Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction

by Newitz, Annalee

  One of the great debates among anthropologists is whether urban life or agricultural life came first. Though we may never know the answer—and it may have varied from region to region—most anthropologists today agree that cities like Caral and Çatalhöyük would have required people to develop highly efficient agriculture. After all, farming is only necessary when there are hundreds or even thousands of hungry mouths to feed in one permanent location. Did the city therefore predate the farm? Tantalizing evidence from a southern Turkish site called Göbekli Tepe, dating from 10,000 BCE—a fascinating circular formation of monuments covered in bizarre human-animal imagery—suggests that the very earliest urban formations were built before evidence of agriculture. Still, it’s possible that humans’ first efforts at crop cultivation would be impossible to distinguish from wild plants, meaning the people who visited Göbekli Tepe might have had small farms that we simply can’t recognize from their remains. Debates aside, what’s certain is that by the time people were living in the extremely ancient cities of Caral and Çatalhöyük, farming was the main occupation of most urbanites. Cities cannot exist without agriculture.

  An artist’s conception of what the ancient city of Çatalhöyük might have looked like. There were no streets, and people entered their homes through holes in the roofs. (illustration credit ill.10)

  (Click here to see a larger image.)

  Cities didn’t just change the environment with agriculture; they changed humanity, too. Stanford University anthropologist Ian Hodder, who has led excavations at Çatalhöyük since the early 1990s, believes that cities “socialize” people. Their routines are transformed by what he calls “bodily repetition of practices and routines in the house,” as well as the “construction of memories.” He writes about one house in Çatalhöyük whose residents rebuilt the structure six times over a couple of centuries, each time with exactly the same layout. Like their neighbors, these people shared a religious tradition of burying the bones of their ancestors in the floor of the house. As time passed, the house became more than just a dwelling. It was a monument to previous versions of the house, to the family, and to the city itself. This is a useful way to think about cities in general, and helps illuminate why we attach so much significance to preserving ancient structures in our modern cities. Our cities are monuments to our shared history. Though the bones of our ancestors aren’t literally built into the floors of our homes anymore, they remain there in a symbolic sense. That ineffable megapolisomancy that gives cities their allure comes from the way they are constructed of memories as much as they are constructed from brick and steel.

  Cities That Endure

  Anthropologist Elizabeth Stone has been excavating ancient cities in the Mesopotamian region, especially Turkey and Iraq, since the early 1980s. When I asked her why some cities manage to survive for thousands of years, she cautioned me that cities don’t ever remain the same over time; they have broken histories, collapsing and rising again. Ancient cities, for example, were organized in a way dramatically unlike cities of today. “If you look at pictures of Baghdad today, you see different districts that are segregated by class. It’s so fundamental that it’s visible from space,” she said. But if you look at the layout of ancient Pompeii, it’s impossible to say where the rich and the poor lived. There is variability between neighborhoods, but there are no visible differences in wealth. As she’s mapped Mesopotamian Era cities, Stone has been struck by how little variability there is in the size of houses. Everybody seems to have homes that are roughly the same dimensions, though some might have more rooms than others.

  The differences between ancient and medieval cities are just as stark. The imperialist Rome of antiquity wasn’t the same as the Church-dominated Rome of the Middle Ages. The former glory of the ancient world was reborn as a new city for the medieval world. Medieval city growth moved slowly, often funded by the aristocracy or the church. But starting in the nineteenth century, industrialization pushed city growth into the hands of wealthy entrepreneurs and developers, whose greatest monuments became skyscrapers devoted to various corporate headquarters. This era also witnessed a steep rise in urban populations, culminating in our majority urban population today. And now it’s become a completely different city again. People have always been drawn to Rome because of its dramatic history, but the urban experience during each stage of its life was notably transformed.

  Long-lived cities survive by going through periods of collapse and rejuvenation. It’s possible that cities tend to collapse when people have less social and economic mobility. “People at the bottom may retreat into the countryside and leave the sphere that’s controlled by the city,” Stone speculated. As soon as there is more opportunity in the city, peasants return and try to climb the social ladder again. Most cities that last for more than a few hundred years are located at the heart of shifting empires, like Istanbul (formerly Constantinople) or Mexico City (formerly Tenochtitlán). Both cities have been inhabited for centuries, but by peoples from successive, often adversarial political groups. Their fates rise and fall with the empires that claim them. Cities may be built on memory, but they are also processes, always changing.

  Longevity isn’t the only measure of a city’s success, however. As Harvard economist Edward Glaeser puts it in his book Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier:

  Among cities, failures seem similar while successes feel unique.… Successful cities always have a wealth of human energy that expresses itself in different ways and defines its own idiosyncratic space.

