Jane Jacobs attained a certain degree of fame after she published her iconoclastic approach to city planning in The Death and Life of American Cities in 1961. Subsequently she wrote two more books about cities that eclipsed The Death and Life in their level of iconoclasm; sadly, those books are still exceedingly off-mainstream. The first of the two, The Economy of Cities (1970), introduces the ideas that the basic unit of macroeconomics is not the nation but the city, and that economic development always begins in cities. The second, Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984), takes the idea to the next level and talks about broader city regions, inter-city trade, the rise and fall of cities’ economies, and cities in relation to nations.

Jacobs’ ideas are sufficiently unknown that I am going to spend half this article just summarizing the two books. If you’ve read them, feel free to skip to the second half, though the first half might still give you a glimpse into how I mentally organize those points before I critique them.

The starting point of The Economy of Cities is that development comes from cities. It begins with a (weak) archeological argument that even the agricultural revolution was an urban renovation, with small trading posts functioning as cities in the preagricultural age. From there, Jacobs builds her points into a considerably stronger thesis that a certain level of population density is necessary to sustain economic development. It ranges from very difficult to impossible to put a factory on the ground without a network of urban suppliers. When Henry Ford tried producing every part of his automobiles at one site, he failed. Only when he changed his operation to assembling car parts produced in other factories, which formed part of Detroit’s manufacturing network, did he succeed.

At the same time, Jacobs makes it clear that development can only happen in one way: import replacement. A city develops by having entrepreneurs and inventors take apart imported goods and learn how they work and how to produce parts for them until they can produce them more cheaply than they can be imported. The example she keeps referring to is Tokyo’s bicycle industry, which replaced American imports with local production. Once a city replaces an import, it can use the extra money it gets to import other, typically more expensive goods, triggering further import replacement. This process is coupled to the full cycle of division of labor, in which division of labor involves adding new work, which in turn triggers more division of labor, and so on.

Finally, Jacobs warns, these processes can never work outside cities. Programs meant to develop agricultural countries by creating jobs in rural areas, most spectacularly the Great Leap Forward, invariably flop. This includes many softer programs for rural development, notably the green revolution and birth control. The green revolution’s productivity increases displaced the rural poor without creating city jobs to compensate, Jacobs says. And birth control does not matter so much given that Japan, Western Europe, and the eastern US have high population densities without widespread poverty.

In Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jacobs broadens her theory. First, she defines a city region, a penumbra of a city that appears to reach somewhat beyond its metropolitan area. Within that city region, the city’s economic development spills over without wrecking society too much. This is based on five factors: the city’s thirst for supplies of primary goods, job creation, productivity increases, transplants, and capital formation.

The most interesting factor, supplies, contrasts cities with supply regions—for example, oil-producing states—which are temporarily wealthy due to their richness of primary goods, and then crash once the goods run out or are replaced with alternatives. That, Jacobs says, is what places Saudi Arabia in the third world. It is economically passive, while the US is not.

More in general, she divides the world into productive and passive regions. Productive regions, i.e. vibrant cities, are in the first world; passive ones, including all rural areas as well as economically dead cities such as Pittsburgh, are in the third world, and only appear comfortable because of subsidies from Jacobs’ first world. In that third world, stagflation, defined as high prices and not enough work, is endemic. She gives the example of Portugal, where unemployment is high and the prices, while low by American standards, are out of the population’s reach. The problem, then, is that mainstream economists mistook the boom of the 19th century and much of the 20th century for a constant economic condition, not realizing that stagflation was perfectly normal.

Much of the rest of the book is devoted to fleshing out her earlier ideas more in full. She talks more about how productivity increases can hurt rural areas by making too many people redundant. She integrates trade into city development, showing how cities grow by not only replacing imports but also exporting goods. She continues her historical narrative, skipping from the agricultural revolution to medieval Europe; her main argument is that Venice developed by trading not only with Constantinople but also with other cities in then backward Europe, and in general cities should not become colonies to bigger cities by only trading with them but also create their own mini-networks of cities.

While she gives some examples of how cities can stab themselves in the back in The Economy of Cities, it is only in the later book that she develops that into a coherent idea, which, incidentally, is also where she is weakest. First, currency feedback is crucial in telling cities when to import and when to replace imports, so national currencies at best depress all cities but one—London in Britain, Paris in France, Milan in Italy, and so on—and at worst create a total disharmony of economic feedback, as in multi-city countries like the US. In developing countries, national currencies are pegged to rural goods or primary supplies, which tend to strengthen the currency beyond what the cities can take without deindustrializing. One major reason Singapore developed so fast is that it was kicked out of Malaysia for political reasons and subsequently used its own currency. The US and Japan needed explicit tariffs to protect local industry; in Singapore (and Hong Kong), this tariff was called the national currency.

