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On 14 and 15 November 2024, the British School at Rome will host the ERC Conference: "(Re)uniting City and Country: New Research on Urban and Suburban Socio-topographical Structures".This conference explores the relationship between cities and their peri-urban and rural surroundings and wants to reflect on the methodological challenges involved in understanding topographical patterns and material evidence in socio-historical terms as indicators of a lived experience.
Research on the relationship between city and country, centre and periphery, metropolis and hinterland, was for long conceptualised in binary oppositions. Yet it is now clear that the hierarchical thinking and assumption of one-directional transfer of knowledge and goods that informed these concepts are oversimplistic. They ignore aspects of reciprocity and the difficulty to pin down exactly where the borderline between centre and periphery should be drawn.
To be sure, oppositions abound in Greek and Latin literature where the two spheres are contrasted in various ways. Yet beyond literary topoi, the situation is far more ambiguous and complex. The ‘simple’ country life members of the Roman élite enjoyed was in fact a romanticised lifestyle that had nothing to do with the living conditions of ordinary peasants. Inhabitants of both city and countryside boasted various levels of education or economic power. Goods were not just moving from the countryside into the ‘consumer city’, but also in the opposite direction. In practical terms, identifying any boundaries between city and country, centre and periphery is difficult if not impossible. Certainly, city walls or the pomerium of Roman towns provided some structure, for instance defining what a villa is as opposed to a domus, or where it was permitted to bury one’s dead. Yet the confines of a pomerium could change, enclosing tombs inside that used to be outside.
Not all cities had city walls, and where they did exist, they could be outgrown as in Rome or Pompeii, pushing the boundaries of the densely inhabited areas further out. Elsewhere, the inhabited area may be significantly smaller than the area surrounded by walls, and even where the more densely inhabited areas are neatly enclosed in walls, the latter had to be permeable to sustain daily life. Ignoring juridical and ritual boundaries, which were often poorly visible and arguably had little impact on the daily life of inhabitants, city boundaries are often ill-defined. Such difficulties are also reflected in terminological struggles of more recent scholarship that accepts topographical continuity between city and country. The areas between the city centre with its administrative and religious institutions and the countryside inhabited by peasants and dominated by agricultural production, are variously described as e.g. peri-urban, sub-urban, urban periphery etc. with none of these terms being universally accepted as adequate.
The conference is linked to the ERC-ADG-funded project IN-ROME (101054143) that aims at answering many of the questions outlined above with regard to imperial Rome outside the Servian Walls and within a range of c.9 miles outside of them. Yet the conference seeks to address these questions by also studying other places and time periods.
More info here: https://bsr.ac.uk/erc-conference-reuniting-city-and-country-new-research-on-urban-and-suburban-socio-topographical-structures/
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Via Antonio Gramsci 61, 00197 Rome, Italy, Via Antonio Gramsci, 61, 00197 Roma RM, Italia,Rome, Italy
