[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
The book is the seventh and only the second English-language volume in De Gruyter’s DECOR series, which, according to the publisher’s website, is dedicated to the comprehensive study of decorative phenomena, focusing on spatial-architectural and visual correlations and integrations. This approach is immediately apparent from the title and structure of the volume. The book is divided into three parts. The first, Neighbourhoods: Small-scale Areas of Individual Experience, considers the perception and experience of neighbourhoods within the socio-spatial pattern of the city. The second, Streets between Axiality and Area, and the third, Neighbourhoods and Districts: the Socio-spatial Patterning of the City, focuses on streets and how they divide the city into spaces or constitute a particular infrastructural, social and visual network.
Roman urban development is an endless topic that has been of interest to researchers for at least several decades. The Roman urban fabric has been analysed using different methodological approaches, but only recently have historians and archaeologists begun to appreciate the widespread nature and social importance of social units as neighbourhoods or districts (Alston 2002; Garrioch and Peel 2006; Goodman 2007; Smith 2010; Albrecht 2019; Muñiz-Grijalvo and del Campo Tejedor 2023). This volume offers a fresh perspective on the subject, providing a systematic approach to the archaeological record in order to understand the socio-spatial patterning of Roman districts and neighbourhoods (p. 3). The editors of the book decided to focus on strategies of purposeful and active design and experience of social and spatial entities (p. 6).
The editors arranged the volume with a clear conceptual approach to neighbourhoods in mind. Based on the German research tradition (Althaus 2018; Besmer 2023; Kurtenbach 2024), neighbourhood is understood as a close relationship between people living next to each other. Therefore, such socio-spatial structures do not function in a specific urban area, but depend on individual experiences (pp. 3-4). The volume thus offers a fresh approach by “relating praxeological and phenomenological perspectives” (p. 6) where “locality and territory constitute social relations and interdependences” (p. 7). This approach is supported not only by recent archaeological evidence but also by epigraphic and other literary sources. The research objects range from the ancient Athenian neighbourhoods, to Rome, Ostia, Herculaneum, Pompeii, Paestum, and so on.
Particularly noteworthy are the chapters by Christer Bruun, Tobias Busen, M. Taylor Lauritsen, Eric Poehler, and Miko Flohr. Bruun’s chapter (Regiones, Vici and Grassroots Dynamics at Roman Ostia) is dedicated to the general question of defining neighbourhoods in the ancient world. On the basis of the evidence from Ostia, the author questions whether historical administrative units had any significance for individual experiences (p. 27) and proposes to focus on places of social encounter, such as balnea, thermae and taverns, as focal points of socio-spatial neighbourhoods, since specific types of behaviour and social ties constitute the mental landscape of spatial patterning (pp. 27-28).
Busen’s case study of Insula I 4 in Pompeii is an interesting in-depth analysis of the socio-spatial patterning of Roman neighbourhoods, revealling social cooperation through construction agreements on the use of the building site. The author shows how the processes of redevelopment had to be negotiated in order to arive at advantageous solutions for each of the house owners (p. 66).
Lauritsen’s contribution (The Crossroads of Mercury: Decoration and Development on the Via di Mercurio at Pompeii) analyses the diachronic development of the Pompeii’s Via di Mercurio from the perspective of visual socio-spatial patterning. The author argues that various decorative elements visible on the street are the result of specific socio-cultural, economic and structural processes (pp. 109-10) that reinforced local identities. Lauritsen additionally provides a valuable statistical table of painted representations of mythological figures (or their attributes) on Pompeian shop/ workshop façades (p. 111).