Further, cities can stifle themselves by engaging in various forms of discrimination, including against small businesses. Caste systems and racial and gender inequality rob the city of needed talent. Regulations such as ground rules established in New York in the 1960s, wherein the city let firms bid on the redevelopment of 37 buildings in Harlem but only if they could bid on all 37 at once, ensure blighted neighborhoods cannot develop their own talent. In the US it is so egregious that in The Economy of Cities, Jacobs quotes a civil rights activist who says government interference with slum development causes so many problems it would be better if it left black neighborhoods alone entirely.

In Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jacobs also introduces the idea of transactions of decline. These are forms of spending that on paper increase GDP but in practice never produce any innovation or further growth. She identifies three such transactions: military spending, subsidies to rural hinterlands, and trade with backward countries. Military spending can help the economy when it is temporary, but otherwise it is a drag since it produces nothing. The same applies to subsidies to the hinterland and loans to third world countries that can never pay them back. All three are preoccupations of great empires, which is why cities tend to have cycles of growth, followed by imperialism, followed by decline.

Before criticizing the specifics of Jacobs’ argument, let me say that I think the basic notion that cities are the basic units of macroeconomics makes some sense. There is no special reason for nations to be the basic unit, especially not in the age of the European Union and the Euro. Urban areas and city regions are natural units defined economically and socially, independent of arbitrary political boundaries. Nations—and, incidentally, city limits—are not. In addition, let me note that there are many sub-issues I cannot address for space constraints. My above summary has 1,100 words; Mark Rosenfelder’s has more than 6,000 and still misses some important points.

The weakest point in Jacobs’ argument is the exact definition of import replacement and when it occurs. She peppers her writing with examples of when cities replace imports and when they do not, without a shred of evidence that this is in fact what happens. It is subtle and remote enough in the two books I am dealing with here, which is why I only noticed it upon reading Dark Age Ahead (2004). In that book, she talks about Canada’s rapid economic growth in the early 2000s as an example of import replacement in Toronto. The sum total of the evidence she includes there is an anecdote of an office chair with “Made in Canada” printed on it. The evidence she gives that some city in the US or Britain underwent a surge of import replacement in the 1840s is even thinner.

In fact, her example of Toronto’s import replacement shows how fragile her analysis is. One of the major factors behind Canada’s recent growth is the fact that Alberta is sitting on more oil than is present in the entire Middle East, albeit in tar sand form, which is more expensive to produce than Saudi crude. Increasing development of tar sands is causing labor shortages in much of Alberta, which then translate to reduced unemployment in other provinces, which send migrant workers to tar sand mining operations.

Second, the three transactions of decline she identifies are not the only or even the most costly types of spending that do not produce wealth. Health spending, debt interest, infrastructure repair, policing and internal security, and even some forms of welfare that go to the urban poor are just as economically unproductive. Much of this is covered by the difference between gross and net domestic product. The rest boils down to how much the city spends versus what level it could theoretically lower its spending to, which is itself a function of its wage level, or its existing level of economic development.

In fact, health spending dwarfs Jacobs’ three transactions of decline in almost every developed country. The US spends 4.5% of its GDP on defense, and New York’s tax imbalance with the state and federal governments, which significantly overlaps military spending, totals 5% of its gross city product. Aid to other countries, including loans, totals 0.2%. That compares with 15% of American GDP spent on health care. Although other developed countries spend closer to 9-10% of their GDP on health, they also spend closer to 1.5-2% of their GDP on the military. The only developed country that spends more on the military than on health is Singapore, which has no hinterland to subsidize (though Israel comes close, and also massively subsidizes settlers above and beyond IDF protection).

There are a few more areas in which Jacobs’ theory is fuzzy. It says nothing of how subsidies to poor regions can in fact produce innovation by investing in education. It entirely misses the fact that population pressure can impoverish countries, and at any rate birth control and family planning are necessary to move women from the production of babies to the production of new wealth. It dwells on manufacturing but says nothing about service economies. It is overall tailored to the 1980s, when the shock of American deindustrialization was at its peak, Germany and Japan were forward-looking innovators, China had barely recovered from Maoism, and Ronald Reagan was busy hiking military spending and running unsustainable deficits.

