---
tags: refx, #readingnotes
book: A Field Guide to Getting Lost
author: Rebecca Solnit
date: August 08, 2013 03:47:50 PM

--- 

p89

Cities are built by men (and to a lesser extent, women), but they decay by nature, from earthquakes and hurricanes to the incremental processes of rot, erosion, rust, the microbial breakdown of concrete, stone, wood, and brick, the return of plants and animals making their own complex order that further dismantles the simple order of men. This nature is allowed to take over when, for economic or political reasons, maintenance is withdrawn. Ruins are also created by the vandalism, arson, and war in which humans run wild. Cities in Europe and the American South have been consciously ruined by war, but this country's North and West have fallen into ruin only for other reasons. Ruins were the symbolic home of much of the art of the time, some photography and painting, much music, the science fiction movies of the time, even the backdrops for rock videos and fashion photographs, for clothes that looked ancient, worn, combat and cobweb stuff. They were landscapes of abandon, the abandon of neglect and violence that came first and the abandon of passion that moved into the ruins.

A city is built to resemble a conscious mind, a network that can calculate, administrate, manufacture. Ruins become the unconscious of a city, its memory, unknown, darkness, lost lands, and in this truly bring it

![](§_getting_lost_89.jpg)