1/x Thread: things from reading about pre-Columbian Mesoamerica that help me in studying planning.

1. Understanding the history of "mixed-use": Mesoamerican cities were packed with mixed use areas! Commerce and residential areas were closely tied, and cottage industries too...

2/x Which brings me to 2. City planning as a set of ideas exchanged across areas. Kaminaljuyu looked to Teotihuacan, but Tollan looked back to Maaya kaab for ideas on how the ceremonial complex interplayed with commerce interplayed with life - New Urbanism isn't new

3/x Nor is the idea of "working from home" or the idea of home as not being so sacrosanct. In pretty much every Pre-Columbian city we're finding out that house gardens were key to how cities fed themselves ( @SarahTaber_bww has cites for this in Aridoamerica and what's now the US)

4/x I should add here that we literally have a Classic-era town at Joya de Ceren (El Salvador) preserved from the seventh century and we see a lot of these things: house gardens, trade from afar, references to big cities near and far

5/x The importance of trade! The entire "local focus" of a lot of the Nostalgic Faux-Left is neatly torn apart by what one finds in sites up and down Mesoamerica from beyond. Yucatec macaws at Chaco Canyon, New Mexico turquoise in Jalisco, Caribbean shells in the Yucatan...

6/x And foodstuffs too! Elites could afford an interplay of local and imported food, allowing them to escape the tyranny of the local (h/t @rachellaudan here) . Marketplaces were very important, as were traders ( @DavidOBowles has some great tweets about this)

7/x I could go on, but I want to say two things here. One is that when we study planning, we need to cast a critical eye on everything - even the things we subscribe to, like New Urbanism and Smart Growth. They're not as new as we think, and who gets credit is deeply political.

8/x When I read a lot of this planning stuff, it's very striking how un-new these things are to anyone who's read about Mesoamerica. And how the reference points are so often European, even though Mesoamerica was light-years ahead of Europe on so many things!

9/x In that case I'm really adding to @plnzcourses' / Dean Saitta @UofDenver's amazing article about the Ancient Roots of New Urbanism: (h/t @casualbrasuell) https://www.planetizen.com/blogs/99183-ancient-roots-new-urbanism

10/x And the second thing is how as a planner, we're often not "innovating" in the sense that techbros talk about: rather, we're looking to make a better space for everyday life! And that includes looking very, very far back, to Tollan and Tenochtitlan and Teotihuacan...

11/11 Credits to @sandypsj , @ScavSheriff , @jacopocomin , @TamaraVelasquez , and @82_Streetcar for hearing me rant repeatedly about this over the past year.