Four Lost Cities: The Secret History of the Urban Age
By Annalee Newitz
Cities rise and fall. History has shown us this time and time again.
Standing at West Baray in Angkor, it is immediately obvious that one end of the reservoir is extremely shallow compared to the other. This is not because the engineers at the time did not know how to design a proper reservoir. The King wanted a reservoir that was aligned East-West for religious reasons. This compromised the hydrology of the location and hence resulted in several instances of flooding.
Religion is just another name for politics, and the cities that we live in today are a result of the politics that go into their design.
West Baray
In the book, the author covers the rise and fall of four cities.
- Çatalhöyük in Turkey
- Pompei in Italy
- Angkor Wat in Cambodia
- Cahokia in the USA
She chronicles the lives of those who lived in these cities. The social systems and the manner in which they influenced the development and the rise of these locations. And finally, the manner in which those very choices drove the demise of these cities.
It is often assumed that the people of Pompei left the city after the Volcano, but that was not the case; the city tried to rise again. Given the class system of the city, the city would not be successful. Angkor was used to seasonal flooding caused by the poor engineering of their water infrastructure, but that resilience gave way at some point, and people were no longer willing to drag the city out of the mud.
In the seeds of the rise of any city are the clues to its demise.
Every city from the past has been actively and knowingly abandoned by the very people who lived there.
She ends the book by saying - in 500 years’ time, some archaeologists will explore the streets of San Francisco, snorkelling through a city submerged underwater. They would wonder about the lives that people led, the classes that existed, where certain people were allowed to go and what they did in their daily lives.