Posted on 06/22/2007 12:18:28 AM PDT by Lorianne
For 900 years, Moenjodaro, a city in what is now Pakistan, was the urban hub of a thriving civilization, the New York or London of its day. Around 1700 B.C., residents suddenly abandoned the Indus Valley city, and it was lost in the sands of time until archaeologists began excavating it in the 1920s. Today, visitors can wander for hundreds of acres among its deserted streets and homes.
It's believed that Moenjodaro had already fallen into economic decline when an invading army attacked, delivering the sudden fatal blow. Moenjodaro never rose again, and the Indus Valley civilization that it dominated soon disappeared too.
Most of today's cities seem pretty sturdy. Indeed, the possibility that they might crumble to dust seems to be less of a concern than how nations will cope with the rise of so-called "megacities," cities with populations of more than 10 million: Tokyo, New York, São Paolo and Mumbai are already around twice that size or bigger.
In Pictures: Ghost Cities Of 2100 But could the opposite problem occur? Could some of our cities vanish as thoroughly as Moenjodaro did? It's hard to predict, of course, but factors as diverse as climate change and aging populations mean that even as the global urban population continues to grow, some cities are shrinking. It's not just small towns, although in wealthy nations, small communities may face the most extreme effects. In Japan, many rural hamlets, left with only a few elderly residents, are in danger of total disappearance. In the U.S., towns in Kansas and the Dakotas face extinction mainly because of an exodus of young people. Some Kansas towns are fighting back by giving away free land, with mixed results.
But some bigger centers also face the risk of annihilation. Urban planners across Europe and North America are already grappling with what to do with "shrinking cities." After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, millions of residents of what had been East Germany moved west. More than a million apartments were simply abandoned.
In response, the German government sponsored the Shrinking Cities Project to study what is now a global phenomenon. The project has an exhibit on tour that examines shrinkage in Russia's Ivanovo, Leipzig in Germany, Manchester and Liverpool in Britain and Detroit in the U.S.
Whether these cities disappear entirely, of course, is an open question. Detroit's population has fallen by around a third since 1950 and now equals about 950,000. It is expected to shrink slowly but steadily until at least 2030; unemployment inside the city is more than 10%. (The suburbs around Detroit, meanwhile, are growing.) If trends hold, Detroit will be altered beyond recognition by 2100.
As Detroit flirts with demographic disaster, some cities face the natural kind. Researchers at the University of California, Davis, forecast a 75% chance that San Francisco will be struck by a major earthquake of magnitude 7 or above by 2086. Some might argue that city dwellers will survive and rebuild, although the fate of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which flooded 80% of the city in 2005, offers mixed lessons.
San Francisco is also one of the fastest-shrinking cities in California, part of an overall population shift away from the expensive and geographically hazardous coast toward inland cities. A major disaster could accelerate that trend.
Rising sea levels threaten cities around the world. The industrious Dutch have strong enough dikes and clever enough engineering to survive a one meter rise in the oceans, even though two-thirds of their country lies below sea level. But Banjul, capital of Gambia in West Africa, is likely to sink entirely into the ocean due to a combination of erosion and rising sea levels, according to a 2002 World Bank discussion paper on cities and climate change. The same paper forecasts that sea levels will rise between 10 and 90 centimeters worldwide this century, affecting many coastal cities, including Alexandria, Egypt; Tianjin, China; Jakarta, Indonesia; and Bangkok, Thailand.
Whether from natural catastrophes, economic collapse or the slow encroachments of sand or water, it seems likely that at least some of today's cities will meet the same fate as Ozymandias, the king of kings who built a monument to himself. As the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote, "Round the decay / Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away."
I think this will be the fate of many cities in the Southwest unless more water sources can be found.
Type “The fabulous ruins of Detroit” into your search engine. It’s a most interesting photographic tour of a veritable lost world.
Flirts ? It's been married to it for well over 35 years. A Stalinist city run by 3rd world racist despots is never going to be a success.
What a site. It’s almost as if there was a war or something in Detroit.
Baghdad by the Bay going limp......how ironic!
The cities in the Southwest are bound to be extinct. The whole region is barren. It should never had been civilized except for a mine here and there.
There was a war. The bad guys won.
`Just went there. Thanks
If you are near, or ever get near Detroit, tune in WCHB at 1200 on the AM band in the morning between about 6:00 a.m. and noon. It will be an eye opener. The africanhyphenamerican hosts and most callers believe that all white people get out of bed in the morning with one purpose, and that is to screw the a-a. One recent discussion I listened to until I was about to retch centered around obesity in the a-a community. It was the view of many that the "Europeans" or "they" (unfashionable to refer to whites as white or accord them any humanity at all) had placed their fat producing fast food joints in close proximity to the a-a population as some plot to cause heart and other obesity related problems in the a-a community.
I didn't really recognize the ruins (except for Belle Isle)... but I do remember, in grammar school, being taken on a tour of at least one of the automotive plants. It was fascinating.
It's kind of spooky to see so much of Detroit in ruins, though.
Can you say "racial paranoia"? I knew you could.
Don't know about you, but personally I don't know any whites (including myself) who spend their time trying to think of ways to screw over any blacks.
But I have run into some blacks who have exhibited similar racial paranoia. They think they're being oppressed if a white person asks them not to crack gum right in their face.
Re: the ruins of Detroit. Someone should turn that into a pamphlet entitled “A Monument to Unionism.”
And what about Newark, N.J., a smaller version of Detroit? It is slowly disappearing.
Newark might surprise people yet.
I spend all my time figuring out how to keep all Moslems in perpetual rage at repeated insults.
I figure eventually they will all stroke out.
There ya go! ;)
And, of course, division of labor is always more efficient. ;)
I spend all my time figuring out how to keep all Moslems in perpetual rage at repeated insults.
Not very difficult, but many more potential "insultees." ;)
Another Ohio candidate is Youngstown, once the Steel City but now a virtual urban derelict.
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