  Modern cities survive by offering people a space where they can form social groups that would be impossible outside them. Kostof calls cities “cumulative, generational artifacts that harbor our values as a community and provide us with the setting where we can learn to live together.” The city community’s “values” are part of the urban structure itself. This helps explain why some cities remain politically distinct from their countries, their cultures proving stronger than the culture of their nations. In the last century, West Berlin and Hong Kong found themselves in this situation. Both cities had strong ties to other nations and urban areas, and used those ties to remain relatively democratic cities devoted to capitalist trade, despite being located inside and alongside powerful communist nations. Other examples include cities like New York and Budapest, whose citizens have often defined themselves by being at odds with the countries that contain them. Cities socialize citizens into certain habits of mind, and these can be hard to break. In fact, sometimes a city breaks with its nation rather than breaking away from its own social norms.

  Case Study: San Francisco as a City of Tomorrow

  How can we ensure that tomorrow’s cities will harbor thriving communities that don’t decay into insignificance like Detroit or disappear into the fog of history like Çatalhöyük? We need to incorporate mutability into urban design. But as we face the future, that mutability must also include ways of building sustainability into the very structure of our cities. Urban geographer Richard Walker believes the San Francisco Bay Area provides a useful template for how that could happen. In his book about San Francisco, The Country in the City, he explains how the Bay Area’s green spaces are as much constructions as the houses and buildings. The region’s designers often built verdant parks on top of barren dunes and scrub, including both “country” and “city” in their plans for how they would convert the wild lands of Northern California into an urban space. The results are visible everywhere in the Bay Area. To get from the BART commuter-train station to Walker’s Berkeley home, I followed a winding path through several public parks full of play equipment and flower beds. Along the way, I passed more bicyclists, pedestrians, and green spaces than I did cars.

  Still, the Bay Area isn’t built on environmental principles alone. It’s also a successful region because its residents have consistently been on the cutting edge economically. “Going back to the Gold Rush, San Francisco has always had
a big skilled labor force full of young, creative people,” Walker said. “That was true when they were inventing new kinds of mining equipment in the nineteenth century, and it’s true now with financial innovation and retail innovation, as well as electronics and biotech.” The Bay Area’s financial heart is truly in the long, braided terrain of farms, parks, and cities that make up Silicon Valley to the south. They pump cash from the innovative tech and science industries into a region that includes Marin County to the north and Berkeley and Oakland to the east. Today, many young people who are attracted to the culture of San Francisco come to the region to settle in its most famous city. But they commute every day to Silicon Valley in one of hundreds of sleek, Wi-Fi-enabled buses dispatched by Google, Genentech, Apple, and other companies to make commuting easier on their employees—and reduce emissions in the process.

  Just as important as its economic success, however, is San Francisco’s status as what Walker called a “wide-open city.” By that, he means a city prepared to tolerate, and even embrace, experimental ideas. In the early twentieth century, the Bay Area was home to the nation’s earliest environmental groups, racially integrated unions, and a large gay community. In this way, San Francisco in the 1920s and ’30s was like Los Angeles and Berlin. But unlike those cities, the Bay Area never suffered a political crackdown on its most rebellious citizens. During the rise of fascism in Berlin, the Nazis drove out (and occasionally murdered) progressives and openly gay activists like the psychologist Magnus Hirschfeld. And in 1950s Los Angeles, the House Un-American Activities Committee persecuted people with leftist sympathies working in Hollywood. Many lost their jobs and had to leave the city. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, the radicalism continued virtually unchecked. Citizens founded environmentalist groups like the Sierra Club, and a general strike in the 1930s brought the city’s bosses to their knees. In the 1960s, an odd set of local environmental groups, industrialists, and politicians came together to battle developers who wanted to top up the bay with landfill so the city could sprawl from the Embarcadero in San Francisco across to Alameda in the east, and all the way down to Redwood City in the south. The environmentalists won that round, and the bay was protected from destruction.

  Out of struggles like these arose a city unlike its predecessors, an urban environment that was green almost from its very inception. “The environment in the Bay Area welded many local opposition movements into a larger radical vision of a green city,” Walker explained. “The feeling here wasn’t ‘protect my neighborhood and screw everybody else.’ It was ‘protect my neighborhood and come hike in my green space.’ It was very public-spirited.” By the mid-1960s, the city’s coalition of local green groups had become so powerful that California passed the first of many environmental-protection laws to prevent anyone from ever filling in the bay for development.

  In building the Bay Area, urbanites realized that success meant destroying the false division between country and city. But San Francisco is just one example of a city that has changed over time by getting greener. People in many cities, from Tokyo to Copenhagen, want to preserve local environments not just with protection laws, but also with solar power, high-efficiency buildings, and urban farms. Cities of the future are changing to include many aspects of the country within their boundaries.

  As we’ll see in the next few chapters, urban planners, architects, and engineers are coming around to the idea that cities must be as much part of their environments as coastlines and trees are. Government and private industry are pumping billions of dollars into the development of energy-efficient buildings, solar power, smart grids, urban gardens, green roofs, and many other eco-technologies. The city of the future, most agree, will be planned the way the Bay Area has been for almost 50 years.

