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Cities dying is nothing new. The Old World is full of abandoned cities. Some get reborn but many just get covered over by deserts, grazing land and forests.
www.city-journal.org
For some of us, a vanishing few, this is not a new phenomenon. It duplicates the flight to suburbia, but on a grander scale.
Consder: World War One changed the way we saw the world - politically, economically, technically, socially - authority died and touched off years of warfare. WWI was followed immediately by the Spanish Flu which killed off millions more than were killed during WWI. Henry Ford's car started the move from city centre to country estates. WW2 destroyed many cities requiring them to be rebuilt, with superhighways connecting them and low density commuter suburbs.
In North America cities had been spared the destruction of WWI and WWII but the citizens were strongly affected by the Spanish Flu and previous plagues and pestilence. When the opportunity came to flee to their own individual fortresses in suburbia and travel in their personal 60 mph cocoons listening to their radio stations they jumped at it. They abandoned their tenements, their churches and their extended families.
Model T - Commodore 64
WWI - September11th
Spanish Flu - Covid 19
Highways - Internet
How many ancient cities were abandoned due to plague and pestilence caused by too many people in too small a space and too much filth?
About 150 AD Rome was at its height. There were over a million inhabitants in Rome where Antontinus Pius of Nimes in southern France was emperor. He was occupying Britain as far north as the Highland Line while squabbling over Baghdad with the Persians. The Mediterranean basin was home to 75,000,000 people. The economy was booming as evidenced by the lead dust found in ice cores in Greenland. The lead dust came from the Spanish Silver mines that produced Lead as a byproduct. Or perhaps they were Lead mines that produced Silver as a byproduct. Either way they underpinned the Mediterranean economy. And the weather was warm.
And then it got cold. The Roman Climactic Optimum ended. In Mesopotamia, where the Romans and Persians where having their debates a plague broke out in 165 AD and killed off the Roman invaders. The survivors returned to their homes and inoculated the rest of the Mediterranean basin. Including Rome. That pulse lasted until about 189 by most estimates. That plague killed off some 7,000,000 people across the Roman empire. Up to 1/3 of the population in places. In Rome up to 2000 people a day were dying in 189. 5 days - 10,000 people. 50 days 100,000 people. 50 days and 10% of the 1,000,000 inhabitants of Rome. And the plague lasted for 24 years - 8,760 days. Greenland Ice Core lead pollution fell off for the next five centuries and didn't really start recovering until 640 AD. By some estimates the recovery didn't recover until 900 AD. Sporadic resurgences of plague suppressed any incipient economic recoveries and demand for silver.
In 249 the Plague of Cyprian broke out. It lasted until 270. It also drove the Greenland Ice Core lead levels to their lowest since 900 BC and the later years of the Phoenician-Carthaginian economy.
That dying destroyed not just armies but authority and taxpayers. The Romans invited wandering Germans from the Baltic to fill their taxpaying vacuum and their hollow army. The Germans came.
Concurrently the Baltic had become less attractive as its coastal marshes flooded and the Germans went a wandering, taking whatever jobs they could find. the Burgundians, Scandinavian Germans from the island of Bornholm in the Baltic packed up and left - joining the wandering in search of dry land. They washed up in the upper Rhine, just over the Alps from Milan as foederati. Rome also started hiring Frisians and the rest of Beowulf's Baltic buddies, the Angles, Saxons, Goths and Swedes, to man Hadrian's Wall at places like Hexham and Dumfries. But that is digressing.
Back to the plague and Rome.
In the middle of all this death and dying and job loss and cold weather and hunger the politicians were blamed. The Five Good Emperors were followed by the 193 AD year of Five Emperors and then the 238 AD year of Six Emperors after Rome's German army mutinied over poor wages. An unstable anarchy prevailed for over a century, from 165 to Diocletian's reforms in 286 AD.
And Rome was replaced.
Milan, facing the Adriatic, became the center of Western Administration.
Another thing that the death and dying spawned was a whole raft of new religions as people lost faith in their old gods. And hermits headed out into the boonies to live long and peaceful lives. Unfortunately for them their isolation didn't last long as people from the cities soon followed their examples.
