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Miscellany
Here are two miscellaneous factlets that have caught my eye recently. First up is On The Public Record, who is reading The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover From Disaster:
DAMN! Cities NEVER give up. Like, ever. You cannot raze a city so bad that it goes away. Like, some study showed that between 1100 and 1800, only forty cities stopped existing. I suppose that makes sense. I mean, the fact of a city not existing is so powerful that we remember it forever: Atlantis, Babylon, whatever that one was that got volcanoed. I’ve been wondering if New Orleans and Galveston will be the leading edge of a new era of cities vanishing. We’ll know in a generation, I guess.
Well, there's always Carthage. It can be done as long as you're single-minded enough about the project. Next up is Mark Kleiman, exploding an urban myth about marijuana cultivation:
Cannabis is not "the largest cash crop in California." That zombie statistic has a history: during the collapse of the lumbering industry in the early 1980s, the Ag Department county extension agent in Humboldt County, which grows timber and pot, was so angry about the suffering he saw around him due to unemployment among loggers that when he filled out his annual estimates of crop-by-crop revenues for his county he listed pot as #1, using a completely made-up number. Dale Gieringer of California NORML then projected that out nationally to show that cannabis was the nation's #2 cash crop, ahead of soybeans but behind corn (or maybe it was the other way around.) Since then, another NORMALista named Michael Gettman has produced even more fantastic numbers. In fact, the Abt Associates estimate put the total retail value of the cannabis trade at about $10b, about 15% of the total illicit-drug trade. That's retail price, not farmgate price. And not all of that is grown domestically; some of it comes from Mexico, from Canada, and from Jamaica.
No special axe to grind on either one of these things. Just thought I'd share.
UPDATE: Jeez, bust one urban legend and propagate another. Bad blogger. In comments, coyote says:
The myth about salting the earth, etc, for Carthage is just that — a myth. Yes, the Romans trashed it, but it was such a logical trading spot that it was rebuilt, and by 400 or 500 AD it was a wealthy city again.
OK, so Carthage doesn't count. Or does it? If you destroy a city, drive out all the people, reduce everything to rubble, and then repopulate it a few decades later with your own people, is it really the same city? Or is it a different city of the same name in the same place? Hmmm. Is there a philosopher in the house? Did Shakespeare really write all those plays? Or some other guy named Shakespeare?
Why cities seldom die
One reason is that cities form in certain places for reasons: maybe where two rivers join, or near a good harbor, or on a trade route between two valuable products. The reason doesn't go away after a town is destroyed.
New Orleans will survive because there is a need for a city at the mouth of the Mississippi River, but it may not need nearly as many people.
The myth about salting the
The myth about salting the earth, etc, for Carthage is just that - a myth. Yes, the Romans trashed it, but it was such a logical trading spot that it was rebuilt, and by 400 or 500 AD it was a wealthy city again.
Short memory?
>>we remember it forever: ... whatever that one was that got volcanoed
I guess forever just isn't as long as it used to be.
--Larry
two cities attacked with early atomic bombs have also survived
The two cities attacked with early atomic bombs have also survived, but they were not attacked with hydrogen bombs.
Is someone sharing their Humboldt stash?
And as for cannabis
From other things I've read $10 billion might be a little low, but it's the right order of magnitude.
It's interesting to look at other cash crop values in California. Corn = $1 billion. Rice = 0.6 billion. Corn, grain, barley, winter wheat, durum wheat, all rice, all types of hay, and dry edible beans combined $4.7 billion.
We don't know how much of the $10 Billion for marijuana is cash crop value and how much is payment for imported stuff, but there is no reason to toss out the claim that it is a substantial cash crop in California.
new orleans
I was just in NOLA this past weekend, and it appears to be largely recovering. I can't speak for the low-income neighborhoods as I didn't visit there and do not follow the issue closely, but the city in general did not appear to be on the verge of vanishing.
Galveston, on the other hand...
There are some cities that
There are some cities that probably shouldn't have been built in the first place, like New Orleans or most of the huge desert cities in the South West.
Beavis's Blog
Damn! That Public Record guy is, like, writing like he's stupid or something. It's like Beavis has grown up and totally gotten a job.
What does the drought actually DO?
Now I’m thinking that I maybe need to understand...
Kevin, are you quoting this guy just to remind us of what a good writer you are? We already know.
There was a little while in
tagged as:- result
There was a little while in CA that in some counties - especially the scrub and lumber ones - that it was their #1 cash crop. But mostly that was because demand on whatever scant crops they did grow there was so weak.
