transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:03] 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.

Speaker 2:
[00:44] Hi guys, thanks so much for having me.

Speaker 1:
[00:47] What does democratic design or democratic architecture look like?

Speaker 2:
[00:53] Oh yeah, I don't know if we can call the architecture democratic, but it certainly reflects kind of ethos in our institutions, which themselves are democratic. And so when we're thinking of democracy, I think what we're thinking of are our places that are inclusive, that can hold a lot of people that are designed to facilitate deliberation and conversation.

Speaker 1:
[01:21] Give me some examples from the sites that you looked at.

Speaker 2:
[01:24] 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, right? 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, right? No one is necessarily front and center, right? 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 it really reflects basic logic of decision making in that deliberation and consensus being more important than top-down action.

Speaker 1:
[02:22] What about plazas or like the big piazza? How do you read that?

Speaker 2:
[02:26] 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 Muskogee Creek Nation. And square grounds are, you know, center to social and political life. They're where people gather to reaffirm, you know, relationships and strengthen bonds between people and eat great food. And looking at things like the size of plazas, again, can tell us, you know, who's meant to be in that space? How many people are meant to get together? You know, is the whole village around the plaza, or is the plaza associated maybe with a palace, right? Which could maybe tell us something different about what the purpose of this open space is, right?

Speaker 1:
[03:22] Yeah, I know I'm getting into the dusty details here, but like, is it a correlation? Like you see, you know, 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 was, there were democratic principles at play?

Speaker 2:
[03:45] Yeah, I think they certainly are a great feature for us to identify and begin as archaeologists begin to interpret these societies as more collectively or democratically oriented. You know, on their own, they don't tell us everything, but I think they're really great hints.

Speaker 1:
[04:08] And what about on the flip side? Is there architecture that suggests autocratic government?

Speaker 2:
[04:16] 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 is the prominence and centrality of palaces. It may be things like the, you know, wildly un-proportional 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, you know, decision-making system that we have going on here.

Speaker 1:
[04:57] How would the White House read?

Speaker 2:
[04:59] This is, this is interesting. I was actually thinking about this this morning. Because, you know, 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, right? And this is not unlike how archaeologists have approached the past in many ways, right? We find a big pyramid or a huge palace, maybe, and we're like, wow, they have a lot of power, right? But once we start maybe looking broader and kind of contextualizing this, right? We find like, hey, right down the road from this White House, there's actually a much larger building and it has way more seats. And, you know, this is the same where I work in the southeast, where, okay, we have maybe earthen mounds, where there may be important people living on top of them. But, you know, right next to the mound, there's a big round structure. And so we find, you know, with the White House, obviously we know about our system of governance. We know it's based on checks and balances in these different arms of the government. And we actually find those same kinds of checks and balances in the archaeological record, too.

Speaker 1:
[06:21] Yeah, in theory, in theory, that's how it works. Okay, so you looked at over 30 places. Did you have big take-homes about the origins of democracy or how it was practiced?

Speaker 2:
[06:34] Oh, yeah, I think so, yeah. And 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.

Speaker 1:
[06:45] Hit us, hit us with some hope.

Speaker 2:
[06:47] Yeah, we found that democracy has really deep roots, right? 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, right? 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, right? And I think we could take this farther. And in the paper, we cite this quote from Applebaum, where they note that, you know, autocracy isn't a genetic trait. It's culture and language and religion. They don't produce autocracy or democracy, right? 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, right? We have to work really hard at it. But I think the archaeological record shows that people have always worked really hard at this and have been really successful at it.

Speaker 1:
[08:10] Well, which came first? I mean, does design for, you know, people being in a collective lead to democracy or does democracy determine design?

Speaker 2:
[08:20] I think the design is purposeful and it's meant to facilitate an idea of a system. I approach these kinds of things as, you know, why was this structure built? Like what was happening at this time? Like, why is it now where I work in the southeastern United States? You know, 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. You know, instead of defaulting towards the easy, you know, the quote unquote easy route of autocracy, they decided, like, we're going to, you know, build new institutions as a response to 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.

Speaker 1:
[09:51] That's a hopeful note to end on.

Speaker 2:
[09:53] I, yeah, like I said, I like to come at a lot of this as, like, very hopeful.

Speaker 1:
[09:57] Look, I'm never going to look at a circular building the same way. So thank you.

Speaker 2:
[10:01] Excellent.

