What cities might have plausibly done much worse in the 20th century?

[rfmcdonald]

Over at Quora last month, I tried to answer a question: "If Istanbul was left to the Greeks to manage, would it be as prosperous as it is today?" I suggested that, if as was barely imaginable it fell to Greece in the early 1920s, the city might well have been a prosperous in per capita terms as it is now; it is imaginable that European and world history might have proceeded as OTL, and the NUTS-2 regions of Attica and Istanbul are closely matched now.

Where Constantinople would differ from Istanbul would be in the likelihood that it would be a much smaller city. There would surely be population exchanges between Greece and Turkey as OTL.

Istanbul would probably evolve into a city with a homogeneously Greek population in a way not dissimilar from that of Thessaloniki, which lost its Turkish and Muslim populations in the 1920s and which lost its Jews (after a period of heavy emigration) to the Holocaust.

(I do think the Armenians likely to stay in the city--I do not think anything likely to happen to them.)

Constantinople might recover its 1920 population peak within a few decades, but there is absolutely no prospect of Constantinople growing to the size of OTL Istanbul simply because there is no way that Istanbul can grow. If the millions of Turks who moved to the city in OTL to make it a metropolis of 15 million will not come, barred by the border, and if there is no prospect of such numbers coming from elsewhere, then this Constantinople will never be a world city of the scale as OTL. At most, it might well rival Athens.

There have been threads in the past considering world cities that could have done better. Berlin and Vienna, for instance, have been stymied by the catastrophes of the 20th century, barely maintaining their 1920 numbers. Have there been threads considering cities that could have done worse, perhaps much worse?

 

[Tomarte]

• Well, Nagasaki and Hiroshima for once, if they don't get the Nuke.
• If Nanjing could have avoided the massacre done by the Japanese it might have been more prosperous today.
• Detroit. Poor Detroit. May some POD give it bliss.
• Cities in Western Armenia, now Eastern Turkey, such as Kars, Trabzon, Erzurum, and Van. If they kept their Armenian and Greek populations and were separate of the Turks or had their own administrative autonomy, they would not be such backwater cities.
• Mecca. If the Saudis didn't come in and destroy stuff, a lot of ancient sites would still be around. A more liberal atmosphere would contribute to Mecca being able to truly be a forward thinking yet religious and holy city. Like Jerusalem, if it was peaceful.
• Berlin. East Germany and stuff.
• Zanzibar. The colonization drama, incompetence of the Sultan, and the general loss of prestige really downgraded it.

 

[Insane Ranter]

Somewhere besides Miami gets picked by Cuban immigrants Fort Myers?

 

[Quintuplicate]

If Nanjing could have avoided the massacre done by the Japanese it might have been more prosperous today.

It's still prosperous. I'm from there.

 

[Look More Closely Later]

What cities might have plausibly done much worse in the 20th century?

Take your pick of city, and nudge one of the really big wars of the 20th century slightly...

 

[Court Jester]

Bucharest - King Michael's coup fails, with German forces taking over the country and Hitler declares it a festung, with several divisions and Iron Guard forces defending it like Budapest was defended, destroying most of the city and killing much of it's population.

Ljubljana - the planned rising at the capitulation of Italy goes through, with Germans giving it the Warsaw treatment

 

[Nick P]

London
The Blitz is harder hitting in the 1940s leading to more housing and factories destroyed and the team creating the Abercrombie Plan for rebuilding gets wiped out. Instead the government focuses on distribution, moving much more of the varied Departments and Ministries out to provincial towns. The Great Smogs of the 1950s discourage people from living there and more move out of town.
Business, manufacturing and construction is stronger in places like Liverpool, Newcastle, Glasgow and Swansea. Creating motorways through the centre of London does not help, merely dividing the city even more into unreachable ghettos. Less people means less money for public transport and the Underground is barely updated, still rattling along in 1930s trains on 1920s tracks.

