four lost cities 🗺

Annalee Newitz · Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age · 2021

A short review of the book Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age by Annalee Newitz. This is the second book I read by Newitz, the first one being Autonomous which is a nice near future scifi novel. I think Goodreads presented the cities book to me as another option by Newitz. A bit funny since this is a completely different beast being non-fiction. Anyway Newitz takes us on a trip to four lost cities. Two of them I had no idea about: Çatalhöyük in eastern Turkey and Cahokia, across the river from St Louis. The other two I had some ideas about from before: Angkor in present day Cambodia and Pompeii south of Naples in Italy. Newitz wants to kill an idea the civilzations die with their cities. She argues strongly that the civilization moves on and configures in new ways. The city in its form has been obsolete and thus its people slowly moves on to greener pastures. This was the case of all of these cities except Pompeii naturally - they continued to be habitated for a long time after their height and glory. In the end when Newitz wraps it all up she notes that today more people lives in cities than ever before and that the next transformation will be more brutal than those known previously. Mixing in a bit of climate crisis and totalitarian trends it becomes a quite dystopic picture she paints. On the positive side though humanity will survive - we have managed to move on and out from a variety of crisis in the past and will surely do so again this time.

The map above is from a nice collection of photos from the authors visits to the cities. All rights of course to the author!

Books about cities is a really nice thing. I remembered reading A History of Future Cities that I apparently read as way back as 2014. (Thank you goodreads for keeping track for me.) And a book I had forgotten about that is also really nice is The Great Cities in History.

written by fredrik at 2021-04-16