The Grand Tour of Forgotten Sustainable Cities

A darkly funny travelogue through myth, archaeology, and the present tense of bad decisions.

Prologue:

Welcome aboard Time Machine Airlines, flight SDG-11 to Everywhere We Should Have Learnt From. Please keep your arms inside the vehicle; the guardrails were built before building codes. Our route is simple: cities that planned brilliantly, cities that believed their own propaganda, cities that never existed but somehow still run our meetings, then, finally, the cities we actually live in.

Stop 1: Atlantis — The Climate Refugee That Never Was

We descend through the salt haze onto a ringed city with canals like compass strokes. Concentric harbors radiate from a temple core, urban design as a geometry lesson. The port basins swallow and release tides with practiced calm; ships glide through sluiced channels that double as storm buffers. It’s all very photogenic—right up to the moment the seabed shudders and the whole amphitheater go dark.

Atlantis’ strength was its hydraulic imagination: water as structure, not enemy. Its flaw was the same, just louder, a city curated for calm seas. When the ocean changed the script, the set collapsed. In our time, we call that “once-in-a-century storms” that come every third year, and we act equally surprised.

Stop 2: Babylon — Hanging Gardens, Low-Hanging Policy

The Euphrates unspools like a bronze ribbon. Beyond the Ishtar Gate, canals stitch city to countryside: controlled intakes, levees, feeder ditches, and the world’s oldest municipal water budget. Rooftop gardens (whether legendary or literal) ladder shade into the street; thick mudbrick walls temper desert heat; broad processional ways drain to stone channels. Babylon was a hydraulic city-state, its cadence set by sluice and season.

But Babylonians also learnt the first big truth of urbanism: vanity projects scale faster than maintenance. Canals silt without a tax base that pays for dredging; a tyrant’s promise is not a service-level agreement. Strength: land-water integration that fed a metropolis. Flaw: politics that preferred inscriptions to inspections.

Stop 3: Athens — Democracy with a Drainage Problem

We rattle into the Agora, a civic machine built for arguing. Fountain houses dot the urban fabric; clay conduits bring spring water downhill; lane-side drains carry rain away; stoas cast long shade for public life. Above us, the Acropolis stone set like a sundial.

Athens’ superpower was governance as infrastructure: rules, assemblies, and juries, the software of sustainability. But the hardware creaked. Timber for triremes and kilns stripped hillsides; grain sailed in because the soil couldn’t cope; sanitation was decent for elites, patchy for everyone else. Strength: institutional redundancy (lots of people arguing before breaking things). Flaw: ecological myopia (forests don’t vote).

Stop 4: Teotihuacán — The Straight Line That Bent a River

The Avenue of the Dead hammers forward on a grid tilted from true north, as if the city were aligned with a constellation and a ledger at once. Apartments and courtyard compounds of stone and lime pack families into walkable blocks. Water runs where planners said it should; a river was literally rechanneled to keep faith with the grid. Terraces secure the hinterland; maize, beans, and squash lift from volcanic soils; obsidian blades gleam in market stalls.

The plan is magnificent and brittle. When the climate wobbled and forests retreated, the orthogonal dream had no shock absorbers. Strength: a mass-housing urbanism that made density livable. Flaw: a beautiful rigidity; when the world drifted off axis, the city didn’t.

Stop 5: Angkor — The City That Thought in Watersheds

From the air, the reservoirs (barays) look like inland seas, rectangles so large the horizon edits them. Canals feed, bleed, and balance the monsoon; temple moats are both cosmology and retention basins. Rice calendars couple to water levels; the metropolis sprawls as a hydraulic ecosystem, not just a place.

Angkor’s genius was storage + distribution at metropolitan scale. Its undoing was time and maintenance debt. Silt wins elections no king can. A few severe droughts and deluges, and the network clogged, cracked, and failed to buffer. Strength: planet-class water engineering. Flaw: over-centralized complexity—too big to tweak, too sacred to prune.

Stop 6: Harappa & Mohenjo-Daro — The Quiet Miracle of the Right Slope

Grids here aren’t for spectacle; they’re for plumbing. Streets fall just enough to keep wastewater moving; covered brick drains carry it away; soak pits keep groundwater sweet; house-to-drain connections are standard kit. Public baths anchor civic life like stone lungs. You notice what’s missing: palaces shouting power from rooftops. The power is invisible—standards, measurements, routine.

The Indus gift is boring brilliance: a city made of interoperable parts. Its sin, if any, is the same as ours, climate exposure. Rivers wander; monsoons mutter; trade routes slip. Strength: sanitation and modular planning millennia ahead of schedule. Flaw: dependence on hydrology they didn’t control—and neither do we.

Stop 7: Ayodhya — Walkable Piety with a Riverfront View

Sarayu glitters; ghats step the city down to water; tanks and ponds glue neighborhoods to ritual and storage; gardens cool the alleys; streets line up to processions, not traffic counts. The urban code is ethical before it is technical: duties, rights, and the choreography of being good neighbors.

