Willet/Geography of Urbanism, 7. Epilogue

The epilogue ties the observations made and conclusions drawn from the patterns of cities in Asia Minor together and pushes the narrative to the grander scale of the Roman Empire, as the patterns observed here are unique in the Roman East, and Asia Minor was one of the most urbanized areas of the Empire. As this is clearly not a result of Roman power alone, but rather a pattern that to an extent began to grow during the Hellenistic period and continues to exist in the Byzantine empire, the epilogue advocates more long term research on ancient urbanism, in which particularly the social developments (i.e. the shift of the economy to a state of proto-capitalism) and the ecological developments (changes in the climate) help to explain the observed patterns better than previous models.