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 1800.1 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 Pele´e 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. They retained the old
surface street pattern, while routing a major expressway under the city center.
Most
dramatic of all, perhaps, is the story of Tangshan, China. Here, northeast of
Beijing, a massive earthquake in 1976 killed at least 240,000 people—maybe more
than twice this number—in a city of 1 million. Within a decade, Chinese
officials rebuilt the city in a maze of six-story concrete housing projects.5 In
January 2002, while the world was watching battles over Afghanistan, half of
the Congolese city of Goma (population 400,000) disappeared under lava, yet few
suggest that the city will relocate.6 Does anyone doubt that Kabul and
Kandahar—or Baghdad and Basra—will also reemerge, once protracted fighting
finally comes to a close?
There are
other facets to the resilience phenomenon. Even as contemporary places rebuild
following devastation, many of the places destroyed in more distant eras—Roman
cities such as Pompeii or Algeria’s Timgad or the pre-Columbian settlements of
the Americas— persist in a different mode. Such “lost cities” are recovered as
sites for tourism, education, remembrance, or even myth. Even St. Pierre
survives as a town of 5,000 persons, a tourable set of ruins, and a volcano museum.
Less
innocently, building and rebuilding have often been tied to attempts to control
and manipulate meanings. Mussolini excavated ancient monuments and ripped new
axial roads through the heart of
Rome in an
explicit effort to rival ancient glories; Hitler and Speer plotted to replace
Berlin with a Germania scaled to dwarf past empires; Saddam Hussein even
recreated Babylon, undeterred by scant archaeological remains.
Subjected
to everything from earthquakes to smart bombs, cities are among humankind’s
most durable artifacts. Whether they are reconstructed to accommodate and
restore ongoing urban life or rebuilt to serve as sites for periodic visitation
and commemoration, it has become exceedingly rare for a major city to be truly
or permanently lost.
Kutipan
Langsung dari Vale, Lawrence J. & Campanella, Thomas J. 2005. The
Resilient City-How Modern City Discover From Disaster. Oxford University
Press. P: 3-5.
