San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Books: ‘Lost Cities’ explores how ancient civilizations fell.
It can’t happen here, thought the United States. Other cities, other empires might fail but not ours.
The Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6 revealed how shaky a foundation that belief rests on, but the riot was just the culmination of years of complacence. Years of kicking the can down the road on reform, whether of education, justice or the environment. And of believing that the descent of civilizations is something that the U.S. is immune to.
Journalist and science fiction writer Annalee Newitz harbors no such naivete. Civilizations rise and fall, and it has always been thus.
Newitz’s new book, “Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age,” delves into the ascent and collapse of four ancient civilizations that “suffered from prolonged periods of political instability coupled with environmental crisis.” What they all had in common was the problem of “managing an enormous piece of humanbuilt infrastructure in a constantly changing environment.” Sound familiar? Newitz (who uses genderneutral pronouns) began this project with the intent of showing how future cities might last forever if they were designed better. But the suicide of their estranged father set the author on a different path. Newitz leaned into loss, both their own and those experienced by Catalhoyuk in Turkey (7100 B.C. to 5700 B.C.), Pompeii in southern Italy (established in the fourth century B.C.), Cambodia’s Angkor (founded in A.D. 1113), and Cahokia (A.D. 10501350), a preColumbian civilization located in what is now … St. Louis?! This led to larger questions about not just how cities and cultures rebuild but also
how we fail to learn from our mistakes at our peril.
The four cities are separated by time, distance and culture, but in them, Newitz sees the commonality of centurieslong transformation. These places saw massive influxes of immigrant populations, faced epic natural disasters, built political systems and created rich cultures. Before the cities were lost, Newitz writes, they “were home to thriving civilizations whose dark futures were by no means fated.”
Newitz is interested in the everyday lives of the common urban dwellers: What led them to agree to live together in such close proximity? How did cities grow to accommodate the changes in culture, environment and climate that came with urban settlement? Their research pokes at the very idea of cities being “lost” — there are patterns of contraction but also expansion, of abandonment but also of return.
I once had a wonderful professor who illuminated historical figures for us by explaining how they might have behaved at the dinner table. Newitz is similarly excellent at painting a picture of “life on the street” — the lively taberna culture in Pompeii for example, the farmers of Cahokia or the struggle of animal herders in Catalhoyuk.
Centuries ago, as now, cities
were growing but not necessarily planning for the right things. City leaders, Newitz writes, “put resources into beautiful spectacles for political reasons,” rather than providing things like good roads and functioning sewers. As a result, “cities may look aweinspiring but aren’t particularly resilient against disasters.” Whether we’re talking about Egyptian pyramids or the sealevelrisevulnerable Chase Center in San Francisco, this dilemma persists. Does it have to?
Newitz doesn’t think so. In
their previous book of nonfiction, “Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction,” they argued that we need to learn to think beyond our own lifespans. Most of humanity lives in places that are “destined to die,” and we’re terrible at doing much about it. We’re not the first (and won’t be the last) to do this. But what’s unique about Newitz is that this knowledge doesn’t drive them to despair.
“Things are going to get weird,” they wrote in “Scatter, Adapt.” “There may be horrific disasters, and many lives will be lost. But don’t worry. As long as we keep exploring, humanity is going to survive.”
I’m glad that Newitz’s book took the turn that it did. Making cities futureproof isn’t necessarily a design problem or an engineering one (though no small amount of tech startups would beg to differ). Throughout history, rulers, zealots and princes have believed they held the secret to building the perfect city, but no such thing exists. Cities, as Newitz argues, are “ongoing social experiments.” Humans are visceral and unpredictable, and cities are interesting and compelling because of that, not in spite of it.
In this book and in their fiction as well, Newitz believes with all their heart in the potential anyone has to change the world for the better. Resilient cities will embrace the notion of being in a constant state of evolution. They’re not lost; they’re more likely regenerating.