By the time Augustine of Carthage was moaning about Germans sacking Rome and his hometown (strangely a city previously deleted by the Romans) in 410 Rome was struggling to exist. That struggle wasn't helped when Milan was abandoned for Ravenna in 402.
By 400 AD the cold weather was getting colder and the Late Antique Little Ice Age started. And the Rhine started to regularly freeze over in the winter. Food supplies became shorter. People were encouraged by conditions to disperse, cross the ice looking for useful squats and freeholds, rely on themselves, hunt and gather more. They couldn't rely on free issues of daily bread, wine and olive oil. Or trips to the Coliseum.
Rome was sacked by Galla Placidia's Goths under Alaric in 410, threatened by her daughter Honoria's Huns under Attila in 451 and her great-niece Licinia Eudoxia's Vandals under Geiseric in 455. Concurrently Hengest and Horsa, Anglo-Saxon Frisians of some sort established the current Germanic regime in Britain.
And the cold weather brought more famines and more plagues.
In 547 the Justinian plague spread across both the Med and the Baltic. Those plagues lasted in cycles as long as the cold weather and the famines. And people continued to disperse.
In 547 Totila, another Goth, evacuated Rome - emptied it - reduced its population to zero.
Rome was no more.
By 549 Rome was reborn as people started to trickle back into it. But recovery was impeded by continuing wars, lawlessness in Europe due to the lack of an Imperium over the dispersed population, poor harvests, famines and more plagues.
Those plagues continued until the weather turned warmer and facilitated the rise of the Carolingian and Mohammedan Imperia about 800 AD and modern cities like Paris and London were born and Rome continued her recovery. By 800 AD she had recovered to a population of about 100,000. Roughly the size of her contemporaries, Paris and London but only 10% of her imperial zenith under Antoninus.
Cities come and go.
And that scares the bejazus out of insurance companies and politicians.
Covid may end up doing what they feared a little bit of water in the streets would do.
The Death of Density?
After vanquishing everything from newsprint to retail stores, the pulverizing, inescapable power of the Internet has its sights set on cities, or, more precisely, density—aided and abetted by its accomplice, Covid-19. If this future—call it the death of density—comes to pass, it spells the...
www.city-journal.org
For some of us, a vanishing few, this is not a new phenomenon. It duplicates the flight to suburbia, but on a grander scale.
Consder: World War One changed the way we saw the world - politically, economically, technically, socially - authority died and touched off years of warfare. WWI was followed immediately by the Spanish Flu which killed off millions more than were killed during WWI. Henry Ford's car started the move from city centre to country estates. WW2 destroyed many cities requiring them to be rebuilt, with superhighways connecting them and low density commuter suburbs.
In North America cities had been spared the destruction of WWI and WWII but the citizens were strongly affected by the Spanish Flu and previous plagues and pestilence. When the opportunity came to flee to their own individual fortresses in suburbia and travel in their personal 60 mph cocoons listening to their radio stations they jumped at it. They abandoned their tenements, their churches and their extended families.
Model T - Commodore 64
WWI - September11th
Spanish Flu - Covid 19
Highways - Internet
How many ancient cities were abandoned due to plague and pestilence caused by too many people in too small a space and too much filth?
About 150 AD Rome was at its height. There were over a million inhabitants in Rome where Antontinus Pius of Nimes in southern France was emperor. He was occupying Britain as far north as the Highland Line while squabbling over Baghdad with the Persians. The Mediterranean basin was home to 75,000,000 people. The economy was booming as evidenced by the lead dust found in ice cores in Greenland. The lead dust came from the Spanish Silver mines that produced Lead as a byproduct. Or perhaps they were Lead mines that produced Silver as a byproduct. Either way they underpinned the Mediterranean economy. And the weather was warm.
