Why did scholars criticize Gideon Sjoberg’s single category of preindustrial cities?

Scholars criticized Gideon Sjoberg’s classification of the preindustrial city primarily because it suffered from overgeneralization. By collapsing diverse urban cultures into a single, undifferentiated category, Sjoberg conflated vastly different historical and social contexts—such as the cities of ancient empires and contemporary urban centers in the Third World.1

Furthermore, his model struggled to account for urban forms that did not align with his specific criteria. Rather than acknowledging these as significant varieties of urban culture, Sjoberg dismissed them as merely temporary or unusual variants of his preindustrial type. While his work was considered a major improvement over previous, more ethnocentric definitions, this tendency to force disparate historical experiences into one rigid framework limited the cross-cultural validity of his research.1