![]() ![]() ![]() In his 2005 book, Collapse, Jared Diamond argued that urban death results from the interaction of environmental calamity and war or social upheaval, which periodically overwhelms apparently solid societies, driving them to extinction. Cities tend to scrabble back from disaster and attain even greater glory, as London did after the Great Fire of 1666, Chicago after its 1871 conflagration, San Francisco after the earthquake of 1906, and Berlin after the Allied bombings of World War II. ![]() Norton), convulsive destruction is rare, and even more rarely definitive. It’s harder to grasp how that passage unfolds, except, perhaps, in the form of some violent upheaval - an earthquake, a pestilence, an alien invasion, burning everything in a matter of minutes.Īnd yet, as Annalee Newitz writes in a new book, Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age (W.W. These sites make it easy to envision the future obliteration of Washington, D.C., or Los Angeles. How does a great city die? How does a place that generations saw as a vibrant center - essential, teeming, terrifying, grand - become a sad and silent field? I’ve always found the relics of mass abandonment creepily thrilling: Mayan pyramids pushing through the jungle canopy at Calakmul in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, raucous with monkeys the ochre-and-gold remains of Morgantina, a gracious Greek enclave high in the Sicilian hills Bodie, California, once the home of 10,000 miners and scroungers and now just vacant houses and taverns parching in the desert sun. ![]()
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