The Century of Destruction:
Preservation, pt. 9

September 13, 2006

In the opening chapter of Anthony Tung's Preserving the World's Great Cities, it is bluntly noted:

The twentieth century was the century of destruction. This is the first and foremost fact concerning the preservation of historic cities around the world. It was a century of dramatic urban expansion, improvement, and redefinition, but it was also a century when urban architectural culture was destroyed at a rate unmatched in human history. [15]

First the mind goes to the devastation brought by the World Wars.. and that partially accounts for ruined cities in Europe and Asia. But the destruction is much broader than what came about as a result of war. Tung lists cities that have lost a major portion of their architectural heritage in the last century, and that includes cities like Istanbul, Athens, Moscow, Cairo, and Singapore.. i.e. not cities that were devastated by war.

It seems that the cultural landscape is passing through a period in which unprecedented destruction is being wrought. 19th century travelers arrived in cities like Cairo and Istanbul, and found them continuing as they had for centuries. They were not static.. I don't mean to imply that.. but they were stable. So what happened in the course of the 20th century to change that, and to bring about the destruction of cultural heritages all over the globe?

Tung points to population as the culprit. In 1900 13.6% of the world's population lived in cities, and only 8 cities had a population of a million or more. Contrast that with the state of the world in the year 2000, when 323 cities had a million or more residents (17). Tung also cites a United Nations report concluding that in 2025 61% of the world will live in cities. So what marks this century more than any other is the explosion of human beings on this planet, and their increasing congregation in cities.

Tung does not go into reasons for this explosion, but the answer must be modern medicine.. right? The near elimination of many epidemic diseases, the advent of infection fighting drugs, and our better understanding of health issues across the board.. We must applaud those advances.. but it also seems evident that cultural systems, developed over centuries, were not ready for what this would mean in terms of exponential population growth. That growth pushed world cultures into a quite novel situation.. the new reality was upon them before they had time to develop new sustainable patterns.

Medicine cannot be the only explanation for the changes in cities. The mechanization of agriculture has meant that fewer hands are needed to work in fields.. and those extra hands seem inevitably to find their way to cities. New methods of transportation have also disrupted traditional systems of circulation within cities.. leading to a vast remodelling of the modern city.

In short, there are many pressures.. most of them relating to modern technology.. which have been exerted on modern cities. And the result is an unprecedented pressure on the cultural heritage of cities. Important cities were destroyed in the past.. like Baghdad by the Mongols, or Corinth by the Romans.. but those were individual instances, and not part of a global epidemic of heritage destruction. What Tung adds to the discussion of preservation is precisely this consciousness, built through a series of chapters on different cultural capitals around the world, that our cities face common challenges from a common antagonist. Preservation is an attempt to mitigate these global pressures.. and to be effective it must learn global lessons.