Preface 1999:
The Urban Maelstrom (extract)
“The appearance of the ocean . . . had something very unusual about it, ” recounted one of Edgar Allen Poe’s narrators. As he watched from a cliff, the sea below began to move. “This current acquired a monstrous velocity. In five minutes the whole sea . . . was lashed into ungovernable fury. . . . Here the vast bed of the waters, seamed and scarred into a thousand conflicting channels, burst suddenly into phrensied convulsion-heaving, boiling, hissing-gyrating in gigantic and innumerable velocities, and all whirling and plunging on to the eastward with a rapidity which water never elsewhere assumes, except in precipitous descents. ” [1]
The abrupt shift in the sea’s appearance marked the opening of the Maelstrom, a legendary whirlpool off the west coast of Norway. Nothing that fell within the Maelstrom’s reach could resist the suction of the vortex or the transformation that it wrought on all that it swallowed. Ships vanished. Hapless whales and bears were dragged howling into the hole. The trunks of firs and pine trees, “after being absorbed by the current, rise again broken and torn to such a degree as if bristles grew upon them. ”
What Poe describes as a self-generated phenomenon of nature can serve as a metaphor for the effect that great cities have upon the natural world. As a city grows, so does both its reach and its power to transform the nonhuman world on which its people depend. Imagine the surface of the globe over the past five thousand years puckered with a succession of vortices called not Maelstrom but Babylon, Thebes, Athens, Persepolis, Carthage, Rome, Chichen Itza, London, New York, Tokyo, Jakarta, Las Vegas. Some have faded, others diminished in their attraction, but their overall number, and their ability to pull in, change, and waste whatever they absorb, has accelerated exponentially with the technological innovations that they generate. Ecologically speaking, the earth’s surface is today one “phrensied convulsion” of competing whirlpools. No area on the planet is now free from the process of global urbanization. Wilderness has ceased to exist…
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Arthur Rackham, Into The Maelstrom. Credit: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Notes
1. Poe, “A Descent into the Maelstrom,” 556-57.
Hudson Yards, a new development on the west side of Manhattan, — like all modern city skylines — represents an enormous concentration of energy and raw materials taken from the city’s expansive hinterland, or contado. Photo by Gray Brechin
Ambrogio Lorenzetti, The Allegory of Good Government, painted 1338-9 in Siena’s Palazzo Publicco, shows an ideal symbiotic relationship between a peaceful city and its countryside (contado) evenly divided by the city wall. In reality, as the city grows it becomes increasingly parasitic upon an ever-growing hinterland requiring remote control technology and military conquest.