Repurposed, abandoned, and decayed cities are nothing new. No one says that ancient Göbekli Tepe, Ur, or Ilium are what they once were. There’s an entropy principle at work.“Things fall apart,” as Yeats wrote in his post-WWI pessimistic “The Second Coming” that relates the failed promises of civilization and religion, both lying in the rubble of that great war.
The “centre,” as Yeats writes “will not hold.” Nevertheless, history repeats. City planners continue to plan, always with the intent to create a new “centre,” some utopia, always with the idea that “this time we’ll get it right.” And yet, every attempt is merely temporary for a variety of reasons, the latest of which are the pandemic and a governmental collapse. The disease emptied inner city office buildings, sending people into the suburbs, where they found that in white-collar jobs they could do what they do without the rush-hour traffic. The Afghan city Kabul has become yet another example of the vulnerability of “centres” that yield easily to sinister forces like armies and criminals.
In her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacob writes, “…all the art and science of city planning are helpless to stem decay” (5). * From those ancient cities lying in ruins through the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s promise, in the words of Puritan John Winthrop, of a “city on a hill,” to twenty-first century Chicago, “Cities,” in the words of Jacob, “are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and design…[that have resulted in] “a monotonous gruel” [both within and outside their boundaries]” (6). “Extraordinary governmental financial incentives have been required to achieve this degree of monotony, sterility and vulgarity. Decades of preaching, writing and exhorting by experts have gone into convincing us and our legislators that mush like this must be good for us, as long as it comes bedded with grass.”
Think public parks. To make that last thought meaningful, think Brasilia, the gleaming city of wide avenues and grassy areas built in the middle of a leveled rainforest. And then think of its suburban ramshackle villages. And how does the gleaming neighborhood maintain its gleam? It’s a capital with public capital at its disposal; it’s the seat of government spending, with the poor in the villages pouring their money into the coffers of bureaucrats. Think Washington, D.C. The city planners promise a return on the investment only to discover the city requires ever more spending for maintenance, the promise of filled coffers becoming a bottomless pit of incurred costs.
Or Pittsburgh. Yes, think Steel City. With about half the population of its heyday steel-making days, the city powers decided to revitalize, first in the 1950s at the “Golden Triangle,” the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela where the Ohio begins, and then on the North Side, where the city built Three Rivers Stadium, eliminating the neighborhoods of the poor in favor of a monument to sports, a stadium that no longer exists because it was further replaced with a new stadium, a science center, and also a casino. And farther up the Allegheny the city decided to build another stadium, eliminating more neighborhoods. To make the gleam, the city had to move out the people. What, pray tell, is the purpose of a city where no one lives? What happens to the people replaced by shine and gloss? So now the city is undergoing yet another “revitalization” to move people back in with condos that crowd humans into one large building after another, making a “planned” neighborhood where an organically evolved one once stood.
Go back to ancient Ilium, Troy as we all know it. When Schliemann excavated it, he found layers. City built on city, not just in one cycle, but in numerous cycles: The ancient inhabitants did what modern city inhabitants do. Where neighborhoods grew organically, they built gleam after destroying whatever originally lay decaying in place.
And as populations change with migrations into an out of cities, the structures they leave behind fall into decay. The promise always reverts to the reality that humans aren’t predictable and that transitory utopias spring up unexpectedly, not from the heads of theoreticians, but rather from the hearts of residents. As Jacob writes, “Meantime, all the art and science of city planning are helpless to stem decay—and the spiritlessness that precedes decay—in ever more massive swatches of cities” (5). As cities expand into the “nature” that surrounds them, they carry their innate tendency to decay, their potential for entropy, with them.
This was Jacob’s prediction in the 1960s: “The semisurburbanized and suburbanized messes we create…become despised buy their own inhabitants tomorrow. These thin dispersions lack any reasonable degree of innate vitality…or inherent usefulness as settlements..Few of them, and these only the most expensive as a rule, hold their attraction much longer than a generation; then they begin to decay…Thirty years from now, we shall have accumulated new problems of blight and decay over acreages so immense that in comparison the present problems of the great cities’ gray belts will look piddling…This is exactly what we, as a society, have willed to happen” (445).
And so today as I write this, in the United States Congress contemplates a utopia built by yet another “infrastructure bill,” another attempt to rebuild Ilium, to make that “new Troy” upon a hill of previous Troys.
