The city as destructive system: Wildfires, Dresden and the case against urban sprawl
Australia, bushfires and learning from urban history
Ed. This piece was originally published at cityofsound.com on October 30th, 2007. Some of the links may no longer work.
Since I wrote about the first glimpse of the bushfire season here in Sydney a few weeks ago (Ed. this written in 2007), attention has switched to the south-west of the USA, where devastating wildfires continue to burn across California. While bushfires or wildfires have been a part of both areas since time immemorial (see also France, Portugal, South Africa, Greece, the Balkans, etc.) there seems little doubt that the drought attributed to climate change is exacerbating the situation. So fires both get worse and more widespread.
By chance I also happened to recently read an astonishing, sobering article on the bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima in the Second World War, entitled ‘The Mongol devastations’, by Jörg Friedrich. (Originally publishd in Die Welt, on 10 February, 2005, it’s hugely enlightening on this horrific, unnecessarily brutal end to the war, amidst the post-war carve-up of Europe and Asia, suggesting that the bombing by the British and Americans was essentially just a strategic show of strength to the Russians — “the demonstration of…
