The Transformation of the World (69 page)

Why did most cities in nineteenth-century North America and Australia manage to avoid the emergence of slums? Why did the detached single-family house become the core of suburbanization, affordable for a large section of the population, including skilled workers? Why did conditions not develop as in
Paris under Louis Philippe (the “bourgeois monarch”) where one-quarter to one-fifth of workers lived in rundown “bed and breakfast” hotels: five-story houses with damp low-ceilinged rooms, often lacking a fireplace or wallpaper and provided with only the bare essentials in the way of furniture?
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In other words, why did housing patterns in the neo-Europes generally develop quite differently from those in the Old World?

This is perhaps the most interesting question of nineteenth-century urban history. An explanation in terms of the greater supply of land, though convincing at first sight, is inadequate; the answer appears to lie elsewhere. Space-taking urbanization is considerably more expensive than more-compact forms, because it requires greater investment in infrastructure: longer suburban train lines with more stops, more extensive sewers, and so on. Three factors must come together if dispersed housing is to be possible in practice: (1) new and cheaper construction techniques (prefabricated structures), (2) mechanized transportation in the shape of electric streetcars and steam-driven subway and suburban trains, and (3) a high average level and fairly even distribution of income. This combination of elements, perfectly achieved in a city such as Melbourne, was lacking in European countries at the time when each began its intensive urbanization.
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An “Anglo-Saxon” or “American” cultural preference for single-family houses cannot therefore be treated as an independent variable; it also had to be a feasible proposition.

The new cities in Australia and the American Midwest may have looked dull or even ugly by the aesthetic standards of European city planning, but they made the petit bourgeois dream of a protected private domain, with a wholesome family life in a house of their own, accessible to a large section of the working population. From the early nineteenth century on, capitalist serial production was able to turn out standardized housing of the most diverse kinds, from the small brick terraces, often standing back to back, that characterized English cities to the apartment blocks of Glasgow, Paris, or Berlin. Nine-tenths of the housing in Victorian London was not built out of need but consisted—just like today—of “speculative” projects in anticipation of future demand. But the mode of production did not yet guarantee production quality. Only the democratized suburbs of the New World solved the problem of overcrowded residential districts. But in so doing it bequeathed to the twentieth century the problem of deserted inner cities.

The technically advanced suburb of 1910 still feels close to us today: we describe it without hesitation as “modern.” In comparison, the pedestrian city of the early nineteenth century was positively medieval: a place where executions were still one of the favorite popular amusements (140 people were publicly hanged in London between 1816 and 1820).
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It was also a dark place.
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House lights were put out early, and one could walk in the streets only with the help of torches and lanterns. Gas lighting was first installed in cotton factories, to lengthen the working day. In 1807 the first gaslights came on in London streets,
and by 1860 some 250 German cities had followed suit.
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In Japan, kerosene and gas lighting were introduced simultaneously in the mid-1870s. If kerosene kept its place, this was because it required scarcely any fixed installations: the railroad distributed it to large and small consumers all over the country. In 1912, the year of the Meiji Emperor's death, Japan was a land of kerosene lamps.
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Interior spaces were fitted with modern alternatives at a later date than central squares and streets.

From the 1880s the average British working-class home had access to gas for lighting, cooking, and heating. The relevant technology had close links to industry; gas stoves, in particular, which came into use around this time in Western Europe, consumed large quantities of iron. In 1875 electricity was made publicly available in Paris, and there was constant electric street lighting by 1879 in Cleveland, 1882 in Nuremberg (the first German city), 1884 in Berlin, and 1897 in Mexico City (where the whole system had to be imported). At first it was difficult to break into the gas market. Gas lighting served its purpose, and it took a while for the advantages of electricity to become apparent. Perhaps the most spectacular was stage lighting in theaters. The dimming of gas lamps in the auditorium had already proved effective in Paris in the late 1830s, but only full illumination of the scenic space laid the basis for the modern dramatic arts, with their sharp focus on the body.
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As soon as the new technology was operating on a mass scale, it led to a veritable light mania. European cities competed with one another for the title “City of Light.”
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The consequences were enormous in the inner cities: the evening was democratized, since it was not only people with coachmen or torchbearers who ventured onto the streets. At the same time, the state could keep a closer check on the nighttime pursuits of its subjects and citizens. Nothing created such a disparity between city and country as the transformation of light from a glow emitted by candles and lamps into a glare produced by technical systems.