Still, the whole war-on-some-people-who-use-drugs against various weeds and plants and pills gives me a bad taste in my mouth. It's legal to sell really bad tasting alcohol for people to get drunk, do millions of dollars in damages, lead to countless illnesses... Or smoking tobacco, same, less damages, more illnesses. But these other substances which injure a few smaller proportion of their users lead to incarceration?
I just don't get it. It just doesn't even make logical sense. Are you against drugs because of the temple of purity? Then why are candybars legal? Are you against drugs because they're intoxicants? Why is catnip, alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine legal? Are you against death and damages caused while intoxicated? Once again, caffeine and alcohol are legal, thousands of fires are started by smokers addicted to nicotine. Are you against death and illness? Again, alcohol and nicotine kill many more of their users than many of these hugely illicit drugs. Are you against the tradition? Meth simulacrums are common in many middle east (Yemen, Africa) cultures - but not meth as we know it, but they're still illegal. Various harmless psychedelics to dangerous hallucinogens are all illegal in the US, even though they've been used continuously in cultures and art we display publicly and proudly across the nation.
It just doesn't make sense. There's no why or reason or logic to it all.
OK, so Carthage doesn't
OK, so Carthage doesn't count.
Troy?
Eden? (never been found)
Some have really vanished.
I can think of a few. Usually it is because of conquest. Troy, Persepolis, Chaco canyon, come to mind. Sometimes there is no going back.
Carthage
You know, rebuilding Carthage by 400AD isnt so impressive. That would be 500 years after the Punic Wars. A long time for a city to disappear. Would you count the grand city of the Hohokam civilization, which was abandoned due to ecological disaster in the 15th century AD, a persistent city just because Phoenix AZ was built on top of it?
SSJPabs -- Give me a break,
SSJPabs -- Give me a break, point taken about the Southwestern cities, but as others have noted, New Orleans is built on the most logical geographic site for a city.
I also can't imagine how horrible American music would be without New Orleans.
By the way, it's worth checking out the work of David Hummels at Purdue about the relationship between economics and geography. Very interesting.
"The City that Sank"
Port Royal was the major city of Jamaica for much of its early colonial history. Then it sank. Yeah, you read that right - then the city sank. Into the ocean. Earthquake. Now it's gone.
lost cities
You can have Troy, if you want, which faded away in Byzantine times when people apparently decided they just didn't care to live there anymore.
Or Ur, which was no longer inhabited by 500 BC due to climate change.
A city these days in an expensive investment to walk away from.
Carhage is still there
tagged as:- result
Not so fast. Carthage still exists. It is a suburb of Tunis. In fact, Tunis is really Carthage and it had a population of 1,200,000 in 2008.
See it's still there, just about where it always was.
http://maps.google.it/maps?near=carthage&q=carthage&f=p&btnG=Cerca+sulle+mappe&rl=1
This may be of use to you
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandoned_city
A couple of vanished cities
The ancient Armenian capital of Ani is pretty well gone: just a few shells of buildings standing around. Still, it has been 1000 years and earthquakes. There's a few others that time just moved on around, especially in the Americas where the Indians died out: Macchu Picchu, for example.
I understand there is a deserted modern city in Nagorno-Karabakh: Agdam, once home to 100,000 people.
Yeah, cities do die
Google "Indianola, Texas" or check out this rather good Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indianola,_Texas
I'm guessing the author of
I'm guessing the author of "Resilient City" didn't spend much time looking at cities in North and South American during his case study.
There were plenty of major
There were plenty of major trade cities that vanished during the Bronze Age Collapse (ca. 1200 BCE), a period marked by destruction on a vast scale. (One of the most famous, and haunting, is the city-state of Ugarit, in modern Syria -- only rediscovered in the 1920s.) Virtually every major city linked to a coastline has one or more destruction layers from that time period, and many of those cities simply vanished, with the inhabitants presumably murdered or dragged away to slavery. The collapse of systemic international trading links and hypothesized continued threats from sea-borne raiders probably contributed to the lack of rebuilding.
Of course, given the sheer scale of devastation during this period, it's probably more remarkable that so many cities recovered, not that so many vanished without further trace.
Dead Cities
I'm writing this from Flint, Michigan...
'nuff said?
I will never buy a device
I will never buy a device that allows a company to push deletes to stuff I have. If I pay for something, I want to be in control. Nagware on our PC's, popup ads in the browsers, locked cellphones. Enough of all this crap.