Four Lost Cities by Annalee Newitz

 

Another interesting book about old places, some more forgotten than others, less interested in frontiers and fringes than The Far Edges of the Known World, much more interested in cities and how they grow and shrink, live and die, and what lessons we can take from history as the cities more of us live in than ever are threatened by climate and other natural disasters. The clearest throughgoing point is that leaving a city--and mass abandonment is in the end how most cities that die, die--is a political choice, especially at a population level. It's not exactly a fix-up, but the four cities were clearly four different experiences for the author, and probably not in the same order they're in the book. Not so scales-from-the-eyes enlightening as the Rees, but very readable and worth reading, especially if you live in or near a city (and probabilistically, you do).