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.