Two points of fuzziness stand out. The first is that Jacobs leaves cities undefined. It is implied that they all work like London or New York, that is have a core surrounded by rings of decreasingly urbanized areas. But that is not the only way for a city to arise. The biggest urban area in Germany is not Berlin, but the Ruhr, an agglomeration of many relatively small industrial cities, none of which dominates the region. On a larger scale, Jacobs leaves out megalopolises, which severely complicate her proposed scheme wherein each city region mints and prints its own currency. How can New York and Philadelphia have separate currencies when their metropolitan areas overlap?

The second fuzzy point is the definition of the third world. The third world is not defined by economic passivity, but by various social problems centered around poverty. Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Beijing, and Bangkok are perfectly dynamic, and fit perfectly into the third world. Moscow has gotten far more economically active since the fall of the Soviet Union, but its upsurge in poverty and breakdown in public health triggered a painful process of third-worldening spreading in Russia.

To some extent, it is hard to fault Jacobs for consistently preferring anecdotes to data. When the economic mainstream focuses on nations, it is very hard to find accurate data about the economies of cities. Jacobs is by and large forced to talk about import replacement in the almost magical terms she uses, invoking it whenever there is no other explanation for economic growth that fits her theory. And the historical overviews that stay away from handwaved import replacement are strong.

But the solution to problems with data is to look for empirical clues, such as the number of bicycles or cars or computers a developing country imports every year. Import replacement will occur whenever we see a decrease in the imports of a lower-level good without a corresponding decrease in its consumption. Supply-oriented growth will occur whenever increased exports of primary goods account for big enough a fraction of economic growth.

Jacobs’ policy suggestions span the entire gamut from politically insane to extremely cogent. It is not especially hard to divert subsidies to areas where they increase productivity: education, worker retraining, public transportation instead of roads and cars, direct scientific research rather than military research, minimum income as opposed to a mishmash of welfare programs that cost too much and reduce poverty too little. There, Jacobs is completely right. Her suggestion that budding empires not squelch city development in colonies the way Britain did in Ireland and tried to in the US could work, but is politically difficult to implement. In contrast, small currency regions will never work, and neither will ending trade with backward areas.

Make no mistake about it: Jacobs understands macroeconomics. Her theory has a fairly sound core, even if it requires tweaking to account for changes brought in the previous decade and in this one. The problems only start when she heaps onto the theory sundry sub-issues that only detract from it.

Elatia Harris

Until 1967, when the excavations of Prof. Spyridon Marinatos began to bring it to light, the clock had been stopped on the settlement of Akrotiri, on the Aegean island of Thera – better known as Santorini – for about 3600 years. Volcanic ash from the largest geological event of ancient times, several hundred feet of ash that would have taken fully two centuries to harden, had both destroyed and preserved the town, setting it apart from history for a very long time.

The precise dating of the event is a difficulty – one of those problems that arise when there’s a spread between archeological and geological data.  Though the Egyptians – this would have been about the time of Queen Hatshepsut – suffered no damage on record from the eruption, its ashy traces blew northeast to Anatolia, helping to date it to around 1600 B.C.E.  Its effects, including a tsunami that pounded the northern coast of Crete, would have been marked with awe throughout the eastern Mediterranean, and may have made an impact on weather systems as far away as China.  Examining a satellite photo of Thera, it is easy to see the outlines of the caldera, the vast undersea crater around which the present island takes form. The Thera Eruption, as it is called, was not the first from this furious caldera, several hundred thousand years old — only the first to impinge on civilization.

Who, then, lived on Thera?  Not that it was in those days called Thera; the name came into use well after the eruption.  The Therans had much but not everything in common with the palace-dwelling Minoans on Crete.  Thera being the southernmost island in the Cycladic arc, just about equidistant from mainland Greece and Asia Minor and 70 kilometers north of Crete, its roots in Cycladic culture went deep. Of Minoans in general, we know what we can infer from archeological sites, but we cannot read their language, written in the tormenting and fascinating script called Linear A, at which scholars have puzzled ever since the Phaistos Disc was unearthed on Crete one hundred years ago.  Shards covered with Linear A have been found on Thera, too, tantalizing in their mute abundance.

One of the most baffling losses pre-history confronts us with is our not knowing how an ancient people referred to itself, or what its place was called by those who lived there. We don’t know Minoan place names, or what the Minoans called themselves, and the sound of their speech is but a guess. We do know that the time of their late flourishing — roughly the middle centuries of the second millennium B.C.E. — corresponded to a period of internationalism and vigorous trade throughout the eastern Mediterranean and Near East.

