Key Insights:
There is a perspective from which “today” means “post-Ordovician”
Catul-Huyuk as 900 families living cheek-by-jowl, and after 1500 years… people leave…
Angkor’s uniquely vulnerable water reservoirs… and eventually… people leave…
Cahokia’s sophisticated organization of labor… but eventually… people leave…
Pompeii… well, we know why people flee all-of-a-sudden…
Cities are magical places, but not always, and not forever…
Cities suffer from abandonment when an overdetermined disaster hits a sclerotic system: you can deal with politics, you can deal with climate change by themselves, but…
Question: Will Detroit or Miami or Houston be the next “lost city” in the U.S.?
Hexapodia!
References:
Annalee Newitz: Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age (New York: W.W. Norton, 2021) <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Four_Lost_Cities_A_Secret_History_of_the/l6K6DwAAQBAJ>
Joseph Tainter: The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) <https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Collapse_of_Complex_Societies/YdW5wSPJXIoC>
+, of course:
Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep (New York: Tor, 1992) <https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep00ving_0/mode/1up>
PODCAST: "Hexapodia" is þe Key Insight! XXXVI: Four Lost Cities, by Annalee Newitz