Necropolis

According to Lewis Mumford, the necropolis was the first form of permanent human settlement and thus, it serves as the very foundation of urban life. In many respects, the construction of a necropolis is a matter of practical necessity, as death leaves the living with the material problem of the remains, but the problem of death extends beyond mere disposal. Death is a unique event in that it occurs within time and space, but it only happens to others (an individual cannot experience his or her own death), and when it has passed, the content or meaning of it is purely interrogative. The interrogative quality of death conditions the living city as it is forced simultaneously to commemorate those who have passed and to face the inevitability of death for the living. The funereal practices, religious ceremonies, and burial customs of each particular culture represent a set of possible responses to death (e.g., Día de los Muertos, Commemoratio omnium Fidelium Defunctorum, and the Bon Festival in Japan).

The necropolis is thus stretched between the temporal extremes of the past and the future as it must act as both a monument to those who have passed and a marker of the future for those who remain. The question of the future returns us to Mumford's work, as he uses the term necropolis to refer to both the cemetery and the ruin. Mumford uses the example of the decline of Rome to argue that, much like the individual citizen, the living city can become pathologically infected and die. This latter form of necropolis is the abandoned city or ruin, and it serves to remind the living of the precarious nature of urban life. As such, the necropolis defines both the past and the future of the city. Yet, within the living city, the necropolis retains its meaning only through the construction and maintenance of a distinct set of boundaries. These boundaries serve to form places of sanctified burial (the church yard, catacomb, mausoleum, etc.), which retain their meaning by being defined in opposition to the unsanctified or simply unmarked grave.