The stability of species. Take the number of species that we now consider extinct. For a long time scientists took the number of such species as that implied from an analysis of the extant fossils.
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In most real cities, such as London or Rome or Shanghai, the tiniest alleyway is hijacked and then utilized for public space, the smallest nook becomes a store, the dampest arch under a bridge is filled in with a home. Over centuries, this constant infilling, ceaseless replacement, renewal, and complexification—in other words, evolution—creates a deeply satisfying aesthetic. The places most renowned for their beauty (Venice, Kyoto, Esfahan) are those that reveal intersecting deep layers of time. Every corner carries the long history of the city embedded in it like a hologram, glimpses of which unfold as we stroll by.
Kelly, Kevin. 2010. What Technology Wants. Penguin Books. WorldCat.
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The future of human mobility points in just one direction: more. The coming decades could witness billions of people on the move, shifting from south to north, from coast to inland, from low-lying to higher-elevation, from overpriced to affordable, from failing to stable societies.
Khanna, P. (2021) Move: The Forces Uprooting Us. New York, N.Y: Scribner.
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We are told not only that movement through geographies can be stopped but that movement through time can be too, that we can return to the past, to a better past, when our country, our race, our religion was truly great. All we must accept is division. The division of humanity into natives and migrants. A vision of a world of walls and barriers, and of the guards and weapons and surveillance required to enforce those barriers. A world where privacy dies, and dignity and equality alongside it, and where humans must pretend to be static, unmoving, moored to the land on which they currently stand and to a time like the time of their childhood—or of their ancestors’ childhoods—an imaginary time, in which standing still is only an imaginary possibility. Such are the dreams of a species defeated by nostalgia, at war with itself, with its migratory nature and the nature of its relationship to time, screaming in denial of the constant movement that is human life.
Mohsin, H. (2019) ‘In the 21st century, we are all migrants’, National Geographic magazine, August.
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