Building Fairer Cities: New Insights From Mohenjo-daro

Conor here: “Inequality is a choice.”

By Adam S. Green is a lecturer in sustainability at the University of York. Originally published at the Coalition for Archaeological Synthesis. Cross posted from Wiki Observatory.

Inequality and Urbanism

Today’s cities are hotbeds of inequality. Urban real estate is one of the most expensive kinds of land in the world. It attracts billionaires looking to store their wealth and hedge funds looking to garner predictable returns: New York’s avenues, Paris’s thoroughfares, and Dubai’s dazzling skyscrapers are great at making the rich richer. But they raise the cost of urban life for everyone else.

And yet, plenty of people who are not rich flock to cities, driving the ongoing expansion of urbanism across the globe. In the 21st century, humans became an urban species, with more than 50 percent of the global population living in urban areas. This is because the benefits of living in a city—the opportunities provided by dense networks of interaction, cultural production, and heaps of concentrated resources—outweigh the immense cost of urban life. Inequality is the price we pay for the myriad opportunities that cities bring.

But what if we don’t have to pay this cost? Archaeological evidence from South Asia is rewriting that story of urbanism. My new article in Antiquity reveals that inequality was low in one of South Asia’s first cities and that it decreased as its citizens prospered.

The Measure of an Ancient City

In 2021, I joined the GINI Project, a working group devoted to investigating the long-term dynamics of inequality using archaeological data, a project supported by the Coalition for Archaeological Synthesis.

The idea was to systematically compare evidence from archaeological sites like Mohenjo-daro, an early city that seemed to defy the tradeoffs of urbanism, with comparable data from other time periods, to better understand why inequality is skyrocketing today.

The GINI project adopted the “Gini coefficient,” an economic statistic that captures the level of inequality within the distribution of a particular variable, like income or wealth, in a given population. When all the wealth or income is concentrated in a tiny portion of the population, you get a Gini coefficient of 1. When it’s more evenly distributed, you get a Gini coefficient closer to 0. Archaeologists often apply the Gini coefficient to house areas, which provide a reasonable, but far from perfect, proxy of wealth or income within a given society.

I collaborated with Cameron Petrie and Iqtedar Alam, both based at the University of Cambridge, to measure all of Mohenjo-daro’s 309 excavated houses, contributing these measurements to the GINI database, which includes similar measurements from more than 50,000 residences found throughout the archaeological record. These measurements, and the Gini coefficients we can get from them, tell a striking story.

Every House a Palace

Mohenjo-daro was built more than 4,000 years ago in what is today the Sindh Province of Pakistan. It was one of the first cities in the world, emerging after a 1,000 years of village development throughout the broader Indus River Basin, forming part of the expansive Indus (or Harappan) civilization, which stretched from the Arabian Sea to the foothills of the Himalaya.

Excavations at the Mohenjo-daro began nearly a 100 years ago, uncovering the foundations of hundreds of structures arranged along wide streets. What archaeologists found astonished them—a massive public bath, the foundations of an assembly hall, and huge foundation platforms that could have provided a defense against Indus River flooding.

But it was the city’s numerous houses—replete with second stories and private bathing platforms—that made the biggest impression. The first-ever report on the archaeology of the Indus civilization opens with a description of Mohenjo-daro’s “commodious” and “well-built” houses, which rivaled the palaces seen in Egypt or Mesopotamia. Excavators have documented more than 300 residences from Mohenjo-daro, some dating to the earliest phases of the city’s development.

Further research has revealed that the people who built these houses were masters of Bronze Age technology, producing a huge range of sophisticated objects, like small statuettes, beads and bangles, which could be widely distributed amongst its populace. As I’ve argued elsewhere, there is tons of qualitative evidence that Mohenjo-daro reaped the benefits of urbanism without creating a massive wealth gap between houses.

Ever More Equal

By the numbers, Mohenjo-daro was far more equal than other ancient cities. If you calculate a Gini coefficient from all 309 houses at Mohenjo-daro, you get 0.44. We can compare that number to other ancient cities in the GINI database, like that from Knossos in Ancient Greece, famous for its palaces, where the Gini coefficient was a striking 0.86, or Ur and Ugarit in neighboring Mesopotamia, where Gini coefficients were greater than 0.60. The city clearly followed a different trajectory than many others.

However, 0.44 is pretty far from 0; does it really support the idea that Mohenjo-daro was egalitarian?

Comparing the oldest houses to the newest ones reveals an even more interesting story. Mohenjo-daro’s earliest houses, those found in the deepest levels of its DK-G South Neighborhood, had a Gini coefficient of 0.39. These date to the earliest periods of the city’s occupation, perhaps around 2500 BC. Each subsequent wave of house construction lowered the Gini coefficient, and by the city’s latest levels, its Gini coefficient was only 0.23, the same as we find in the world’s earliest farming villages.

Mohenjo-daro was not only more egalitarian than other ancient cities, it also became more equal over time.

Governing an Egalitarian City

We don’t know exactly how Mohenjo-daro’s citizens kept a lid on inequality. Was it an effect of the broader economic system, which perhaps gave all the city’s residents equivalent access to land and fuel for making bricks? Was it more active, perhaps with communities placing an upper limit on the size of residences, or punishing people who tried to make ostentatious houses? We can’t say for sure.

What we do know is that there is strong evidence for governance at Mohenjo-daro. Its houses used the same brick ratios—a level of standardization unprecedented in the Bronze Age. And the city’s houses were full of standardization stamp seals, tools for carrying out different kinds of economic transactions, as well as weights and measures.

These small tools had big effects, facilitating trade and communication across an expansive area. This penchant for setting and agreeing to shared protocols is evident in Mohenjo-daro’s infrastructure as well. The city boasted one of the world’s earliest systems of public drainage, and its houses conformed to a public street plan. This street plan developed over time. At the same time, the Gini coefficient of houses decreased. It does not seem far-fetched to suggest that the same set of rules produced the city’s street plan and leveled differences between residences.

There is also evidence that governance was inclusive or democratic. Public structures, like the Pillared Hall, which could have allowed hundreds of people to deliberate and make decisions about the city, likely helped facilitate this governance, perhaps providing a forum for discussing the distribution of residence area within the city. Archaeologists are becoming more and more aware of such early forms of democratic governance across the globe.

Prospering in a Fairer Society

Mohenjo-daro’s declining inequality also correlates with an increase in the median size of houses, a proxy for productivity in past societies. As inequality dropped, the total resources people could invest in their housing increased. The city appears to have prospered, a pattern corroborated by claims that later levels at Mohenjo-daro have more evidence for craft production than earlier levels. Ensuring that public goods were maintained and ensuring equitable access to housing seems to have been deliberate.

Still, I don’t think Mohenjo-daro’s declining Gini coefficient was an accident—it’s far more likely that its communities made rules that actively shaped the distribution of housing in the city, and that those same rules channeled labor and resources into goods that could be enjoyed by everyone.