[LINK] Syrian Ubaid cities and Hainan's bubble economy

[rfmcdonald]

I've an amusing enough pair of New York Times articles about cities and real estate.

• Found the most recently (thanks to David and Patrick from Facebook) but dealing with much the most ancient conurbations is John Noble Wilford's "In Syria, a Prologue for Cities". This article explores how, on the upper reaches of the Euphrates River in Syria, archeologists displaced by the ongoing violence in Iraq have made interesting discoveries about the growth of communities in the Ubaid period (5500 to 4500 BCE), marked by the diffusion of cities and agriculture from the Mesopotamian heartland in Iraq. It looks very much like even at this early time, the Syrian Ubaid communities were complex, socially stratified agglomerations which actively took part in long-range trade networks.


• Edward Wong's "On China’s Hainan Island, the Boom Is Deafening" examines China's real estate boom on its tropical island province of Hainan. Besides highlighting China's growing income inequalities, with the country's rich and middle classes snapping up properties, it seems to me as if China's enjoying on Hainan its version of the real estate boom that has wrecked the economies of the United States, Spain and the United Kingdom.