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Comment by haltist | Hacker News Reader

Most cities are built on top of the ruins of old cities. Or nature eventually reclaims the territory, e.g. Chernobyl. I think the software crisis is a non-issue. The stack works well enough for most people and most software consumers don't care if the software has bugs as long as it does the job 90% of the time.

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Most?

Is that true?

What is the total number of cities today in a world of 8+ billion?

No cities in Australia were built on ruined former cities .. cities such as Dublin and London appear to have been continuously cities since their founding.

It's an interesting claim, is it one that you can back with any data?

London was (almost entirely[1]) burned to the ground in the great fire of 1666[2]. The new city was built on the smoldering wreckage of the old one.

[1] Pretty much the only things that survived were the tower of London and a few streets around The Cathedral of St Bartholomew the Great near Smithfield Market which most people even in London don't know about even though hundreds of people pass just one street away every day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Bartholomew-the-Great

[2] https://www.london-fire.gov.uk/museum/history-and-stories/th...

Most cities exist where they do for geographical reasons that have existed for longer than humans. Until the railroad (~200 years ago) you couldn't have a large city unless it had a good port as the only possible way to get enough food in to support a city was by boat. There are only limited places that support a great port so once humans start a city we can't abandon it. Today we could abandon NYC - the port itself would have to remain but everything else could move elsewhere (the port could not move elsewhere as most places don't have a way for ships to get in without massive ocean floor projects) - that won't happen because there is so much inertia of people already living there, but it could.

I don't know what the natives in Australia did. however I can report without looking that if they had the numbers to build cities they would be about where the current cities are.

There were massive cities up rivers too with I think no real seafaring component: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37973229

River ports exist. I did not mean to exclude them. Some places on a river are better than others.

I recommend you look into it at your local library. You'll probably need to ask the librarian about archived city plans. The place I live had train tracks running through the middle of the city and now that area is a paved bike path with parks and recreation centers. Cities are more dynamic than most people realize.

Cities are dynamic in much the same manner as axe's that have handles and axe heads replaced .. while growing larger and spawing smaller axes about them.

The "Great Fire of London" took out a large chunk of the city which allowed for a clean slate redesign and rebuild of a district - it didn't wipe out the entire city, modern London is vast compared to the original Londinium Fort.

The original quote, as given, was that most cities in the world were built on the implied total ruin of prior cities - I'd argue that relatively few cities (not most) were built on the smoking ruins of near total destruction (74 cities at least in Japan fit the bill, along with roughly that number in Europe) with most having a more organic growth based on a long series of partial rebuilding of districts in rotation.

Thank you for your advice - I did once work on digitising a few hundred years worth of city records some 40 years ago.

Rome was the global superpower all the way until they weren't

Edit: However, I will concede that I think nuclear annihilation is more likely. So in that case you would be correct by accident

...and that's why we can't have nice things :(

No, seriously, there's a saying that if construction engineers built buildings the way software engineers do, thousands of people would die each day because of buildings collapsing without any reason. Even if you build on the ruins of an old city, you still have to dig a hole that's deep enough (securing archaeological remains if necessary), create a stable surface with concrete piles or similar, and then you build a new building. You don't just stack miscellaneous boxes one on top of each other like in this XKCD (https://xkcd.com/2347/) and hope that they don't fall down...

What your describing is how modern cities are made. Go back about 200 years and we did build that way and if an earthquake happened... well the results were not great. Some places in the world still build this way, and if and when the earthquake happens... ya.

I guess we're still in the earlier ages of software development.

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