I am writing a five-part miniseries about cities to consolidate and record my learning about urban planning and economic development. These thoughts represent a synthesis from books, talks, podcasts, conversations, documentaries, and our work at Subcity.
“Underneath the city, there are programs and infrastructure designed to support the buildings, equipment, people, and jobs - the very things that have always made cities engines of upward mobility for humanity.”
-Everywhere Ventures (Subcity investor)
Why do we live in specific metropolises and how did we settle on these specific coordinates instead of any other area on this vast planet? Have you ever wondered what compels us to collectively converge on specific locations on Earth? In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Márquez wrote, “A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground.” Humans are the only animal to consistently and deliberately bury the dead ceremonially. I’m going to argue that this simple fact drove the earliest decisions on the broad areas in which our ancestors chose to settle.
Unlike many solitary predators, humans have always been social creatures. The movement of these early hunters and gatherers in tribes across the earth was important for safety, for procreation, for camaraderie, and for basic survival.
In canvassing the landscape these early people would have identified locations of interest that satisfy our primitive needs: fresh spring water that bubbled year-round, private watering holes where the river’s current slowed enough to attract animals, shaded groves of fruit trees with sweet crop aplenty, natural rock caves sheltered from the elements. These natural features could be supplemented by human creations such as tiny rock cairns along a wooded trail, simple cave paintings, clearings of brush for fire pits, and special locations marking the final resting place of deceased members of the tribe.
From the earliest mounds to the towering tombs of the Egyptian Pharaohs, the location of the burial grounds held sacred sway over early man and would become the location of the first steady repeat visits and ultimately the earliest settlements. This transformed the land from natural, undifferentiated terrain to the immovable resting place of one's ancestors - worth maintaining, defending, and settling around. Revered locations like Jerusalem, Mecca, Lhasa, and Salt Lake City.
This proximity to deceased ancestors would eventually help drive a solution to the collective action problem. How can you get individuals to willingly sacrifice their lives to defend a settlement, hand over food and resources to a taxing authority, or generally act in the best interests of the community? A tribe member would be much more likely to listen to the chief and be a positive member of the tribe if they believed the leader was communicating with the spirits of the omniscient dead.
Within these ancestral lands, cities and towns sprang up near water. Humans need water multiple times each day for drinking, bathing, farming, and washing belongings. While the surface of the earth is 71% water, only 3% of that is fresh water and only 1.2% is drinkable, the rest of the fresh water is locked up in glaciers, ice caps, permafrost, or deep underground. The Yangtze. The Nile. The Tigris. The Seine. The Danube. The Amazon. The Thames. The Mississippi. The Rhine. Long, legendary fresh water sources with civilizations’ entire histories running parallel to their flows.
In addition to daily life, rivers proved the earliest method by which humans could reliably transport people and heavy cargo. The wheel itself, for land travel, was known early on and discovered on small children’s toys but the axle technology to carry real weight only came thousands of years later.
The founding of the settlement, and primarily the mode of transportation at the time, would determine the final location. Whether it was developed early in the era of agriculture, during bronze age warfare, the sea-faring colonial era, or modern times, would all have an impact. In the earliest settlements, with minimal resource competition between tribes and before irrigation technology, fertile soil with regularly flooded plains were optimal. With the rise of towns and inter-city warfare, strategic locations with elevated sightlines or natural mountain or water defenses would be most carefully considered. The ruins atop the Palatine Hill and the Acropolis illustrate these locations of strategic military importance within Rome and Athens. From the 16th century onward, natural deep-sea harbors that could support ocean-going vessels helped transform previous coastal villages into thriving port cities like Cape Town, Shanghai, Amsterdam, San Francisco, London, Hong Kong, Lisbon, and New York City. Railroads in the 19th century spawned cities like Chicago, St Louis, and other transit hubs. Finally, the automobile decoupled a city’s need to be near a natural or artificial feature. A nearby flood plain, deep seaport, strategic military location, or the intersection of major railroad lines were no longer key considerations and allowed more modern cities to be formed in a sprawling fashion. Cities like Phoenix, Houston, Atlanta, and Las Vegas have all ballooned in population since the end of World War II. Several cities in the Southwestern United States are literally in the desert and far from natural water sources, a truly modern occurrence.
Ultimately, though, they are all built on human desires of belonging and necessities—and in all our huge, 21st century global metropolises’ centers can be found burial grounds just like those sought by Garcia Márquez’s settlers.
Sources:
➢ The City in History, by Lewis Mumford
➢ The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, by Francis Fukuyama