
‘Lost’ ancient Mexican city had as many buildings as Manhattan, laser map shows - wildduck_io
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/lost-mexico-city-aztec-buildings-pur-pecha-empire-morelia-michoac-n-a8214551.html
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hprotagonist
as the original coverage pointed out, one of the drawbacks of lidar imaging
alone is that you generally don’t get any temporal resolution.

you get “every structure that ever existed here”, basically. you still need
generations of grad students and pickaxes to figure out which buildings
coexisted in time and use.

the real win is that now you know where to dig, and that’s a huge deal all by
itself.

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thinkingkong
Doesnt it suggest that there was some maximums size in the same general
timeframe? The alternative is that they used a city like a rotating pasture or
something. Genuinely curious.

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freehunter
Modern cities go through this all the time, growing and shrinking and growing
and shrinking, just to slightly less extreme extents.

You'll very often see a popular side of town fall out of fashion, the
buildings get torn down and now it's just empty lots while another side of
town is built up and is now fashionable. In 20 years, the buildings fall into
disrepair and since rents are so cheap back on the other side of town and
empty lots abound, the other side of town is now rebuilt.

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xyzzyz
The buildings in the unfashionable part of the town don’t get torn down, it’s
actually opposite — they are getting torn down in fashionable parts to make
place for new ones, precisely because it is fashionable place to build. People
hardly ever demolish structures to keep the lot empty — it’s an extra cost
without any payback, and the old structure may be useful to some buyers, so
destroying it would not only be expensive, but it would also destroy some
value. If the existing structure is no good for anyone, then the cost of
tearing it down is incorporated in the value of the lot, and the buyer will do
it, there is no need for seller to spend money on that.

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purple-again
Sigh I wish you weren’t wrong but sadly you are. We demolished both of our
closed buildings because the cost of not doing so (fucking transients are not
free, land owners somewhere are paying for them) is higher than the cost of
just demolishing the building.

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saalweachter
Not to mention property taxes on empty buildings.

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vanderZwan
The alternative is having people buy a building, _not do anything with it_ ,
and wait for the price to increase to sell it at a profit. Leading to a
shortage of real estate with a ton of unused real estate.

And no, we can't just wait for the market to self-correct for empty properties
being devalued due to being surrounded by empty properties: you'll just end up
with empty, abandoned buildings that nobody wants to fix.

If you want incentives to make people avoid doing that, the only two methods
that I can think of are property tax, or legalised squatting (with squatters
having a right to stay).

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downrightmike
I wonder if they had a high mortality rate like a lot of modern cities before
the sanitary movement.

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tzahola
Not until the conquistadors brought the necessary bugs.

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ceejayoz
I'm fairly certain human waste had pathogens in it in the Americas even before
1492.

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tzahola
Maybe, but human waste is not intrinsically pathogenic. Unlike in Europe and
Asia, American natives rarely had any livestock, so they didn’t have pathogens
jumping from animals to humans.

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BatFastard
The headline is a bit misleading "As many buildings as Manhattan"? I see maybe
20 buildings in articles photo. Is this Manhattan in 1640 or something?

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gus_massa
I think that the misleading part is that many (most) of the 40000 buildings in
Manhattan are skyscrapers and the 40000 buildings in the ancient city had only
1 (or 2?) stories. In particular Manhattan has a population of 1600000 and
many buildings are offices without permanent population, but that city had
only 100000 habitants.

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gowld
And the buildings in the ancient had much smaller footprint than 0.1 of a
Manhattan city block. (Manhattan has ~2500 blocks)