By the 1970s the British capital is down to half the population it had in 1939 and other towns and cities across the UK are booming. Even larger areas of London than OTL are still abandoned wastelands and bombsites despite attempts by local boroughs and the Greater London Council to clear up the worst of these and develop modern housing. Unfortunately this has to be done on the cheap and the new high rise flats are not the best quality. After just 15 years the concrete will spall, split and crumble. It does not help that little grass grows in the modern parks that surround them because of the shallow contaminated soil over the broken bricks of Victorian London. The residents move out to anywhere the grass is greener.

If you want to make a movie set in London all you need is a view of rust-stained cement. That is your main visual clue that you are in the supposed greatest city in the United Kingdom....

 

[xsampa]

Moscow and Beijing-nuclear war

 

[JohnBull]

The reverse question is much easier to answer: which city might have done much better. Maybe focusing on cities that have done incredibly well, it would be easier to make them fare a bit worse.

The whole US Sun Belt have cities growing at insane rates since ever. All of them could easily be doing a bit "less great". A slightly less sharp decline on Rust Belt would suffice.

We should look on cities population shifts as well: if Montreal hadn't fell so hard in the 1970's and managed to keep its primacy for longer, Toronto would certainly be smaller than it is today. Melbourne, without the ressurgence in the 21st century, would be smaller if kept losing ground to Sydney. São Paulo, maybe not that big and powerful, if Brazilian capital have been kept on Rio de Janeiro.

In Germany, without WWII, all cities in former West Germany would be smaller as they got millions of people fleeing from east. On the other hand, without the war, Germany would have better demographics and that would compesate for them.

 

[anotherlurker]

A bunch of German cities got levelled by bombs, but were rebuild again. Showering them with chemical weapons would have made that permanent.

 

[Thisisnotausername]

A few PODs:

• Seattle: Have Microsoft stay in Albuquerque instead of moving to the area in 1979. No Microsoft, no influx of tech people. No large pool of local talent to recruit from means other tech companies like Amazon don't set up shop there, leaving the city smaller and poorer than it became IOTL.
• San Francisco/Bay Area: IOTL, Silicon Valley really got its big start with the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. Shockley only set up shop in the area to be closer to his mother in Palo Alto. If she'd moved or died, or if he hadn't wanted to be close to her as much, he probably would've set up shop in or near Pasadena (where Shockley previously lived and where Beckman, the SSL's corporate owners, were based) instead. This would've stunted the Bay Area's growth as a tech hub, and therefore its growth overall, and would have seen the Santa Clara Valley remain more of an agricultural region instead of becoming as urbanized as it did IOTL.
• New Orleans/Baton Rouge: The Mississippi only continues to flow through these cities due to the Old River Control Structure, without which it would have by now changed course to flow down what is presently the Atchafalaya River. If the ORCS failed, such as by the result of a more severe 1973 flood, the result would be a major natural disaster causing massive amounts of damage to towns and infrastructure on the Atchafalaya, major, months-long disruptions in the navigability of the Mississippi down the either the old or new channels, and a dramatic loss of flow down the old channel which would, among other things, disrupt New Orleans' water supply, as the reduced flow of freshwater through the old channel would mean that by the time it reached New Orleans, it would be a saltwater estuary possibly as far north as Baton Rouge.
• Anaheim/Orlando: Pretty straightforward here: keep Disneyland/Disney World from happening.

 

[Intosh]

Much worst, Paris :

The Germans want to destroy it by artillery fire in WW1, and if the frontlines were closer to Paris, they could target it everyday.

Again, the Germans who wanted to destroy as much they can of the monuments of Paris in August 1944.

Not counting the infamous austrian architect Adolf H. who had "revolutionnary" plans for Paris.

In OTL, it was Le Corbusier.

Plan Voisin - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

May he rot in Hell for this idea.

 

[EternalCynic]

Without a communist victory in China, Taiwan would have remained a backwater island province of the Republic of China, little different from Hainan. Taipei would be a third-rate provincial capital within China rather than a node of the global high-tech industry.