And then it got cold. The Roman Climactic Optimum ended. In Mesopotamia, where the Romans and Persians where having their debates a plague broke out in 165 AD and killed off the Roman invaders. The survivors returned to their homes and inoculated the rest of the Mediterranean basin. Including Rome. That pulse lasted until about 189 by most estimates. That plague killed off some 7,000,000 people across the Roman empire. Up to 1/3 of the population in places. In Rome up to 2000 people a day were dying in 189. 5 days - 10,000 people. 50 days 100,000 people. 50 days and 10% of the 1,000,000 inhabitants of Rome. And the plague lasted for 24 years - 8,760 days. Greenland Ice Core lead pollution fell off for the next five centuries and didn't really start recovering until 640 AD. By some estimates the recovery didn't recover until 900 AD. Sporadic resurgences of plague suppressed any incipient economic recoveries and demand for silver.
In 249 the Plague of Cyprian broke out. It lasted until 270. It also drove the Greenland Ice Core lead levels to their lowest since 900 BC and the later years of the Phoenician-Carthaginian economy.
That dying destroyed not just armies but authority and taxpayers. The Romans invited wandering Germans from the Baltic to fill their taxpaying vacuum and their hollow army. The Germans came.
Concurrently the Baltic had become less attractive as its coastal marshes flooded and the Germans went a wandering, taking whatever jobs they could find. the Burgundians, Scandinavian Germans from the island of Bornholm in the Baltic packed up and left - joining the wandering in search of dry land. They washed up in the upper Rhine, just over the Alps from Milan as foederati. Rome also started hiring Frisians and the rest of Beowulf's Baltic buddies, the Angles, Saxons, Goths and Swedes, to man Hadrian's Wall at places like Hexham and Dumfries. But that is digressing.
Back to the plague and Rome.
In the middle of all this death and dying and job loss and cold weather and hunger the politicians were blamed. The Five Good Emperors were followed by the 193 AD year of Five Emperors and then the 238 AD year of Six Emperors after Rome's German army mutinied over poor wages. An unstable anarchy prevailed for over a century, from 165 to Diocletian's reforms in 286 AD.
And Rome was replaced.
Milan, facing the Adriatic, became the center of Western Administration.
Another thing that the death and dying spawned was a whole raft of new religions as people lost faith in their old gods. And hermits headed out into the boonies to live long and peaceful lives. Unfortunately for them their isolation didn't last long as people from the cities soon followed their examples.
By the time Augustine of Carthage was moaning about Germans sacking Rome and his hometown (strangely a city previously deleted by the Romans) in 410 Rome was struggling to exist. That struggle wasn't helped when Milan was abandoned for Ravenna in 402.
By 400 AD the cold weather was getting colder and the Late Antique Little Ice Age started. And the Rhine started to regularly freeze over in the winter. Food supplies became shorter. People were encouraged by conditions to disperse, cross the ice looking for useful squats and freeholds, rely on themselves, hunt and gather more. They couldn't rely on free issues of daily bread, wine and olive oil. Or trips to the Coliseum.
Rome was sacked by Galla Placidia's Goths under Alaric in 410, threatened by her daughter Honoria's Huns under Attila in 451 and her great-niece Licinia Eudoxia's Vandals under Geiseric in 455. Concurrently Hengest and Horsa, Anglo-Saxon Frisians of some sort established the current Germanic regime in Britain.
And the cold weather brought more famines and more plagues.
In 547 the Justinian plague spread across both the Med and the Baltic. Those plagues lasted in cycles as long as the cold weather and the famines. And people continued to disperse.
In 547 Totila, another Goth, evacuated Rome - emptied it - reduced its population to zero.
Rome was no more.
By 549 Rome was reborn as people started to trickle back into it. But recovery was impeded by continuing wars, lawlessness in Europe due to the lack of an Imperium over the dispersed population, poor harvests, famines and more plagues.
Those plagues continued until the weather turned warmer and facilitated the rise of the Carolingian and Mohammedan Imperia about 800 AD and modern cities like Paris and London were born and Rome continued her recovery. By 800 AD she had recovered to a population of about 100,000. Roughly the size of her contemporaries, Paris and London but only 10% of her imperial zenith under Antoninus.
Cities come and go.
And that scares the bejazus out of insurance companies and politicians.
Covid may end up doing what they feared a little bit of water in the streets would do.