Ayodhya’s strength is proximity, daily life compressed into a fifteen-minute city before we coined the phrase; water is everywhere and therefore respected. Its flaw is the fragility of perfection: exile and war as governance tools; a city that assumes virtue scales better than pipes.

Stop 8: Indraprastha — Shiny Floors, Slippery Ethics

On the Yamuna’s bank rise halls so polished the visiting prince mistakes reflections for ponds and falls in UX failure, 12/10. Gardens and lakes dot a master plan that choreographs awe; the assembly chamber is a spatial sermon about order. The infrastructure exists, water bodies, broadways, and shaded courts, but the operating system is gambling, grievance, and ego. Strength: landscape urbanism, where water and public life share the same room. Flaw: governance as spectacle. The drains can be fine, and a city can still break if the council does.

Stop 9: Dwarka — The Coastal City That Forgot to Blink

Harbours blink with masts; causeways stitch islands; the coastal plan treats the sea as a boulevard and pantry. Maritime trade fattens markets; inland wells and tanks keep salt at bay. It’s all very elegant until the tide remembers itself. The shoreline moves a few impatient meters, then a few kilometers. Foundations feel the wobble, then the long pull down.

Strength: a port city that lived with the sea, not just on it. Flaw: coastal hubris reclamation without retreat plans, a love letter to high tide written in wet ink.

Stop 10: Lanka — Towers, Tanks, and the Ten-Headed RFP

Gold flashes. Terraces cascade. Gardens hide water tanks and channels dressed as pleasure; the skyline is a thesis on verticality before elevators existed. Administration hums a central court, specialized guilds, and a city that could plausibly file its audits on time.

And then one stakeholder, a very large monkey, performs a fire safety test. Strength: dense, mixed-use prosperity with green woven through height. Flaw: zero social license. Kidnap policy beats climate policy every time; the best infrastructure cannot out-engineer a legitimacy crisis.

(Intermission) What the Dead Keep Saying

We pause over the map. Patterns pop water first (store it, slow it, share it), density with dignity (shade, courtyards, human-scale streets), infrastructure you can maintain (drains you can open by hand), and governance that keeps promises (budgets that include brooms). Where they failed, the reasons rhyme: maintenance debt, governance rot, climatic shove.

Final Stop: Dhaka, Mumbai, Karachi — Our Unsustainable Love Story

The cabin is quiet. We are home to three cities braided by monsoon, ambition, and the physics of congestion.

In Dhaka, the plane banks over what used to be wetlands, natural retention that once made floods brief and survivable. Too many are now filled, parceled, and paved. The Buriganga and Turag carry more effluent than memory; drains that should exhale simply cough. The city’s strengths are density, short trips, intense street economies, and a talent for improvisation. Its flaw is treating hydrology as an inconvenience. You can’t negotiate with a catchment; you can only make room for it.

In Mumbai, the sea slaps back against embankments, once-continuous mangrove belts and free surge protection are nibbled for roads and towers. The stormwater network, some of it a century old, tries to empty into a tide that’s already in the living room. Mumbai’s strength is multi-modal grit: suburban rail, buses, walking, and a metabolism that somehow moves 20 million lunches and dreams a day. The flaw is the coastal mathematics of denial: every square metre reclaimed is a future ankle-deep apology.

In Karachi, heat hangs like a sentence. Informal neighborhoods stitch the city together more effectively than expressways; water tankers line up like a parallel utility—the mafia filling gaps the state leaves. Sea breezes used to temper summers; glass towers now bank the heat. Karachi’s strength is entrepreneurial redundancy; if one system fails, three informal ones pop up by dusk. The flaw is governing by improvisation, resilience as hustle, not as right.

The old cities whisper as we circle. Babylon asks where our maintenance budgets are. Athens want our minutes and roll calls. Teotihuacán taps the window: Is your grid adaptable? Angkor gestures at the clouds: Where’s your storage? Harappa simply points down and says, 'Slope. Cover. Clean. Repeat.' Dwarka watches the tide. Lanka checks our ethics.

Arrival: What We Keep (and What We Stop Pretending)

If sustainability had a passport, the stamps would read: Make room for water (urban reservoirs, wetlands, cleaned rivers, floodable parks). Design for feet and shade (trees, courtyards, continuous footpaths, transit that beats a car at noon). Standardize the boredom (interoperable drains, house connections, inspection protocols). Fund the invisible (O&M before ribbon-cutting). Tell the truth about risk (retreat where the map says so; adapt where we can; insure what’s left).

The ancients do not ask us to worship ruins. They ask us to remember geometry, hydrology, and humility, the only trinity that has ever kept a city alive. We taxi to the gate. Outside, the air tastes like a decision.

Welcome home. Please mind the smog as you disembark and the future as you plan your route.