If you’ve ever seen a picture of a lost city—maybe in the pages of National Geographic or in the first Tomb Raider movie—you were probably looking at the crumbling temples and immense, empty canals of Angkor, the former capital of the Khmer empire in present-day Cambodia. Thick tree roots have wrapped themselves around massive blocks of stone in its legendary palaces. Flowers grow from cracks in hundreds of ornate towers carved with the Buddha’s serene face. A thousand years ago, Angkor was among the world’s largest cities, with nearly 1 million residents. Today its iconic ruins are as famous as the city itself once was, attracting millions of tourists to Cambodia every year.
Though Angkor has always been widely known in Asia, Europeans became obsessed with it after the French explorer Henri Mouhot claimed he discovered the place in 1860. Mouhot described Angkor as a lost city, its past a fairy tale with no connection to present-day Cambodia. His vision of Angkor captured the Western imagination and popularized a myth about urban life cycles, in which cities follow a linear progression from humble origins to spectacular heights—and then collapse into obscurity. This myth continues to shape public understanding of urbanism a century and a half later. It haunts news stories about “pandemic flight” from Manhattan and San Francisco, and it is the unspoken subtext of anxious questions about whether Detroit and New Orleans, cities battered by economic or ecological catastrophes, are at risk of dying.