I am aware of locations in cities, such as NY where a building currently stood, that a building was torn down to build the current one, that possibly a building was torn down to build that one, that at least 3, possibly more buildings have stood. I’ll stipulate that we are talking from the start of the colonial period, as it would be darn difficult to determine how many pre-columbian buildings stood over a particular location. So the questions are:
What spot in the US has had the most number of buildings on it and how many?
What spot in the world has had the most number of buildings on it and how many?
My guess is that they would both be in the oldest parts of very old (relatively for the US) cities. My guess is that earthquake-prone areas have an ‘advantage’ because of “unplanned urban renewal”.
Would I be right to assume that the driveway to a mobile home factory doesn’t count?
Jericho - according to Wiki: “Archaeologists have unearthed the remains of more than 20 successive settlements in Jericho, the first of which dates back 11,000 years (9000 BCE), almost to the very beginning of the Holocene epoch of the Earth’s history.” Damascus is pretty old - carbon dating back to 6300 BC. Athens has been continuously inhabited for seven thousand years, apparently. That’s enough time for a whole lot of rebuilding on the same spots. London’s much younger than I thought, actually - though there apparently were settlements in the area, they date the “birth” of the actual city to the Romans. Fancy living in a place that’s only a couple of thousand years old - I feel quite cheated!
I don’t know if this is true or not, but I’ve heard it was the practice in Japan for a long time to put up buildings with the knowledge that they were going to collapse during the next earthquake. The buildings were designed to be short and lightweight so they wouldn’t cause a lot of damage when they fell and the material was just gathered up and used to erect a new building. If this is true then there are probably places in Kyoto, Fukuoka, or Nara that have had dozens of buildings up and down on them.