Four Lost Cities: A Secret History Of The Urban Age, by Annalee Newitz

This book really shrank on me, like the footprint of a city approaching its end. In general, secret histories leave a lot to be desired, as they tend to reflect the biases of their authors more than historical reality. In this case, the author perhaps understandably seeks to counteract the exaggerations of accounts of the collapse of cities and the civilizations they are a part of, but in the end manages to succumb to the opposite extreme of failing to account for the obvious in looking at fallen cities. What insights the author could provide into urbanism are more than counterbalanced by the author’s inability to deal with the reality that stares into one’s face when one looks at abandoned cities. Cities are abandoned for a reason, and their abandonment is involved with loss. The specific causes of that loss may be different, but in all cases, past, present, and future, they represent the waste of a great deal of time, money, and attention to places where physical, social, and political realities ultimately lead to a loss of the will and effort needed to sustain organized life in a place that once held a great deal of promise and importance.

The four cities chosen here are by no means equal in terms of their importance. Likewise, none of the cities was exactly lost in the same way. Unfortunately, only two of the four cities are grounded on what one can consider to be reasonable histories–Pompeii and Angkor–which leaves the other two cities to be filled with a lot of space that allows for speculation in the absence of firm facts to ground the analysis. And though the author has, at least in some cases, sought to visit the places she writes about, in the absence of historical texts there is a limit to what can be understood by the mere chance remains of the past. That does not stop people from trying to interpret the behavior of the past from material remains, it is simply that this task is not conducted with the sort of humility that would express the limits of understanding that come from our interpretations of what has survived from the past. Some sense of that humility would have helped the author not only to better understand the past, but better ground her fears about the future in a realistic understanding that take sa little of the self-righteousness out of her environmental panic attacks.

This book is about 250 pages long or so and is divided by the author into four parts for four cities that are distinguished by four different aspects and that served as important areas for four civilizations that are, at least as far as present-day realities are concerned, are lost, even if the cities have never been entirely so. The book begins with an introduction into how one loses a city, a sensible enough question. The first part of the book deals with the ancient proto-city of Catalhayuk, known for its odd doorways and its absence of streets and other obviously urban aspects like public spaces and the like. This densely populated settlement, of two mounds on either side of a river, was clearly towards the beginning of the urbanizing process, although without writing we have little knowledge of the political or religious underpinnings of the civilization it was a part of. This part of the book has three chapters that discuss the shock of settled life (1), a discussion of the goddesses of the site (2), and a discussion of the history of places without texts (3). The second part of the book focuses on Pompeii and its streets, with chapters on the reality of the city’s riots (4), a discussion of what people do in public (5), which in a corrupt place like Pompeii was a lot, as well as what happened to the urban culture of the region after the eruption of Vesuvius destroyed the city without hope of repair or restoration (6). The third part of the book deals with Angkor and its reservoirs, with chapters on agriculture (7), the importance of water to the people of Angkor (8), who nonetheless were an inland people with a land-based empire, and the remains of imperialism (9) that endured even after Cambodia became a mere kingdom and abandoned its imperial pretensions in the region. This is followed by the last part of the book, on Cahokia, known for its plazas. This part of the book contains chapters on America’s not-so-ancient pyramids (10), the supposed revival that led to the city’s birth and growth (11), and the deliberate abandonment of the site (12) and the dispersion of its people. The book ends with an epilogue looking at urbanism as a social experiment in progress, along with acknowledgements, notes, and an index.