Collateral Damages: Landlords and the Urban Housing Crisis

Abstract

may reach an equilibrium state in some environments: A climax forest is a good example, where individual species may remain unchanged for thousands of years. However, to do so requires environmental equilibrium, which is not currently the case for cities or humans. In fact, cities have changed constantly for as long as they have existed. Woolf’s insight may shed light on what is to come, but conclusions are not self-evident. Instead, his framework raises more questions: Is there an upper limit to city size? What can the environment support? Demographers tell us that our planet’s human population may be approaching a maximum. Environmental pressures will most likely encourage larger city forms. Woolf challenges us to think harder, and longer term, about these issues. The long-term case study aspect is what sets Woolf’s book apart from conventional discussions in the planning of urban development. As an ancient historian, Woolf masterfully draws on textual and archaeological evidence to consider the widest possible scope of urbanism: cities as they grow and shrink, reorganize, and re-emerge. Whereas Part I sets out the evolutionary framework and offers examples of both successes and failures of emergent cities, Parts II through IV balance the details of individual urban histories with his interest in the larger evolutionary patterns. In Part II, Woolf describes early urban growth in the Mediterranean from the Aegean Bronze Age through the 4th century BCE. He focuses on the rise of the Greek city-state model, though he provides contemporary comparisons across the Mediterranean. Part III turns to the Roman Empire, particularly the relationship between urban form and imperial power. Cities offered structure—physical space, governmental organization, social norms—that was essential to exerting imperial control and the success of the Roman Empire. Finally, in Part IV, he looks at deurbanization and the resilience of urbanism. Woolf contrasts the greatest megacities, drawing on resources from across the Mediterranean, with the post-classical shift to smaller, regional cities as the empire fragmented. Despite—or perhaps because of—the political, economic, and social challenges, the core cities of the Mediterranean transformed into a different sort of urban in the post-classical period and continued to evolve into the places we know today. Although the specificity of data from the ancient world leaves much to be desired by modern standards— population size and total city area are frequently ballpark estimates, at best—Woolf’s study of the ancient Mediterranean offers an unmatched opportunity to explore what happens with evolutionary successes, when new and better systems emerge, and what failure might look like. The issues of urban failure and long-term resilience are perhaps his most important lessons as we look to a future of cities that must respond to environmental, political, and social challenges. Woolf cautions that we cannot map the post-industrial urban experience onto cities of the ancient world and that our urbanism is distinctly different from the past. Yet for all of the advances of modern technology, the human experience of living in cities, places denser, larger, and more diverse than their surrounding landscapes, maintains some fundamental similarities. Cities from millennia ago cannot model the future, but they do mirror the problems of today, offering insights into essential human responses. It is up to us whether we force change or remain part of a larger evolutionary pattern.