Organisms
We think we are masters of our bodies, that we are discrete organisms, but in reality we are all just communities of cells. These communities are linked networks of individual creatures (the cells) who co-operate, compete, live and die without any consciousness of our existence (and until very recently without us being conscious of them).What we call health is just the management of these communities. There are always ‘foreign’ bacteria and viruses inside our bodies, but these entities are only equivalent to immigrants in our societies. They are a part of life, and although the bodies cell communities may try to expulse or exterminate them, they will always be around. There is no optimal state of health - we never reach it, no matter how well we might feel.
Similarly, cities are organisms in which we are the cells. If cities were conscious, they would probably have no idea of our existence and we certainly don’t have any idea that they can be considered as organisms (though Pirsig in Lila may have been the first to propose the concept). There is no optimal state of health for a city. Cities are born, they grow, they mature, and eventually they die. How could we preserve a city? By removing all the people? There would still be decay caused by the elements. By somehow moving it into the vacuum of space? Well, it wouldn’t really be what we would call a city once it was lifeless and unchanging. It would be the same thing as saying that if you removed all the living cells from a human being and preserved the skeleton the person would live forever. I suppose that’s what mummification is meant to achieve. And mummies can never be beautiful — only living beings are.
A living being is nothing more than the process of the growth and retreat of its cell communities. Hoping to preserve human life beyond the limits of those communities is ridiculous. The beauty of life is that it is a process, and there are layers upon layers of organisms, all in their own communities, in their own scales, which can never break out from those scales. The scales in question are both physical and temporal. Manage the process of life by all means, but try to stop the process and all you will achieve is death and ugliness.