This was the Late Bronze Age, and many of its gorgeous refinements were fully present on Thera. In the harbor there were 50-foot ships of cypress, with resinated linen-covered hulls and benches for 30 oarsmen. Thanks to the same geothermal activity that would one day disastrously increase, hot water ran in pipes through multi-storied houses with stone stairs. Ventilation was understood, with light wells sunk in blocks of dwellings. Then as now in the Mediterranean, staples were stored in gigantic ceramic jars – olive oil, grain, dried figs. There was intricate and characteristic jewelry – out-sized crescent earrings, for instance – and there was perfume, of coriander, almonds, bergamot and pine. Weaving was so fine that garments could be woven sheer and then embroidered. There were blue-toned vervet monkeys from Egypt, tall stone vases for lilies, and sufficient paint for many radiantly colored and figured walls — had there not been paint, we would know very little of the rest.

And there was saffron, the dark red thread linking so many ancient peoples.  Saffron is obtained by plucking the stigma — the female parts of the reproductive system of the saffron crocus – and drying it. The dried stigma are called saffron threads, and these are typically ground to a powder before or after being sold.  Harvesting and drying saffron is intensive labor, performed almost everywhere by women. Known and used since Neolithic times, the wild-growing crocus species that produces saffron, C. cartwrightianus, has given over to a cultivated species, C. sativus.  Numerous crocus species, some with mythological associations, bloom in the late winter, the spring and the fall.  C. cartwrightianus and C. sativus, with their petals of violet-blue, bloom in the late fall, a time of tremendous fecundity in both plant and animal life in the Mediterranean. It takes about 70,000 deep orange-red stigma to make a pound of saffron.  Always regarded as very, very precious, it is now mainly known as the world’s most expensive spice.  In its defense as a flavoring for food – the taste is epiphanial, and you only need a little.  More about that another time.  Its 4000-year history includes not only culinary applications, but use as a dye, a medicine, and a ritual substance.

Anyone looking for the cultic aspects of saffron had better begin with Akrotiri. Though history’s most ardent kiss – language that we can read – has not yet been bestowed here, the images on the walls tell us a story of their own.

In the building known as Xeste 3, larger and more decorated than any other in town, is a two-storied chamber of frescoes – true frescoes, painted on wet plaster for a time-defying bond – depicting women and girls gathering saffron crocus blooms, bringing them in baskets to a saffron-cushioned goddess seated on a three-tiered platform. It is by far the most splendid and evocative cycle of paintings from the ancient world to be discovered in our time, and a match for almost any painting from pre-classical antiquity.  Since the Aegean Late Bronze Age was a time of complex cross-currents in artistic influences, striking parallels between the Egyptian and Minoan painting styles are to be expected.  The precision with which landscape elements as large as harbors and as small as individual flowers were imagined and represented on Thera, however, is without peer in either Minoan civilization or Dynastic Egypt.

Xeste 3 was probably a public building – on an ashlar wall there is an altar surmounted by a painted pair of horns tipped and dripping in red and, below, a lustral basin, both too large for domestic use.  If public or semi-public rituals were performed here, then to what end? And in whose propitiation?

Mistress of the Animals

It is hard not to look at the goddess on the saffron cushion. Though her state of preservation is less than optimal, she is the focal point of the cycle. Necklaces with a duck and a dragonfly motif hang in an arc from her throat. Her blue and white costume is richly embroidered with a saffron crocus motif, the easily recognizable silhouette of the wild-growing C. cartwrightianus that is everywhere represented in Xeste 3 – clinging to rocks, garlanding its gatherers, piled into baskets, and patterning the creamy white field on which all the images are painted. The sheer visual inescapability of the crocus on these premises where rituals were enacted may represent its fragrance suffusing the atmosphere. A sign in Greek mythology of the presence of a deity is the scent of flowers, and one thousand years earlier on Thera, it may have meant the same, for the Greeks routinely endowed the Olympians with the attributes of far older gods.

To us, perhaps the most compelling aspect of the goddess is not her regalia, but her expression. Head turned in profile, her eye is starry with interest, her lips parted as if in speech with the blue monkey to her right offering a handful of saffron. A gryphon flanks her left, present only in paw and wing. While she commands girls to gather and bring her tribute, her companions are animals, on the same level of the platform as herself. We don’t know her name on Thera, but she is known to us anyhow: this is the Mistress of the Animals — potnia theron — one of the oldest goddesses of ancient times. A mountain deity of the Near East – the mountain here recalled by the three-tiered platform – potnia theron held sway over wild animals, the wild and the holy being, for purposes of propitiation, terribly similar. A fierce Nature Mother, she was allied with the animals, needing to be won over with worship to the side of the hunters. 

