Augusta McMahon explores Mesopotamian ’15-minute cities’

Professor Augusta McMahon explored the liveability of ancient cities in Third Places and Happiness: 15-Minute Cities in ancient Mesopotamia, this year’s Henry Sidgwick Memorial Lecture at Newnham College.

She drew on evidence of ancient Mesapotamian city life, relating it to more recent ideas of what makes a successful city in terms of the proximity of home, work and social spaces.

Professor McMachon said: “Cities in the ancient world and now provide employment opportunities, enable innovations and creativity but they are also crowded, stressful to navigate, unsanitary, unequal, and alienating. There must be compensations.”

One of those compensations is the social life and she related it to Oldenburg’s idea of the third place (1989): safe places that brought social introductions in an informal environment. In the UK they might be parks, pubs, cafes. (The first and second places being home and work.)

Mesopotamian cities – the world’s earliest urban settlements – model the perfect accessible ‘15-minute city’ so sought after by modern urban planners where home, work and social life are all withing easy reach.

In ancient Mesapotamia the stressful aspects of living in built up cities were mitigated by social spaces, ‘third places’ for community encounters and shared activities. These were largely the immediate shared street faced by neighbouring homes, where people could chat, oversee children playing, and more.

Inside homes meanwhile many women worked in textile production. In these ways, Professor McMahon argued, “Mesopotamian cities – the world’s earliest urban settlements – model the perfect accessible ‘15-minute city’ so sought after by modern urban planners where home, work and social life are all within easy reach.”

Augusta McMahon is Professor of Mesopotamian Archaeology in the Near Eastern Languages and Civilisations department and the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. She taught in the Department of Archaeology at Cambridge University from 1995 to 2022 and was a Fellow of Newnham College.

Henry Sidgwick was a prominent figure among Newnham’s founders, and a keen advocate of University reforms, including the gradual acceptance of women. In 1871 he risked renting a house in Cambridge for five female students attending the newly founded “lectures for ladies” in which he taught philosophy. From such a modest start grew Newnham College.