Hong Kong would also have been returned to the RoC by the early 1950s and quickly faded into history. It would be notable only for its Victorian British architecture. Without Hong Kong, Shenzhen would have remained an unknown village along a local railway line, instead of a hub for the global manufacturing and technology industries.

It's still prosperous. I'm from there.

It would have been the capital of the Republic of China, and Chiang would have been free to implement the grand plan he had signed off on before the war.

 

[djf64360]

Los Angeles without the film industry. It was pretty small and insignificant before that.

Seoul if the North won the Korean War.

Any city in South Africa if Apartheid hadn't ended as well as it did and civil war wrecked them Pretoria or Johannesburg.

No Prohibition means no mob, no mob means Vegas doesn't get built up.

New York City was still pretty slummy when I was a child. When my father first took me, guys tried to sell us stolen telephones at the GWB entrance. Avoid the rich mayor crackdowns and 9/11 security and it might keep its old Taxi Driver - Escape From New York aura somewhat.

 

[Thisisnotausername]

Los Angeles without the film industry. It was pretty small and insignificant before that.

Huh? By 1900, LA was the second-largest city on the west coast, a major Pacific port with a booming oil industry. Obviously not having the film industry would result in a lesser city than IOTL, but it's not like it was just a bunch of empty desert until Hollywood came onto the scene.

Seoul if the North won the Korean War.

I don't think a DPRK that won the Korean War and unified the peninsula would've kept the capital in Pyongyang, if that's what you're getting at--prior to the division of Korea, Seoul had been the capital for more than five hundred years, and the DPRK would have no reason to spurn it in favor of the provisional capital they'd only used because they didn't control the half of the country that had the real one.

 

[Workable Goblin]

Hong Kong would also have been returned to the RoC by the early 1950s and quickly faded into history. It would be notable only for its Victorian British architecture. Without Hong Kong, Shenzhen would have remained an unknown village along a local railway line, instead of a hub for the global manufacturing and technology industries.

I think you're being a little too pessimistic here. Guangzhou had always been a major entry point into China--that's pretty much why Hong Kong even existed, after all--so a continuing open China would probably see more (or at least earlier) growth there. As per OTL, that's likely to spill over into other cities in the Pearl River area, including Shenzhen and Hong Kong. Sure, they might not become Shenzhen and Hong Kong, but doing as well as Jiangmen or Zhuhai is not out of the question. This would leave them fairly large, significant cities, just overshadowed by Guangzhou.

 

[Retro_Reaction]

I'm biased, because I'm a big fan of Lee Kuan Yew, but Singapore is a bit of an oddity, it's a first world country that has very little going for it, it doesn't have any natural resources to rely on really so all it's wealth is artificially created. Screw with the economies of the world, or take Lee Kuan Yew out of the picture and you might have a Singapore that's no where near as successful as it is today.

 

[SealTheRealDeal]

Las Vegas doesn't become Sin City in 1931.

 

[Arkenfolm]

Without a communist victory in China, Taiwan would have remained a backwater island province of the Republic of China, little different from Hainan. Taipei would be a third-rate provincial capital within China rather than a node of the global high-tech industry.

Taiwan does have the advantage of proximity to Japan and all that Japanese infrastructure compared to Hainan or many other parts of China.

I'm biased, because I'm a big fan of Lee Kuan Yew, but Singapore is a bit of an oddity, it's a first world country that has very little going for it, it doesn't have any natural resources to rely on really so all it's wealth is artificially created. Screw with the economies of the world, or take Lee Kuan Yew out of the picture and you might have a Singapore that's no where near as successful as it is today.

It has the Straits of Malacca going for it, so it would still be a major regional city.

 

[Raferty]

The Morgenthau Plan would do this for many already rubble covered cities in Germany.

Deindustrialization for most German cities would be disastrous and perhaps irreversible.