Inevitably, the fault lines erupted, and it all went downhill with territorial expansion, corruption with the new wealth market not shared, wars and uprisings within conquered lands, national debt, and inflation.
Another, less well-known factor was climate change. As documented by Kyle Harper in The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, the period between roughly 200 BCE and 150 CE is now known as the Rome Climate Optimum.13 This was a period of a warm, wet, and predicable climate that helped harness the empire’s agricultural crops. The climate became cooler and dryer in the third century, resulting in droughts and crop failures, and by the fifth century the Late Antique Little Ice Age arrived. The changing climate reduced the empire’s resilience to a variety of shocks, such as a smallpox pandemic and the outbreak of the Plague of Justinian. The decade before the outbreak of the plague in the sixth century saw some of the coldest temperatures in millennia brought about by a series of massive volcanic eruptions in central Asia, which likely forced gerbils and marmots out of their natural habitats, causing the bacteria-bearing fleas they carried to infect the black rats whose population had exploded along Rome’s network of trade routes.
A weakened population, mass deaths, a dying democracy, war, inflation, national debt, and corrupt governance, helped along by a climate crisis, saw the fall of Rome. But this does not take away from the lesson that Rome is perhaps the greatest example we have in recorded history of a city with effective, far-reaching leadership. They recognized that sustainable development and economic growth must go hand in hand with social inclusion and respect for the environment.
Venice
Venetians have lived on water ever since the first Venetians chose to settle in a mosquito-filled marsh in the northern Adriatic Sea. These fifth-century settlers were fleeing German and Hun invaders and probably picked the area, which consisted of dozens of disparate islands surrounded by a 200-square-mile (517-km2) shallow lagoon, for the protection it offered them.14
They harnessed the natural landscape to build a city by driving wooden poles into the ground, creating plank and marble foundations, and redirecting the rivers to the sea away from the lagoon15 – problem solving at its finest. If the original Venetians hadn’t done this, Venice as we know it today would be Italian coastline and not much else.
Venice is the city where the streets are made with water. There are no additional lanes or roads that have to be built, road traffic is purposefully kept to a minimum, and this has in turn made everyone walk. Venice is an inspiration for cities who want to reduce their car use and diversify their transport system. Venice was one of the first cities to hit its GHG emissions peak before the 2020 target.16
Venice faces many challenges today, including rising sea levels and shifting tectonic plates that technology and urban development are attempting to keep up with, but the original premise is still to be admired. For a city founded for the purpose of protection, it seems to still be in line with its original values (Figure 2.4).
Figure 2.4 Venice today, a city founded for the purpose of protection, now ironically under threat from rising sea levels. (Source: Miiisha/Shutterstock)
Venice has endured, with a concept that is wholly unique. It has taught us a model for sustainable multimodal transport without car use. It is an enduring proof-of-concept.
1665 London
History has shown us that London is a city that “applies” its learnings from its disasters.
The Great Fire of London
In 1665, the Great Plague swept through London, killing about 200,000 people, almost one-quarter of London’s population.17 The people of London were to face another disaster a year later when a fire started on 2 September in the King’s bakery in Pudding Lane near London Bridge. It had been very hot that summer and there had been no rain for weeks. The wooden houses and buildings were tinder dry, so the fire spread rapidly across the city, its population powerless to stop it.18
As a result of the Great Fire, 80% of the city was destroyed: 13,200 houses, 87 churches, the Royal Exchange, Newgate Prison, and Bridewell Palace. It left 80,000 Londoners homeless, a fifth of the city’s population at the time and equivalent to almost two million people in today’s capital being made homeless.19
The Great Fire was not the first occurrence of disastrous fires to afflict London. St Paul’s Cathedral was first built in 605 and 70 years later was destroyed by a fire that swept through the city and once again in another fire in 1087. Alongside these disasters were two medieval fires that caused massive damage to London in 1135 and 1212, which resulted in the first Building Act of 1189 that legislated standards for building materials and footprints but clearly did not go far enough.
The Great Fire inspired a series of measures to prevent future fires. Each parish now had two fire “squirts” (an early attempt at the fire engine), which set the foundation for today’s fire brigade. The London Fire Prevention Regulations of 1668 also established a new water supply pipework and infrastructure, the origins are which are seen in modern fire hydrant systems.20 But it was the London Building Act of 1667 that takes its place as the single most influential piece of construction-related legislation in British history. It regulated storey-heights, banned timber facades in favour of brick and stone, and banned thatched roofs.21
Many of these structures are still enforced in building regulations today, with the roof of the new Globe Theatre being the first thatched roof permitted in London since the Great Fire. The real success of the 1667 Act, however, was that it was the first-time money was allocated by the state to employ surveyors to enforce building regulations.22 Thus, a profession that still exists today and our entire modern building control system was born.
It is also worth mentioning that the Great Fire helped bring about the end of the Great Plague by killing all the rats – another lesson London learned from disaster.
Cholera
In 1854, at the height of a new cholera epidemic in the Soho district around Broad Street, John Snow, a physician, plotted the course of the cholera outbreak on a map he drew himself and worked out from the map that all the victims had used the same Broad Street water pump. As an experiment, Snow removed the handle from the pump so no one else could drink from it and from then onwards no one else in the area became infected. Snow had stopped the spread by removing the source of the disease – the water pump. He discovered the connection between contaminated water and cholera.
Sewage
The discovery that cholera was a waterborne disease was pivotal in the city’s urban transformation. The Thames was little more than an open sewer system with zero wildlife and represented a public health hazard as much of the city’s waste ran freely through the streets and thoroughfares directly into the river. The city depended on a system of local waste disposal such as night-soil collectors to empty local cesspits and the city’s rivers, which also served as a source of drinking water and washing.23 The increasing use of the flush toilet