Introduction: The Cities Rise Again

Abstract

Whoever penned the Latin maxim Sic transit gloria mundi (thus passes the glory of the world) was likely not an urbanist. Although cities have been destroyed throughout history—sacked, shaken, burned, bombed, flooded, starved, irradiated, and poisoned—they have, in almost every case, risen again like the mythic phoenix. As one painstakingly thorough statistical survey determined, only forty-two cities worldwide were permanently abandoned following destruction between the years 1100 and 1800. By contrast, cities such as Baghdad, Moscow, Aleppo, Mexico City, and Budapest lost between 60 and 90 percent of their populations due to wars during this period, yet they were rebuilt and eventually rebounded. After about 1800, such resilience became a nearly universal fact of urban settlement around the globe. The tenacity of the urban life force inspired one of Rudyard Kipling’s most famous poems: . . Cities and Thrones and Powers Stand in Time’s eye, Almost as long as flowers, Which daily die: But, as new buds put forth To glad new men, Out of the spent and unconsidered Earth, The Cities rise again. . . There have been some exceptions, Kipling notwithstanding. One of these is St. Pierre, Martinique—once known as “the Paris of the Antilles.” On May 8, 1902, the eruption of Mount Pelée buried the city under pyroclastic lava flows. Nearly 30,000 residents and visitors perished; only one man survived, a prisoner in solitary confinement. St. Pierre was not a resilient city. Yet one is hard-pressed to think of other cities that have not recovered. Atlanta, Columbia, and Richmond all survived the devastation wrought by the American Civil War and remain state capitals today. Chicago emerged stronger than ever following the 1871 fire, as did San Francisco from the earthquake and fires of 1906. We still have Hiroshima and Nagasaki, despite the horrors of nuclear attack. Both Dresden and Coventry have been rebuilt. Warsaw lost 61 percent of its 1.3 million residents during World War II, yet surpassed its prewar population by 1967. Even as the war still raged, farsighted planners and designers surreptitiously assembled voluminous documentation of the city that the Nazis were systematically dismembering. After the war, they painstakingly (if creatively) replicated the exteriors of hundreds of buildings in the Old Town and New Town, while modernizing the interiors.

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