In her earliest known incarnations, potnia theron was wild and implacable to look at, anything but easy to sell on the idea that her creatures should be slaughtered to feed and clothe humans, and nothing at all like the luxuriously adorned beauty inclining her head to the ear of the monkey on the walls of Xeste 3.  It is probable that what we see represented here is the priestess of the cult – the most highly stationed woman in the town — standing in for the deity during the ritual, and in a moment of awful mystery, actually assuming her throne.  It was understood as a sacred performance, and doing just this was one of the major functions of cultic priests.  It still is, as, for instance, with the vicar empowered to forgive a penitent in the name of God at the end of a ritual confession, literally to hand out God’s forgiveness in His place.

Saffron from Thera

What role did saffron play here? In the thirty years since scholars began to study Xeste 3, their appreciation of this role has grown, but that is only to say conjecture ranges ever wider, for however lavish the visual clues there is a crucial absence of record. Perhaps, however, visual clues and the inferential processes they stimulate can point the way to an accurate understanding of what is seen.

Most educated guessing about the meaning of the paintings in Xeste 3 has tended towards the interpretation that fertility rites are being enacted, or coming of age ceremonies performed, even that a goddess is overseeing the production of perfume or spice. The youngest looking members of the troop of saffron-gathering girls have curious coiffures not seen elsewhere among Cycladic and Minoan peoples – banded heads with shaven, blue-painted skulls and long black locks at the forehead, ears and crown. Boys on Thera are painted this way too – it seems to have been a youth thing, no doubt fraught with meaning.  Based on documented head-shaving patterns and rituals in Asia Minor, more than one scholar has concluded that Xeste 3 might be where the youth of Thera dedicated its hair to the gods – the offering of hair, symbolic of one’s strength, being in many places in the ancient Near East the maximum offering that one could make. 

These guesses speak to Late Bronze Age folkways in a general sense; initiations were known to take place at childhood’s end, spices were ground, plants were processed for perfume and incense, and what the ancients did with their hair – how they considered it –was deeply meaningful to them. What has been until recently overlooked is the specific focus on saffron in this large chamber.  It’s everywhere, and because the flower that produces it, the saffron crocus, is extremely accurately represented it cannot be a generic flower motif, for lilies, irises and other flowers are elsewhere in Akrotiri painted with the same careful and characteristic attention to plant anatomy. But these others are not shown being handled by humans.

Could the Xeste 3 murals pertain to the dyeing of luxury goods?  Prof. Elizabeth Wayland Barber observes in Women’s Work: the First 20,000 Years (1994) that yellow was the color of women’s garments in the ancient world, with saffron the dye that produced those tonalities – from radiant warm yellow to deep orange-red – reserved for women of high status.  The use of saffron as a component in pigment goes back about 50,000 years to cave painting in Iraq, so the Therans were more likely simply to have used it as a dye than celebrated it as such. A young, blue-skulled priestess in a saffron robe is found on a wall of the West House, a nearby building at Akrotiri, and a long-haired woman suited in a tight-fitting saffron-colored costume raises her arm – signaling what? – on a wall of the House of the Ladies, also near Xeste 3.  Looking closely, it’s possible to see that the priestess’s lips and ear-tips are colored a deep orange-red, and on the cheek of the woman in fitted saffron clothing, there appears an emphatic red stain. Make-up? It’s probable that these facial markings are cultic, like the smudge of ash on the foreheads of Christians on Ash Wednesday, or the bindi on the foreheads of Hindu women, originally made of saffron paste, and a mark denoting both status and cultic affiliation.

By the time of the Thera Eruption, yet another supremely important use for saffron was known.  It was powerful medicine.  In about 1550 B.C., in the XVIII Dynasty, the Ebers Papyrus, not only a medical treatise but perhaps the first known complete book of any kind, was rolled up and placed between the thighs of a body prepared for burial in Egypt. It consists of over 3000 lines of text written in the cursive script called Hieratic, with 811 prescriptions and diagnoses interspersed with spells and incantations. It recommends saffron powder blended with beer as a poultice for women in difficult labor, and recognizes saffron as a diuretic, as well.

Prof. Jules Janick of the Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture at Purdue University writes that “the early medical arts were associated with the search for knowledge about healing substances on the one hand and magic and religion on the other.  Plants with strong tastes and odors (herbs and spices) that were seized upon to alleviate illness and enhance food were considered sources of power, and became associated with ritual, magic, and religion. The prehistoric discovery that certain plants are edible or have curative powers and others are inedible or cause harm is the origin of the healing professions and its practitioners — priest, physician and apothecary.  For thousands of years the role of the priest and the physician were combined.” 

The theory that diseases had natural rather than supernatural causes would not be expounded until Hippocrates, more than 1200 years after the Thera Eruption.  The notion that healing properties inhered in plants with or without divine intervention likewise belonged to a later, more rational era.  In the long meanwhile, medicine was magic assisted by careful observation.  And on Thera, the magicians were women.

