The narrative about the rise and fall of civilisations and their infrastructures is still omnipresent in scholarship about past cities. It is a story that sells well. Think, for example, of the ruins of Pompeii and Gerasa in the Mediterranean region, the monuments of Persepolis in modern Iran, the temples of Angkor in Cambodia, or the remains of Maya cities in the jungles of Mesoamerica. Many people will have heard about these places and images of ruins naturally spring to mind – frequently tied to romanticised visions of them crumbling amid what have become picturesque landscapes, where nature merges with the grand relics of past urban societies. In some modern cities, ancient remains also remind us, on a daily basis, of the longevity of occupation – often with ups and downs along the way – these places have experienced. Cities such as Athens, Rome, Mérida, and Trier are famous examples of urban centres from the classical world that have survived in bits and pieces over millennia, with the ancient remains becoming part of contemporary cityscapes as they changed over time. The past percolates into the present, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the palimpsests of material remains that compose our historic cities.
A few years ago, the French classical archaeologist Alain Schnapp published a monumental work entitled Une Histoire Universelle des Ruines (A Universal History of Ruins), which engages with the relationships that cultures across the globe have cultivated with their pasts, attempting to explain how they are shaped by the manifold ways in which different societies perceive former eras. He brought to the forefront some crucial examples of engagement as well as non-engagement, including one which stands out, namely a Japanese shrine that is destroyed every 20 years only to be rebuilt as a replica – never to become a ruin.
One might ask: why are perceptions of ruins important to the topic of urbicide? The short answer is: because we reconstruct the past through the fragments – archaeological or literary – left to us, so our narratives will always be influenced by present perceptions of those fragments as we strive to fill in the lacunae. And so the questions remain: Were cities ever killed? Did they die off? Or are there stories that are not relayed through those patches – no matter how substantial – left for us to study?