  It may seem bizarre for the Bay Area to represent urban life of the future, given that an enormous earthquake or tsunami could wipe out the whole region tomorrow. But as we’ll discover in the next chapter, new engineering techniques could help our cities survive all but the worst natural disasters.

  15. DISASTER SCIENCE

  THERE’S ONE THING that never changes when it comes to city life. Disaster will always strike. Whether it’s from storms, floods, earthquakes, fires, or just urban decay that’s turned buildings into deadly hulks of rotting wood, cities fall apart. One of the biggest questions for urban planners and engineers is how to build cities that can withstand common calamities. It turns out the best answer is to destroy a lot of buildings on purpose. Engineers innovate city-building technologies by using enormous labs to re-create the worst disasters you can imagine—and then inventing structures that survive them.

  Many of these labs are in remote facilities that you might at first mistake for storage warehouses, missile ranges, or airplane hangars. Several years ago, I crisscrossed the United States, trying to visit as many disaster labs as I could. I started with the Energetic Materials Research and Testing Center, a 40-square-mile swath of blue-veined rocky hills covered in sage brush next door to the White Sands Missile Range in Socorro, New Mexico. Between peaceful hillsides mostly dominated by wildlife, researchers from New Mexico Tech collaborate with government and industry scientists to study how explosions affect city environments. The day I was there, emergency responders set off a car bomb to see whether a specially reinforced brick wall could protect a test dummy from the blast. The dummy survived, though the “control” dummy behind a standard wall was shredded, as was the car. Analysts pored over the crater the car left behind, measuring the distance that the engine had traveled, trying to analyze every factor in the explosion. Other tests at the facility measure the effects of tanker explosions, gunfire, and even tiny suitcase bombs. Their results could help city planners and rescue workers design streets and walls to protect residents from harm.

  Tests like these also help rescue workers learn new ways to pull people from wreckage that can be even more dangerous than the blasts that created it. Rescue innovation is a big part of what scientists and emergency responders study at Texas A&M’s Disaster City, another enormous open-air facility devoted to destruction for the sake of survival. Here, engineers can build whole city blocks just to blow them up in a re-creation of a meth-lab explosion or a house fire. They can simulate a train crash or root around for survivors in a collapsed parking structure. When I visited, engineers were testing experimental reconnaissance robots designed to fly or climb around in dangerous, unstable environments to find people trapped in rubble. Next to Disaster City is a fire field with a mock chemical-processing plant. While I watched, the technicians opened the valves on gas lines that fed into a maze of pipes and tanks, emulating what would happen if such a plant caught fire. Firefighters struggled to contain the two-story flames. I stood in the heat-mangled air outside the painted safety lines that bracketed the area like the sidelines on a basketball court.

  While these facilities specialize in pyrotechnics, another network of labs in America and Japan are filled with huge machines that can simulate earthquakes and tsunamis. At Oregon State’s tsunami lab, engineers carefully erect scale-model cities around the “shoreline” in a 160-by-87-foot water tank, then create carefully designed tidal waves with huge paddles to see where the water washes ashore. The tank is lined with sensors that measure the movements of tiny beads of glass suspended in the water—this allows researchers to understand how waves propagate through oceans, and better predict how tsunamis will behave when they hit the shore. Sitting high above the tank in a control room, scientists use a computer to control the paddles, generating exactly the kinds of waves they want to send crashing down on the model city. They can imitate the conditions that would affect the speed and shape of a tsunami in a very specific region, such as the northern coast of Oregon or the San Francisco Bay. Ultimately, these tests help city planners determine a safe distance to build from the water, as well as the optimal places to put escape routes in case of flooding.

  Researchers at the Oregon State University Tsunami Lab have built a model city in
the football-field-sized wave tank and use enormous machine-controlled paddles to generate a wave. Simulating a tsunami disaster will help them plan better how to build cities that can withstand flooding. (illustration credit ill.11)

  As scientists in these labs struggle with floods and fires and quakes, they are also struggling with a fundamental contradiction at the heart of city design. As the urban planning historian Spiro Kostof explains, cities are the result of ongoing conflicts between centralized planning and organic, grassroots development. To prevent people from dying in quakes and floods, for example, we need rules about how and where developers are allowed to build. But city governments can’t control everything. City dwellers aren’t going to be happy if they don’t have the freedom to change their living spaces and neighborhoods. Not everyone can afford to build homes that are robust against every kind of possible disaster, either. That’s why engineering a disaster-proof city isn’t about magically conjuring damage-proof structures. Instead, it means building urban areas that will kill the smallest number of people possible during a disaster. This is pragmatic optimism at its most literal.

  Inside the Apocalypse Lab

  I met the UC Berkeley civil engineer Shakhzod Takhirov inside a three-story warehouse that’s home to UC Berkeley’s Earthquake Simulator Lab. Located in the city of Richmond, the lab is easily identified by its proximity to piles of shattered wood beams, twisted girders, and giant cracked columns of concrete. But this was no junkyard. As I wandered through the rubble, I noticed that every crack and break had been carefully labeled with measurements in permanent marker.