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The author lost me at > Cities are nearly immortal; though they decline, they rarely die. Cities great and small die all the time. Ur died, Babylon died. SF w
by dmitryminkovsky 8y ago
The author lost me at
> Cities are nearly immortal; though they decline, they rarely die.
Cities great and small die all the time. Ur died, Babylon died. SF will die. Cities die when their purpose no longer justifies their expense. And the purpose of most cities is concentrating people to facilitate trade. But increasingly there’s nothing to do in SF, especially for the masses. If people don’t figure out something for these people to do, SF will definitely die.
- notsofastbuddy 8y agoYour examples are more than 2000 years old.
- dmitryminkovsky 8y agoThat was for dramatic effect, if you will ;). SF isn't exactly a legendary human habitation like Ur or Babylon. There are thousands of cities that have come and gone since Ur and Babylon, just because they stopped "making sense" their inhabitants.
- tntn 8y ago> die all the time > ur died, Babylon died. Your two examples are from 2-3 millennia ago. I would think if cities "die all the time," you would have more recent examples. Maybe it proves the author correct that the first cities that came to mind are from 2500 years ago?
- dmitryminkovsky 8y agoGood criticism of my post. Here's a more extensive list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_city https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_city. So when the author writes "they rarely die" it seems to me like the author has a serious historical blind spot. But why do we need to only talk about "great cities?" Why aren't all the "ghost towns" of the wild west a good enough example?
- tntn 8y agoBecause people tend to distinguish between "cities" and "towns." There are a lot of ghost towns, but few ghost cities. Once a settlement becomes large enough to be called a city, it is rare for it to die.
- asdf21 8y agoExactly. Are Detroit and Baltimore dead? May as well be, for most intents and purposes.
- freehunter 8y agoYeah, the 20th and 23rd most populous cities in the US are "dead". The millions of people that live in Detroit and Baltimore, the tens of millions who rely on those cities for their livelihood, all the people who live there and the children being born there, all dead. I feel like sometimes people don't read their own comments before they click "reply".
- wonderwonder 8y agoI think this issue / attitude is a major problem with the US. Both Detroit and Baltimore have over 600k people living there, a lot of whom don't have the option to just pack up and go. To claim the cities are dead is a disservice to the very real adults and children living there. If the nation dropped its war on drugs and instead waged a war on poverty those cities would be able to thrive in a generation or two.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- whateversclever 8y agoThe United States began its War on Poverty in 1964, prior to the War on Drugs. It's been running for more than 50 years https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiswoodhill/2014/03/19/the-war-on-poverty-wasnt-a-failure-it-was-a-catastrophe/#27eab7b6f49d https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiswoodhill/2014/03/19/the-wa...
- freehunter 8y agoThose cities were more like nations and the city fell when the civilization did. If we're using Ur and Babylon in reference to the complete abandonment of SF, we would need the entire American nation to collapse and be abandoned as well. Without that, SF will "die" the way Rome did or the way Detroit did. Not the way Ur or Babylon did.
- dmitryminkovsky 8y agoI'm sorry, I should have provided more context. Here's a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_city https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_city that includes the kinds of cities I'm thinking of. Many of these cities declined and depopulated due to climate change, economic factors, etc. Ie the same kinds of factors that are affecting SF and Detroit right now. Cities don't just die because their nation falls.
- freehunter 8y agoHow many of those were from post-industrial societies in a stable developed nation with a population of nearly a million people supporting a metro area of nearly 10 million people? Because what I'm seeing on that list is ghost towns, nomadic civilizations, or a complete civilization collapse. What I don't see is a city the size of San Fransisco in a civilization as powerful as the United States of America completely collapsing and disappearing from the face of the planet like Ur or Babylon.