy or democracy. No person or nation is condemned to autocracy just by their nature of geography or religion.

And the flip side of that is that no nation is guaranteed democracy. We have to work really hard at it. But I think the archeological record shows that people have always worked really hard at this and have been really successful at it.

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

JAKE HOLLAND-LULEWICZ: I think the design is purposeful. And it’s meant to facilitate an idea of a system. I approach these kinds of things as why was this structure built? What was happening at this time? Why is it now? Where I work in the southeastern United States, 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 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. Instead of defaulting towards the easy, the quote-unquote, easy route of autocracy, they decided like, we’re going to 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 is through deliberation and consensus.

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FLORA LICHTMAN: Hm, that’s a hopeful note to end on.

JAKE HOLLAND-LULEWICZ: Yeah, like I said, I like to come at a lot of this as very hopeful.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Look, I’m never going to look at a circular building the same way. So thank you.

JAKE HOLLAND-LULEWICZ: Excellent.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Dr. Jake Holland-Lulewicz is an anthropologist and assistant professor at the Pennsylvania State University. Coming up after the break, what do modern spaces tell us about ourselves?

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FLORA LICHTMAN: Moving from ancient cities to modern ones, what role does design play in democracies today? Do those ancient design principles hold true? Joining me now is Doctor Jeff Hou, head of the architecture department at the National University of Singapore. Hey, Jeff, thanks for talking today.

JEFF HOU: Yeah, thank you. Nice to join.

FLORA 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, which was thousands of years ago?

JEFF HOU: Yeah, yeah. No, I think the role of public space is still critical to democracy. If we look at how democracy works. So people have to express their opinion. They need to gather. They need to communicate. They need to engage in debate. They need to make their presence known to the state.

And so public space still plays 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 exists virtually online, on your device. And they are– today, they are just as powerful as the actual physical space. And in some way, became even more 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. Oftentimes, space come with surveillance. So even though the space may be there, people are not able to gather. And so at the moment, interesting kind of historical moment in which we’re experiencing, this sort of disconnect between space and what they’re meant to perform and how democracy works, both in physical realm and in the online kind of realm. And that’s the whole kind of purpose of public space become sort of diminished.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Well, what’s that for an architect? Because I assume you are interested in the physical.

JEFF HOU: Oh, absolutely. I think the physical space is still absolutely important. 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 or your digital device. And also at the same time, the same kind of destroyed infrastructure can also stop people from gathering.

So, for example, the state can just shut down the internet. And that stop people from communicating with each other. And so things are more complicated today.

FLORA LICHTMAN: When you’re traveling, can you read a new place to figure out any clues about the values of that society?

JEFF HOU: 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. The center of the city is still the palace. So you can read into the history of the city in terms of what it used to be, 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. But it’s not a functioning democracy. These places do tell stories. And stories from the past, from the present, and where things are going, and they’re really fascinating to look at.

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

JEFF HOU: Yeah, so it’s hard to tell now. So the line has blurred between what the appearance and how spaces actually function. So if you go to a Chinese city, for example, it’s just as vibrant and colorful, in some way, even more vibrant and colorful than a lot of cities in liberal democracy.

But it doesn’t suggest how the spaces are actually governed. And so this disconnect between the appearance of spaces and then how they actually function in a active democracy. And this is where how the state can control a narrative, how they can control what people remembers, what people know.

And so I think that comes back to, again, the question of democracy is that a public space– a functioning public spaces where the story can be told. And that required, not just the actual physical artifact, but also the actual conversation. People speaking up about what might have been marginalized, what might have been forgotten.

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

FLORA LICHTMAN: That’s a great point. And I think it’s really interesting because it suggests that, even if a space looks a certain way, 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?

JEFF HOU: Absolutely.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Dr. Jeff Hou, head of the architecture department at the National University of Singapore. Thank you for joining me today. I appreciate it.

JEFF HOU: Thank you.

FLORA 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.

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