Necropolis

Necropolis means “a large elaborate cemetery of an ancient city” (www.m-w.com)

The world necropolis, as used in urban planning and urban design, is referred to the final phase of urban development, the dead of city. This word was used by Louis Mumford in his famous work <The city in history> to describe the evolution of city from the form of polis in ancient Greece to metropolis, megalopolis, tyrannopolis, parisitopolis and necropolis in the end. Mumford compares city as a container, with certain volume and capacity. The bigger the city, the worse it would be. He urges urban development needs to be controlled in a moderate scale. Otherwise it would implode and end in a graveyard of dust. 

The image shows the debris of Roman Empire. It is not only a history but also a lesson. (http://www.thejupiter.info/about/author/admin/page/5/)

“From the standpoint of both politics and urbanism, Rome remains a significant lesson of what to avoid: its history presents a series of classic danger signals to warn one when life is moving in the wrong direction. Wherever crowds gather in suffocating numbers, wherever rents rise steeply and housing conditions deteriorate, wherever a one-sided exploitation of distant territories removes the pressure to achieve balance and harmony nearer at hand, there the precedents of Roman building almost automatically revive, as they have come back today: the arena, the tall tenement, the mass contests and exhibitions, the football matches, the international beauty contests, the strip-tease made ubiquitous by advertisement, the constant titillation of the senses by sex, liquor, and violence – all in true Roman style. These are symptoms of the end: magnifications of demoralized power, minifications of life. When these signs multiply, Necropolis is near, though not a stone has yet crumbled. For the barbarian has already captured the city from within. Come hangman! Come vulture!”

cited from book<The City in History> p242 by  Lewis Mumford