In 2004, Dr. Gordon Bendersky, a cardiologist at the University of Pennsylvania, and Susan Ferrence, an art historian at Temple University, published in the journal Perspectives in Biology and Medicine an acclaimed article, “Therapy with Saffron and the Goddess of Thera,” in which they propose that the Akrotiri frescoes suggest the Therans had developed saffron as a versatile medicine.  Citing not only that the women in the frescoes are picking crocus flowers and emptying their elaborately detailed stigma — where its medicinal phytoactivity is concentrated — from small baskets to large ones, but that facing the goddess there is a seated girl with a bleeding foot and her hand to her head in the gesture that, in the Egyptian painting that influenced the artists of Akrotiri, indicates suffering, Bendersky and Ferrence hypothesize that “the program of Xeste 3 does not merely include the secondary medicinal value of saffron, but in fact emphasizes its primary therapeutic function, and exhibits the production sequence in cultic recognition of its precious curative value. The frescoes express a divinely encouraged concept – the medicinal healing that is the major function of saffron.”

Since ancient Eastern Mediterranean healers and worshippers often invoked a deity to potentiate a medicine, the paintings may promote the belief that the goddess depicted has conferred curative properties on the saffron. Benderski and Ferrence argue for the interpretation that saffron as a medicine could have originated on Thera at a slightly earlier time than the Ebers Papyrus catalogues its use, or at the very least, that Akrotiri was a major production center.  Interviewed for the New York Times about the findings presented by Bendersky and Ferrence, Dr. Ellen N. Davis, a professor of archaeology and specialist in the Mediterranean Bronze Age, said, “It’s the most valuable and convincing study of the medicinal uses of saffron in the ancient Mediterranean world.”

Over the next three and one half millennia, there would be written records from many cultures and countries about the use of saffron to treat over 90 illnesses – among these, menstrual disorders, melancholy, libido loss, eye diseases, liver diseases, wounds, joint pain and headache. Saffron appears in the botanical dictionary at Ashurbanipal’s library and in the Song of Songs. Alexander the Great bathed his battle wounds in it, Cleopatra bathed in it before meeting her lovers, Ayurvedic and Tibetan physicians prescribed it, and Western researchers have begun to study its active ingredients to determine whether its Bronze Age reputation as a curative substance is supported by modern science.  In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, saffron or its derivatives – crocin and crocetin – were shown to have anti-tumor activity against different malignancies in humans and animals both in vivo and in vitro. The potential success of saffron against many of the ills it was used to treat in antiquity has been confirmed by phytochemical studies and experimental evidence.

Was a Bronze Age island town capable of processing and packaging enough saffron to make it a major manufacturing center?  Bendersky and Ferrence point out that very little saffron would be necessary to achieve a therapeutic dose – just a few milligrams – and that there is such a thing as too much saffron, as the ancients would have known.

In 2006, two years after Bendersky and Ferrence had published their paper, a 3200-square-foot perfume factory dating to 2100 B.C.E. was discovered by an Italian team of archeologists at Pyrgos on Cyprus.  The complex had been destroyed by a major earthquake in 1850 B.C.E., but perfume bottles, mixing jugs and stills were preserved underneath the collapsed walls.  This discovery has enlarged once again our already impressive understanding of Bronze Age manufacturing and trade capabilities, and suggests that several hundred years later on Thera there would have been few technological obstacles to producing commercial quantities of saffron-based medicines.

The Thera Eruption

In the three decades that the world has been aware of it, Akrotiri has seen inevitable comparisons with Pompeii and Herculaneum, destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 C.E.  But the accuracy of the comparison is for many reasons imperfect. The Pompeiians were famously caught by surprise, the devastation occurring in the middle of normal town life, as the ash-preserved fallen figures attest.  Quite plainly, people dropped what they were doing and fled for their lives, with no time to gather up their valuables.  At nearby and slightly wealthier Herculaneum, they ran to the sea, where many of their bodies were found huddled along the coast.  Yet it was a much, much smaller eruption that caused all this destruction than the one 1600 years earlier on Thera. For the Theran Eruption, there had been years – perhaps decades — to prepare.

On the satellite map of Thera, two small islands in the crater can be seen – these are Nea Kameni and Palaia Kameni, and one may sail out to them to be closer to where the catastrophic eruption was centered, on a small island now vanished that was just to the north.  Here, the eruption that many times surpassed Vesuvius occurred.  It was four times bigger than even Krakatau in 1883, and roughly commensurate with the eruption of Mt. Tambora in 1815, which occasioned the well-documented “Year of No Summer.”

