Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age

 

Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age by Annalee Newitz is an informative and entertaining exploration of how cities rise and fall.

Newitz walks us through some obvious cases, like Pompeii, and those that are less well-know, like the city of the mound building people, called Cahokia, in the Saint Louis area; at its peak it numbered thirty-thousand residents, larger than contemporary, medieval Paris.

We all think and feel as if we are living in a closing age.  Newtiz certainly does, and has written of this topic before.  Their message in this book is more sanguine: the people of Cahokia, for instance, did not just up and die.  They scattered from the city when, for various debatable reasons, until it was fully abandoned.  The same goes for us.  Newtiz sees the human future as less urban, and more contracted.  They try to give us hope, but the message is still unsettling.

In a wider sense are we really doomed, or has every generation of people through the end was near?