Conservationists lament the passing of wild places, but cities too are endangered ecosystems. Since Neolithic times, when they first began to emerge in places such as Çatal Hüyük in contemporary Anatolia, cities have been places where humans re-enact the rituals of hunter-gatherers. Humans are ill suited to the incessant labour and recurrent migration that go with farming. Cities were created from the yearning for a settled existence.
Hunter-gatherers must know their local environment intimately. They need to move freely on the land so they can track its changes; but they are not bound to move into new territory, as farmers must when they have exhausted the soil. The lives of hunter-gatherers circle around a place they never leave, or cease to explore.
All cities were once new; but it is ancient cities that best meet the need for a settled existence. Iain Sinclair believes old cities bear the psychic traces of the generations that have passed through them:
The churches are only one system of energies, or unit of connection, within the city. There are also the old hospitals, the Inns of Court, the markets, the prisons, the religious houses.… Each church is an enclosure of force, a sight-block, a raised place with an unacknowledged influence on events.
Old cities are descendants in a line that goes back to the Labyrinth at Knossos in Bronze Age Crete.
In cities, persons are shadows cast by places, and no generation lasts as long as a street. In the post-urban sprawls that are replacing cities, streets come and go as quickly as the people who pass through them. As cities are deconstructed into sites for traffic, the settled life they once contained is fading from memory.