A geological event of this size cannot have gone unheralded, and it did not. A series of warning earthquakes must have prompted a mass evacuation from Thera. Only one body relating to the eruption has been found, on the island of Therasia just off northernmost Thera. If, as at Herculaneum, there are human remains on the coast of Thera – people who were not evacuated in time – they have yet to be found.  The kinds of metal artifacts that gave such a vivid picture of life at Pompeii have not been unearthed at Akrotiri – neither jewelry, nor weaponry, nor even a frying pan. Items of this kind were carried away by the Therans.  All they left, really, were their jars of grain and their painted walls.

It is not known where they went, or what kind of life they made as migrants to foreign shores, only that they got away in fairly good time.  While there is no reason to suppose that, panic-stricken, they plied their oars through hissing seas, there is the awful pathos of their foreknowledge: the mouth of hell would open to swallow up their world, and no Mistress of the Animals or Saffron Mother endowing plant parts with the magic to heal was any match for that.

To judge from the buckled stone stairs at Akrotiri, the warning quakes coming five or ten or twenty years before the eruption were hugely damaging, but not so bad it wasn’t worth it patching things up.  Everywhere in town during that interval, the work of repair was undertaken, even continued up to the time of the eruption, and the sheer scope of these repairs would have taken an organized and numerous population considerable effort to effect. In a bedroom of the West House, the location of the young priestess of the red-tipped ears and saffron robe, two vessels full of dried plaster and a third of dried paint were found; this room was in the process of redecoration when Akrotiri was abandoned once and for all.

None of those who left it, or their children, or their children’s children, would make a return trip, for once the ash from the volcanic plume reaching 40 kilometers into the sky had settled over the island, it would be sterile, every last plant extinguished, and uninhabitable for several hundred years.  Akrotiri, a world still striving for order and beauty when it came to its long-foreseen end, would go missing even from memory as the subsequent history of the island transpired.

Around 1100 B.C.E., the Phoenicians came, then the Dorians, the Athenians, the Romans. The island was called Kalliste — “beautiful one”— and Strogyli – “round one.”  In the middle ages, Venetian crusaders called it Santorini, after Saint Irene, a martyr of the Eastern Church.  This is the name that has stuck, although the Greeks call it Thera or Thira, too.  The unquiet caldera, the most active volcanic center in the South Aegean, last erupted in 1956, and will do again; sulphur and steam are often seen rising from Nea Kameni, dead center in the peaceful dark blue bay.  For many hundreds of years now, the saffron crocus has been back. You would find villagers to say it has always been there.  It is gathered every October, the stigma plucked from it and processed – a small local industry, run by women.

Coming: SAFFRON MOTHER, Part II

SELECTED RESOURCES FOR THIS ARTICLE

The White Goddess, by Robert Graves
The Masks of God, Vol. 3: Occidental Mythology, by Joseph Campbell
Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religion, by Walter Burkert

Online Resources:

http://www.therafoundation.org/
Beautifully designed and well-maintained site, rich in visual content relating to Akrotiri and Thera. Many learned articles posted on the Thera Eruption as well as on topics more specific to art, architecture, religion, social organization, technology.

http://projectsx.dartmouth.edu/history/bronze_age/lessons/les/17.html
Lectures on Prehistoric Archaeology of the Aegean from Dartmouth College. Excellent, readable overview.

http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/history/default.html
Lectures on the History of Horticulture, Lessons 1 –26, by Prof. Jules Janick of Purdue University

About a year ago I started working on an article about the use of vertical space in cities, confused over why, beyond the ground floor, most buildings are totally inaccessible except to their occupants. Without much confidence and convinced that I should engage in further exploration, I abandoned the piece and bottled up my frustration over what I perceived as a fundamental problem of urban design. I’ve spent the last year studying cities, and haven’t made much progress regarding this issue, so here we are. I’ve gone public with my complaint.

The problem is simple: most cities contain tall buildings (though, ironically, I’m writing this from Los Angeles), and yet despite sharing scale and parallel planes, these buildings rarely connect or contain any physical relationship to one another. The average city dweller only really enters vertical space for specific purposes, whether to go from his 16th floor apartment to his 42nd floor office or from his friend’s basement flat to the observation deck on the top of Rockefeller Center. That is to say, from private space to private space. This isn’t about rooftop restaurants or mid-building showrooms, but rather the problem of urban circulation that forces pedestrians down a stairwell, across the street, and up an elevator—ultimately and forever bound to move over a singular plane at the feet of the city.

