Since May, I have been able to spend time in two of the world’s biggest metropolises, Istanbul and Mexico City. They are similar in several ways beside their vastness. Each is the leading city of a substantial and proudly independent nation with a distinctive culture. In both, neighborhoods of poor, traditionally religious migrants from the countryside abut cosmopolitan secular districts.

One significant difference is the crime rate. Three people per 100,00 are murdered annually in Istanbul, versus 13.2 in Mexico City. This is a case where a quantitative difference becomes qualitative. In Turkey, crime is so low that I have seen—admittedly, in a smaller city than Istanbul—a whole shop’s worth of consumer goods left outdoors and unguarded overnight. In Mexico City, conversation quickly turns to avoiding violence. Is it safe to hail a cab? (Generally, the answer right now is: No.) Can you drive safely along a certain road?

According to Philip Mansel (in Constantinople: City of the World’s Desire), Istanbul was notably safe in the 1500s, when it was already one of the biggest—or perhaps the single most populous—city in the world. “Merchants could leave stalls unattended; pastry-sellers trusted members of the public to pay for the wares they left on a small round tray.” Mansel quotes Lord Charlemont’s report from the 1700s: “Housebreaking and street robbery, crimes so unfortunately common in our great towns as to render dwelling in them unpleasant and unsafe, never happen in the Turkish metropolis, and a man may walk its streets at all hours of the night with his pocket full of money, without the smallest fear of danger or molestation.”

Charlemont had an explanation: “the salutary rigour of frequent acts of execution.” It is hard to believe that executions were more frequent in Constantinople than in London or Paris, where a child who stole a roll would be hanged. And even if the Ottomans really used capital punishment more than the English or the French, I doubt the executions of those days can explain the safe streets now.

The “broken windows” hypothesis won’t explain the difference, because Mexico City and Istanbul are both rather chaotic and rife with violations such as illegal construction. Poverty is not a likely explanation, because Mexico City’s per capita GDP is twice as high as Istanbul’s, and its inequality index is not much worse. The proportion of residents under age 20 is virtually identical in both cities. Any explanation of the difference may have to be regional, because Mexico City shares similar crime rates with most other large cities in its region. (With Istanbul, it’s a little harder to say what the region is, and I cannot find crime statistics for possibly similar cities, such as Tehran.)

I’m sure there’s a large literature on this topic, but no persuasive explanation is well-known enough that it has reached me.

I suppose one possibility is that there is no root cause. Crime is part of a cycle: each act of violence begets more violence, puts strains on the state, and makes law-abiding behavior less rational for other people. Once you get into a high-crime pattern, it is hard to get out. But if you can avoid or stop the circle, you may be better off even five hundred years later.

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(On the train to NYC) It’s my sense that the second half of the 20th century was hard on America’s oldest city, but Boston is recovering from the wounds it sustained then.

Boston entered the 1900s as the hub of the first region in the United States to industrialize. It had its own factories, but mainly it provided the harbor and the financial and managerial center for a ring of manufacturing cities from Lowell to Fall River. Founded early and always prosperous, Boston had assembled cultural resources that made it a claimant to being America’s intellectual capital. Politically, it was a battleground between WASP Republicans and Catholic European working-class Democrats–not a pleasant struggle but sometimes a dynamic one. People of color were largely marginalized, but their communities had impressive assets. The city was especially attractive thanks to its architecture and its location at the mouth of the Charles. It had its own distinctive businesses that were points of civic pride, from Filene’s Department Store to the Red Sox.

But the industrial base largely collapsed. The harbor lost most of its business and became notoriously polluted. That meant that the city lost its traditional face to the sea. I-93 was blasted through the central core, and a terrible brutalist City Hall also marred downtown. Because the city was relatively small, each bad large building was a blow to the whole. The department stores faltered and ultimately closed. As in other cities, white middle class residents moved out and left a declining post-industrial economy to African American migrants and new immigrants. In Boston, white resistance was especially explicit and violent. The rest of American grew two- or three-fold while Boston shrank as a proportion of the nation’s economy, cultural leadership, and population.

Although I liked Boston when I first encountered it in the mid-1980s, I think it was a wounded city then. Having lived in the metro area continuously since 2008, I would now describe it as recovering. The Big Dig buried I-93, and the city is stitching together over it. The harbor is clean and graced by some fine new buildings, private and public. Boston again has a face to the sea. Biotech is flourishing. Certain de-industrialized zones, such as east Cambridge, are now massive building sites. The metro area has become multiracial and multicultural. Racial injustice is certainly not resolved, but I sense positive momentum. Boston’s fifth century should be much better than its fourth (unless we sink under the seas because of polar melt).

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In Detroit, they call it “Ruin Porn”: images of a 35-acre abandoned automotive plant, the 18-story abandoned railway station (modeled, in turn, on ancient Roman baths), and other vast and decayed structures.

I can certainly understand why citizens of Detroit would object to the aestheticization of poverty and abandonment–to their city’s being used to produce marketable images of tragic grandeur. But the story of Detroit is tragic, in the Aristotelian sense. Recall the plot: the city rises from a few thousand residents to 1.8 million when hubristic men like Henry Ford invent forms of mass production that transform work itself. Black people migrate there from the South, face violent hostility, but manage to obtain political and cultural power. The city builds cars, weapons, and pop music that conquer the world. It becomes a model of modernity, vividly depicted by Diego Rivera on the walls of its world-class museum. And then Detroit collapses to 700,000 people who live amid the empty shells of its industrial past, while the nation looks away.

There is nothing new about treating a tragic fall as sublime. “Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.” Or: “It was at Rome, on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefoot friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.”

In fact, because the Detroit Institute of Arts is an encyclopedic collection, one can find on its walls many images of ruin. For example, Jacob Isaaksz van Ruisdael paints the Jewish cemetery of 17th-century Amsterdam falling to pieces in a wild storm, as a momento mori. I don’t know why he picks Jewish graves, but perhaps because their dead are dead for good (in his view), not subject to resurrection.

van Ruisdeal, “The Jewish Cemetery” (ca. 1654)

The American Frederic Church imagines the coast of Syria as a kind of museum or theme park of ruins: Roman, Gothic, and Islamic piled almost on top of each other.

Frederic Edwin Church. “Syria by the Sea” (1873)

Anselm Kiefer paints a vast three dimensional canvass, parts of it literally burnt by the artist. He means to represent a particular brick factory in India (one that manufactures its own walls and sells the same walls, brick-by-brick, to consumers) and also the ovens of Auschwitz–which was another kind of Jewish cemetery.

Anselm Kiefer, “Das Gewiert” (1997)

The DIA even includes a whole Gothic side chapel moved to Detroit from a chateau in Lorraine–reconstructed there from a real Old World ruin. When you stand inside it, with its streaked and burnished stone and stained glass all around you, you are in a late-medieval building, inside a much larger structure patterned on the ruins of ancient Rome, near the center of a modern American city that is partly falling into ruin.

The DIA itself is hardly ruinous. On a Friday night, it is packed with visitors of all ages and backgrounds who stroll through its magnificent galleries, listen to live jazz, or play chess. But the collection, whose market value might reach $1 billion, will likely be sold to make a small dent in the bankrupt city’s pension obligations. In the best case, the purchasers will be a consortium of foundations whose wealth derived from Detroit and which have pledged to give the art back once they buy it. It’s a strange twist that some of the objects they may buy and return to the city from which their endowments came will be “ruin porn” of other times and places.

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