Speaker 1:
[10:03] 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? Science Friday is supported by Planet Visionaries, the podcast created in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. If you're feeling overwhelmed by climate headlines, here's something different, a show about solutions. It's called Planet Visionaries, hosted by Alex Honnold, who you might recognize as the climber from Free Solo and Skyscraper Live. Now Alex is turning his focus to the biggest challenge of all, protecting our planet. Every episode brings you stories that aim to prove climate optimism isn't naïve. It's a strategy. You'll hear from experts and storytellers who are reshaping the future in practical and inspiring ways. Upcoming guests include Grégoire Courteen and Zocheline Bloch, a neuroscientist and neurosurgeon duo advancing spinal cord injury treatment with groundbreaking neural implants. Episodes span the globe from Arctic scientists and Amazon forest guardians to entrepreneurs re-imagining fashion and food systems. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch on Apple, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you're listening to this podcast.

Speaker 3:
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Speaker 1:
[12:04] On Science Friday, we talk about the science, tech and health stories changing our world from a pancreatic cancer vaccine, to data centers in space, to AI and art, to the real science behind cold plunges. We talk with world experts on issues listeners really care about. When you sponsor Science Friday, you connect with curious, engaged audiences who care deeply about discovery, innovation and evidence-based insight. To find out more about sponsorship opportunities, visit sponsorship.wnyc.org. 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 Dr. Jeff Hou, Head of the Architecture Department at the National University of Singapore. Hey, Jeff, thanks for talking today.

Speaker 4:
[13:02] Yeah, thank you. Nice to join.

Speaker 1:
[13:04] 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 just thousands of years ago?

Speaker 4:
[13:14] Yeah. I think the role of public space is still critical to democracy. If we look at how democracy work, so people have to express their opinion. They need to gather, they need to communicate, need to engage in debate. They need to make their presence known to the state. And so public space still play 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 kind of virtually online, on your device. And today they are just as powerful as the actual physical space. And in some way, it became even more kind 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 comes with surveillance. So even though the space may be there, people are not able to gather. And so at the moment, an interesting kind of historical moment in which we're experiencing the sort of disconnect between space and what they're meant to perform, and then how democracy work, both in physical realm and in the online kind of realm. And that's the whole kind of purpose of kind of public space become sort of diminished.

Speaker 1:
[15:14] Well, what's that like for an architect? Because I assume you are interested in the physical.

Speaker 4:
[15:18] 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, your digital device. And also at the same time, the same kind of digital infrastructure can also stop people from gathering. So, for example, the state can just shut down the internet and stop people from communicating with each other. And so things are more complicated today.

Speaker 1:
[16:06] When you're traveling, can you read a new place to figure out any clues about the values of that, you know, of that society?

Speaker 4:
[16:17] 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, you know, the center of the city is still the palace, right? 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, right? These places do tell stories, and stories from the past, from the present, and where things are going. They're really fascinating to look at.

Speaker 1:
[17:15] That's so fascinating. I mean, what are the modern, in modern autocratic societies? Is there telltale architecture? Is it just cameras? What do you look for?

Speaker 4:
[17:27] Yeah. So it's hard to tell now. So that line has blur 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 so-called liberal democracy. But it doesn't suggest how the spaces are actually governed. So there's a kind of disconnect between the appearance of spaces and then how they actually function in the active democracy. And this is how the state can control a narrative, how they can control what people remember, what people know. And so I think that comes back to the question of democracy, is that a public space, a functioning public space is where this kind of story can be told. And that required not just the actual physical artifact, but also the actual conversation, right? 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, you know, when things have been erased, people have been marginalized, and stories have not been told.

Speaker 1:
[19:08] That's a great point. And I think it's really interesting because it suggests that, you know, even if a space looks a certain way, like 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?

Speaker 4:
[19:28] Absolutely.

Speaker 1:
[19:29] Dr. Jeff Hou, Head of the Architecture Department at the National University of Singapore. Thank you for joining me today. I appreciate it.

Speaker 4:
[19:36] Thank you.

Speaker 1:
[19:37] This episode was produced by Rasha Aridi. And if you like the show, please rate and review us wherever you get your podcast. 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. On Science Friday, we talk about the science, tech, and health stories changing our world, from a pancreatic cancer vaccine, to data centers in space, to AI and art, to the real science behind cold plunges. We talk with world experts on issues listeners really care about. When you sponsor Science Friday, you connect with curious, engaged audiences who care deeply about discovery, innovation, and evidence-based insight. To find out more about sponsorship opportunities, visit sponsorship.wnyc.org.