With arguments abound over the state of public space in urban environments, especially in light of the recent mid-brow pop fascination with Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, these discussions have been limited to basic ideas about development, preservation, and the ever-present demand for parks. Why, though, does no one look up in cities to see the wealth of space and potential that looms overhead?

This silly rhetorical question is indeed that. Countless architects and planners have tried to conceive of ways to utilize above-ground space through a diverse range of measures. In the 1950s and 60s, just as Corbusian ideals of modernist planning were stroking the want of our rational selves, smaller movements of frustrated designers were forming across the globe. From England’s Utopianists and France’s Situationists to Italy’s Superstudio and Japan’s Metabolists a diverse array of designers were devising urban forms that proposed new networking systems to connect cities from the ground up.

Buildings would be connected by sweeping, dramatic bridges and pedestrian walkways. Pompidou Center–like stairs would span blocks and would begin at one building’s 20th floor and end at another’s penthouse. Bucky Fuller offered modular cities that could grow with need but within a pre-existing structural system that allowed buildings to float hundreds of feet over the ground. It was the city that might be born of a union between Jacobs herself and the creative team behind the Jetsons. These plans represented simultaneously everything that was right about what are known as “Paper Architects”—intellectuals whose radical designs are seldom realized—and everything that was wrong given their impossibility of execution. But comparable plans need not be so unattainable.

[Projects such as New York’s High Line present dynamic examples of off-the-ground development. An existing elevated railway cutting through 1.5 miles of New York’s West Side, shown in the picture on the right, is presently under renovation and will link to various galleries, apartment buildings, and hotels.]

Two years ago I saw a thesis at Wesleyan University where a student designed a fantastic proposal for a derelict waterfront neighborhood in Worcester, Massachusetts. The project addressed these issues with phenomenal clarity and pragmatic foresight. In it, a public park comprising a pedestrian walkway, gardens, and athletic facilities was incorporated over and through several adjacent warehouses, factories, and office buildings. Park-goers would enter one building and walk through floors of retail and restaurants, onto roofs where basketball and tennis courts were thoughtfully planned, and along (though above) the waterfront.

The simplicity of the proposal was remarkable: the traditional notion of the sidewalk with storefronts and services was stretched and pushed; in a sense rendered three-dimensional. This was no elevated pedestrian system, however. Those exist, without much success, in cities around the world. Two that spring to mind are constantly derided for their detrimental effects on the surrounding neighborhood, those in Minneapolis and in Los Angeles. These systems, though, do not a vertically-integrated city make.

On two recent trips, one to Shanghai and the other to Istanbul, I found interesting solutions to this problem of vertical space. Shanghai is host to an interesting phenomenon where restaurants, bars, and clubs are located on upper floors of office buildings. Not, like in America, the marketable roof-top venue, but rather on middle-floors, soaring thirty stories over the ground but under twenty others, sandwiched between offices. Here I found a convenient, profitable, and novel solution to the problem of desolate commercial neighborhoods in cities, a subject of constant study and debate. By attracting night-oriented retail, whole blocks that would be otherwise deserted were teeming and vibrant.

Istanbul, situated on a hilly landscape, features amenities and retail on atypical floors as in Shanghai, but complements this integration by bringing pedestrian circulation through buildings, connecting to others above and behind and forming mini-pathways up steep inclines in the topography. These developments have come about through a seemingly organic process due both to the store owners and nature of the urban economy of these cities. This same process has yet to occur here in the US, and likely won’t as the buildings in question are usually operated by corporate owners none too concerned with innovation.

And the issue becomes clear that what’s really preventing the realization of these types of developments is the issue of funding and responsibility. I’m sure many of you figured out this obvious problem from the get go. Barring any unforeseen hullabaloo, however, businesses would do well to let certain floors to retail. New York is a perfect example: while new office buildings continue to languish with unfilled vacancies, empty storefronts downtown continue to rent for far higher prices and are rare to encounter.

Simple policy strategies could finance the infrastructure needed for this type of system, and policy should support these types of endeavors. If you read the strategic plans of most major metropolises—I can say with certainty this is true for London, New York, and Los Angeles—you know that, increasingly, local governments are seeking out measures to encourage and ensure greater density in central urban spaces. In addition, a recent emphasis on the benefits of greenroofs has introduced a new playground, as it were, of experimentation in public space.

Before building taller and taller buildings, however, we should determine better ways to connect them efficiently and in a way that takes acknowledges and takes advantage of scale. While we’re in the midst of enormous construction booms across the globe, now seems as good a time as any to re-imagine how cities can work, how we can reduce sprawl, and how we can realize a future so idealistically conceived in the past.