Poehler’s chapter (Urban Infrastructure and the Perception of Neighbourhood) focuses on the social significance of fountains and street shrines within the city space of Pompeii. The chapter approaches neighbourhood from the visual perspective of the individual. Taking Pompeii’s urban infrastructure as a starting point, Poehler argues that the morphology of urban space creates distinctive experiences that help to understand neighbourhood as a sensory event. The author analyses physical objects, such as street façades, paving types, fountains and street shrines, that shape the socio-spatial patterning (p. 123-4). The archaeological evidence collected and its visual cartographic representation is a particularly valuable part of this chapter. The author illustrates their chapter with Pompeian maps of street surface types (p. 127), sidewalks and stepping-stones (p. 128), fountains (p. 129), street shrines (after Van Andringa 2000, edited by E. Poehler, p. 130), and a distinctly intriguing model of intensity of pedestrian movement (p. 133).
Flohr’s chapter (Prosperity and Inequality: Imperial Hegemony and Neighbourhood Formation in the Cities of Roman Italy) looks at the impact of increasing wealth inequality and its effect on the differentiation of socio-spatial patterns in cities. The author links the study of urban neighbourhoods to the study of inequality which shows how these “could impact on the everyday lived experience in specific locations” (p. 160), since the perception and experience of neighbourhoods was linked to different facets of everyday life.
The volume is impeccably edited. One small detail could be mentioned regarding the use of terms. The introduction uses the term ‘social-spatial’ (p. 15), although elsewhere in the volume and in the same chapter it is socio-spatial (e.g. pp. 13-4).
One more thing could be said about the methodology. The volume aims to understand neighbourhoods through the lens of the inhabitants of these cities and how these people were forced to interact and communicate, how the materially shaped urban spaces create social interactions (p. 15). In short, the volume adopts a clearly articulated phenomenological approach that takes Heidegger’s work as its starting point (p. 7). Of course, the primary aim of phenomenology is the direct study and description of phenomena as conscious experiences, and the volume provides such a perspective. However, some chapters raise the question of whether the method of inquiry is phenomenological or simply appears to be. For example, Busen’s chapter on processes of negotiation between neighbours (p. 66) focuses on archaeological evidence and attempts to reconstruct individual experiences, thereby losing the subjective element of phenomena. Similarly, Simon Malmberg’s chapter, which uses the concepts of Gerald Suttles (1972) as its main methodological approach (p. 85), is obviously sociological. Of course, these methodological remarks could be refuted because experiences are related to the material world, but the question remains whether they can actually be reconstructed in the process of phenomenological archaeology.
Finally, this volume will undoubtedly attract attention and provide a solid background for further research, as there are still many questions to be answered about Roman urban neighbourhoods and the approach offered by this volume, which considers the perception and experience of neighbourhoods within the socio-spatial pattern of the city, seems to offer a promising future research perspective.
Authors and Titles
Introduction.
Design and Experience of Neighbourhoods and City Quarters, Annette Haug, Adrian Hielscher and Anna-Lena Krüger
Regiones, Vici and Grassroots Dynamics at Roman Ostia, Christer Bruun
I. Neighbourhoods: Small-scale Areas of Individual Experience
Neighbourhood Dynamics, Neighbourhood Character and the Persistence of Shared Infrastructure: Impressions from an Urban Quarter in Athens, 5th Century B.C. to 3rd Century A.D., Patric-Alexander Kreuz
Back-to-Back and Yet not Separate: Evidence of Neighbourly Agreements within Insula I 4 in Pompeii, Tobias Busen
Roman Neighbourhoods and the Archaeological Process: A Case Study from the Porta Stabia Neighbourhood at Pompeii, Steven J. R. Ellis
Neighbourhoods by the Tiber: Life at Two Harbours in Rome, Simon Malmberg
II. Streets Between Axiality and Area
The Crossroads of Mercury: Decoration and Development on the Via di Mercurio at Pompeii, M. Taylor Lauritsen
Urban Infrastructure and the Perception of Neighbourhood, Eric E. Poehler
III. City Quarters and Districts: The Socio-spatial Patterning of the City
The Green City Quarter Close to the Amphitheatre in Pompeii and its Rural Identity, Pia Kastenmeier
Prosperity and Inequality: Imperial Hegemony and Neighbourhood Formation in the Cities of Roman Italy, Miko Flohr
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