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Comment by dmitryminkovsky | Hacker News Reader

The author lost me at

> Cities are nearly immortal; though they decline, they rarely die.

Cities great and small die all the time. Ur died, Babylon died. SF will die. Cities die when their purpose no longer justifies their expense. And the purpose of most cities is concentrating people to facilitate trade. But increasingly there’s nothing to do in SF, especially for the masses. If people don’t figure out something for these people to do, SF will definitely die.

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> die all the time

> ur died, Babylon died.

Your two examples are from 2-3 millennia ago. I would think if cities "die all the time," you would have more recent examples.

Maybe it proves the author correct that the first cities that came to mind are from 2500 years ago?

Good criticism of my post. Here's a more extensive list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_city. So when the author writes "they rarely die" it seems to me like the author has a serious historical blind spot. But why do we need to only talk about "great cities?" Why aren't all the "ghost towns" of the wild west a good enough example?

Because people tend to distinguish between "cities" and "towns." There are a lot of ghost towns, but few ghost cities. Once a settlement becomes large enough to be called a city, it is rare for it to die.

Those cities were more like nations and the city fell when the civilization did. If we're using Ur and Babylon in reference to the complete abandonment of SF, we would need the entire American nation to collapse and be abandoned as well. Without that, SF will "die" the way Rome did or the way Detroit did. Not the way Ur or Babylon did.

I'm sorry, I should have provided more context. Here's a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_city that includes the kinds of cities I'm thinking of. Many of these cities declined and depopulated due to climate change, economic factors, etc. Ie the same kinds of factors that are affecting SF and Detroit right now. Cities don't just die because their nation falls.

How many of those were from post-industrial societies in a stable developed nation with a population of nearly a million people supporting a metro area of nearly 10 million people?

Because what I'm seeing on that list is ghost towns, nomadic civilizations, or a complete civilization collapse. What I don't see is a city the size of San Fransisco in a civilization as powerful as the United States of America completely collapsing and disappearing from the face of the planet like Ur or Babylon.

Your examples are more than 2000 years old.

That was for dramatic effect, if you will ;). SF isn't exactly a legendary human habitation like Ur or Babylon. There are thousands of cities that have come and gone since Ur and Babylon, just because they stopped "making sense" their inhabitants.

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