The Circus Maximus Syndrome

If you love cities, this is a week to rejoice. Now that the stadium planned for New York's West Side is dead, no one can fantasize anymore about the Olympics coming to New York.

If the city had gotten the 2012 Games, its leaders would have basked for seven years in Olympic photo opportunities, and mayors across America would have watched enviously. They would have succumbed further to what I think of as the Circus Maximus syndrome.

The victims of this urban-planning syndrome believe, like some Roman emperors, that a leader's prime civic responsibility is to build entertainment palaces for the masses. American mayors haven't yet built anything quite like the Circus Maximus, where a quarter of a million Romans watched chariot races, but their combined output makes it look puny.

They've endowed downtowns with stadiums, arenas, theaters, concert halls, museums and aquariums. They imagine drawing hordes of out-of-towners to the new convention center, and when the visitors don't materialize, the mayors' solution is to build an even bigger convention center with a subsidized hotel next door.

The mayors hire consultants to project grand economic benefits from their projects, but these dreams virtually never come true. The only realistic way to justify one of these public projects is by considering the noneconomic benefits.

You have to ask if the project performs a core function identified by Joel Kotkin in his new book, "The City," a global history of urbanity starting with Ur. He finds that successful cities have always done three things, two of which are straightforward: protecting the lives of inhabitants and providing a congenial home for a commercial marketplace.

The third function is the creation of "sacred space" that gives people a sense of identity with the city. In Ur, it was the shrine of... moon god, Nanna...

Review for The City. Looks interesting.

The City: A Global History

FROM THE PUBLISHER
"Despite their infinite variety, all cities essentially serve three purposes: spiritual, political, and economic. Kotkin follows the progression of the city from the early religious centers of Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and China to the imperial centers of the classical era, through the rise of the Islamic city and the European commercial capitals, ending with today's post-industrial suburban metropolis." Looking at cities in the twenty-first century, Kotkin discusses the effects of developments such as shifting demographics and emerging technologies. He also considers the effects of terrorism - how the religious and cultural struggles of the present pose the greatest challenge to the urban future.
FROM THE CRITICS
Library Journal
A Los Angeles-based senior fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, DC, Kotkin (The New Geography) offers a brief but thorough overview of cities in a global context. Kotkin limns the salient aspects of imperial, classical, "Oriental," Islamic, and industrial cities and dispersed suburbanized conurbations, focusing on two themes: the universality of the urban experience and the need for all successful cities to combine sacred or moral purpose, a security-providing political structure, and a commercial base centered on a viable middle class. Civilization, the author argues, is inextricably linked to life in cities, entrepots for both material goods and ideas. Whether in Mesoamerica, in Mesopotamia, or along the Mediterranean, municipalities have flourished as places of relative tolerance and creative energy. Kotkin cites the alarming "deurbanization" of some late 20th-century American metropolises, where rising crime rates caused residents to flee, an instance that echoes the evacuations of late classical times. Seasoned with quotations from contemporary observers and buttressed by endnotes, this lyrically written reflection is recommended for all libraries.-Frederick J. Augustyn Jr., Library of Congress Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
In gentle rebuke to those who never saw the good side of a city, urbanist and commentator Kotkin (The New Geography, 2000, etc.) looks at the bright side, calling cities "humankind's greatest creation."Cities concentrate not just people but also energy, talent, and wealth. Kotkin adds to these the element of sacredness: Ancient cities, he observes, were dominated by religious structures, suggesting "that the city was also a sacred place, connected directly to divine forces controlling the world." Accidents of geography and history dictate how cities will rise, flourish and fall. Interestingly, Kotkin ventures that monoculture is one recipe for collapse. Carthage, he writes, was a mere commercial center, though it began with all the cultural values of its Phoenician ancestors; absent "any broader sense of mission or rationale for expansion other than profit," it fell under the weight of unenlightened self-interest. Readers will remember that Rome had a hand in Carthage's end, and Kotkin does a fine job of showing how the Romans instilled civic virtues and engineered their way to greatness in their own metropolis. Carthage's example looms as Kotkin turns up other instances of cities done in by greed, such as Athens and Constantinople. Even Amsterdam of the Golden Age might have benefited, he suggests, from some of Elizabethan London's drive toward the "democratization of culture" and, he adds, some of its moral fiber: Otherwise the Dutch might have fought a little harder to hold on to New York, soon to become a city of world importance. Artificial cities like the ones the Nazis planned usually don't work, Kotkin notes, but more-or-less planned cities such as Pudong and Abuja are springingup everywhere, changing the face of the developing world. Kotkin closes his already useful, literate essay by pondering the future of the urban order, with the hope that the Islamic world, "having found Western values wanting, may find in its own glorious past . . . the means to salvage its troubled urban civilization."A thoughtful survey, of interest to students of urban affairs and of world history alike.

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=jd3K6qcBnG&isbn=0679603360&itm=2

Kotkin ventures that monoculture is one recipe for collapse. Carthage, he writes, was a mere commercial center, though it began with all the cultural values of its Phoenician ancestors; absent "any broader sense of mission or rationale for expansion other than profit," it fell under the weight of unenlightened self-interest.

This guy is a jackass, and I'm guessing his book is just another bit of propaganda for multiculti. Carthage didn't fall under the weight of unenlightened self-interest, it was wiped out by Rome in a cynically engineered war. It was, in fact, on the rise after losing two wars with Rome. Rome allowed one its client states to aggressively take over Carthaginian territory and when the Carthaginians fought back used a treaty they forced on them after the second Punic war (which prohibited the Carthaginians from fighting external wars without Rome's permission) as an excuse to destroy Carthage. Carthage, far from immovable, simply met an unstoppable force, as the Greek city of Corinth did in the same year.

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