*Vintage Books Edition, Dec. 1992. Original copyright by Jane Jacobs, 1961 and renewed in 1989.
The “centre,” as Yeats writes “will not hold.” Nevertheless, history repeats. City planners continue to plan, always with the intent to create a new “centre,” some utopia, always with the idea that “this time we’ll get it right.” And yet, every attempt is merely temporary for a variety of reasons, the latest of which are the pandemic and a governmental collapse. The disease emptied inner city office buildings, sending people into the suburbs, where they found that in white-collar jobs they could do what they do without the rush-hour traffic. The Afghan city Kabul has become yet another example of the vulnerability of “centres” that yield easily to sinister forces like armies and criminals.
In her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacob writes, “…all the art and science of city planning are helpless to stem decay” (5). * From those ancient cities lying in ruins through the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s promise, in the words of Puritan John Winthrop, of a “city on a hill,” to twenty-first century Chicago, “Cities,” in the words of Jacob, “are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and design…[that have resulted in] “a monotonous gruel” [both within and outside their boundaries]” (6). “Extraordinary governmental financial incentives have been required to achieve this degree of monotony, sterility and vulgarity. Decades of preaching, writing and exhorting by experts have gone into convincing us and our legislators that mush like this must be good for us, as long as it comes bedded with grass.”
Think public parks. To make that last thought meaningful, think Brasilia, the gleaming city of wide avenues and grassy areas built in the middle of a leveled rainforest. And then think of its suburban ramshackle villages. And how does the gleaming neighborhood maintain its gleam? It’s a capital with public capital at its disposal; it’s the seat of government spending, with the poor in the villages pouring their money into the coffers of bureaucrats. Think Washington, D.C. The city planners promise a return on the investment only to discover the city requires ever more spending for maintenance, the promise of filled coffers becoming a bottomless pit of incurred costs.
Or Pittsburgh. Yes, think Steel City. With about half the population of its heyday steel-making days, the city powers decided to revitalize, first in the 1950s at the “Golden Triangle,” the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela where the Ohio begins, and then on the North Side, where the city built Three Rivers Stadium, eliminating the neighborhoods of the poor in favor of a monument to sports, a stadium that no longer exists because it was further replaced with a new stadium, a science center, and also a casino. And farther up the Allegheny the city decided to build another stadium, eliminating more neighborhoods. To make the gleam, the city had to move out the people. What, pray tell, is the purpose of a city where no one lives? What happens to the people replaced by shine and gloss? So now the city is undergoing yet another “revitalization” to move people back in with condos that crowd humans into one large building after another, making a “planned” neighborhood where an organically evolved one once stood.
Go back to ancient Ilium, Troy as we all know it. When Schliemann excavated it, he found layers. City built on city, not just in one cycle, but in numerous cycles: The ancient inhabitants did what modern city inhabitants do. Where neighborhoods grew organically, they built gleam after destroying whatever originally lay decaying in place.
And as populations change with migrations into an out of cities, the structures they leave behind fall into decay. The promise always reverts to the reality that humans aren’t predictable and that transitory utopias spring up unexpectedly, not from the heads of theoreticians, but rather from the hearts of residents. As Jacob writes, “Meantime, all the art and science of city planning are helpless to stem decay—and the spiritlessness that precedes decay—in ever more massive swatches of cities” (5). As cities expand into the “nature” that surrounds them, they carry their innate tendency to decay, their potential for entropy, with them.
This was Jacob’s prediction in the 1960s: “The semisurburbanized and suburbanized messes we create…become despised buy their own inhabitants tomorrow. These thin dispersions lack any reasonable degree of innate vitality…or inherent usefulness as settlements..Few of them, and these only the most expensive as a rule, hold their attraction much longer than a generation; then they begin to decay…Thirty years from now, we shall have accumulated new problems of blight and decay over acreages so immense that in comparison the present problems of the great cities’ gray belts will look piddling…This is exactly what we, as a society, have willed to happen” (445).
And so today as I write this, in the United States Congress contemplates a utopia built by yet another “infrastructure bill,” another attempt to rebuild Ilium, to make that “new Troy” upon a hill of previous Troys.
*Vintage Books Edition, Dec. 1992. Original copyright by Jane Jacobs, 1961 and renewed in 1989.
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