The New York Times on the Life and Death of Cities

Two stories in the New York Times' science section today relevant to our game here. First, Dennis Overbye takes a historical trip to cities that died, here. Good bits:

"Cities rise and fall depending on what made them go in the first place," said Peirce Lewis, an expert on the history of New Orleans and an emeritus professor of geography at Pennsylvania State University.



Changes in climate can make a friendly place less welcoming. Catastrophes like volcanoes or giant earthquakes can kill a city quickly. Political or economic shifts can strand what was once a thriving metropolis in a slow death of irrelevance. After the Mississippi River flood of 1993, the residents of Valmeyer, Ill., voted to move their entire town two miles east to higher ground.



What will happen to New Orleans now, in the wake of floods and death and violence, is hard to know. But watching the city fill up like a bathtub, with half a million people forced to leave, it has been hard not to think of other places that have fallen to time and the inconstant earth.

Overbye goes on to talk about Atlantis and Alexandria.



The lead item in the section, though, is the more optimistic (and editiorially brilliant) roundup of big-tech projects other cities are taking on to defend against nature. Salient bits:

London has built floodgates on the Thames River. Venice is doing the same on the Adriatic.



Japan is erecting superlevees. Even Bangladesh has built concrete shelters on stilts as emergency havens for flood victims.



Experts in the United States say the foreign projects are worth studying for inspiration about how to rebuild New Orleans once the deadly waters of Hurricane Katrina recede into history.

So let me say this about that: I live in the California Bay Area. My house is raised up about six feet above grade, because I live on what used to be a flood plain and what remains an area at high risk for liquefaction in a major earthquake. You know what liquefaction is, right? It's when the ground, sodden with water, gets shaken to the point that the solids go into solution, and hardpack turns into quicksand. In the abstract, liquefaction is my third most favorite terrifying aspect of nature, right after pyroclastic flows and katabatic winds. But in reality, I would like my house to not sink into muck after the not-if-but-when quake that the Bay Area's due for.



And after Katrina I have absolutely no faith that the local government or the Feds are anything approaching ready for that quake.



Residents of coastal cities: hang on to your hats and glasses. This here' s the wildest ride in the wilderness.