8 Symbolism, Aesthetics, Planning

Punishment and Exoticism

In a certain sense, the specificity of urban spaces defies formal analysis; literary description can do greater justice to local color, to the genius loci.
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There is no need to assume that the “spirit” of a society is expressed in built-up cityscapes. It is simpler to investigate what contemporaries thought about the essence of the city. In nineteenth-century Europe we often hear them say that the city is a natural organism—an idea that is at the origins of sociology. To take “modernity” as an external standard for a city is problematic. Historians too easily share either the enthusiasm of new “city people” or the aversion of old elites—the landed nobility or mandarin class—for the ascent of mercantile and industrial urbanites. A discourse of backwardness is hard to disentangle. What does it mean to say of
a city that it is “a big village?” Western Europeans in Moscow or Beijing used to sneer at the appearance of simple countryfolk in the cityscape, wondering at the social mix and implying that these urban societies might be of a different kind from their own.

Images and evaluations of a city can change abruptly. Lucknow, the nawab of Awadh's capital with a population of 400,000, was the glittering residential seat of one of the richest princes of India, probably the most prosperous inland city of the Subcontinent in the mid-nineteenth century and the cultural center of a sophisticated Persianized elite. Yet in 1857, in the eyes of the British, it changed overnight into a hotbed of rebellion and wickedness. Admiration for the old Muslim India disappeared from one day to the next. The British garrison in Lucknow was besieged for 140 days during the Great Rebellion—and the cramped and crooked layout of the old city was given as the explanation of how this was possible. After 1857 the British therefore rebuilt it to make it more secure and also to improve public hygiene (disease had claimed more European lives than the actual fighting). The reshaping continued for two decades, until 1877. Other major precolonial cities that had been battlegrounds in the rebellion—Agra, Meerut, Jhansi—received similar treatment. Most of their older districts were demolished, and their symbolism systematically degraded. One of the main Islamic holy sites in Lucknow, the mausoleum of a nawab venerated by the people, was turned into a barracks where British soldiers marched around in hobnailed boots, drank alcohol, and ate pork. The great Friday Mosque, until then the religious heart of the city, was closed down and left to decay—a violent intrusion into the social space of the city, after which all that remained was small local mosques. Wide avenues suitable for military use were driven through the city, destroying streets and alleys in their path. The British, again for military reasons, defined traditional monuments as cases for slum clearance. Lucknow was radically de-exoticized.
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Model cities and architectural styles interacted with each other in different ways. The latter could be more easily copied than the former, but the cultural “spirit” of a city almost not at all. In the nineteenth century, there was a tendency to oscillate between eclecticism and a quest for cultural authenticity. Nor was this true only in Europe: the architects Nahouchi Magoichi and Hidala Yitaka introduced art nouveau and the latest designs to Osaka; the newly built city of Yokohama became a hodgepodge of the most diverse influences, with domes and colonnades, Gothic spires and Moorish round arches.
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Another uncolonized country, Siam, made a conscious effort in the early twentieth century to develop a “national” Thai style, which, as the architectural expression of an emerging nation, had first to be created out of previously existing elements.
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On the other hand, following the previous experience in the mid-eighteenth century, the period from roughly 1805 on witnessed in Europe a second (and in America, a first) wave of architectural exoticism. The Royal Pavilion in Brighton sported “Indian” domes and minarets, while the nearby stables of the Prince
of Wales's thoroughbreds (today used as a concert hall) were given a pseudo-Oriental splendor.
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The American showman and entrepreneur Phineas Taylor Barnum tried to outdo the Brighton Pavilion with his three-story “Iranistan” fantasy in the “Mogul style.” The fragile structure, completed in 1848, succumbed to a fire nine years later. Other “Oriental villas” across the Atlantic had a longer life and were aesthetically more pleasing.
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In fact, one finds Oriental interiors more often than entire buildings: tiles, open woodwork and metalwork, rugs, and tapestry. Technically avant-garde places such as railroad stations and pumping stations were decorated with “Moorish” touches, and cemeteries embellished with exotica. Chinese pagodas and Japanese wooden door arches were even featured in city parks.
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(Conversely, the typical European equestrian statue never had any resonance among Asians.) World exhibitions became displays of architecture from all around the world, or of what was thought to count as such.
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Two “Oriental” elements—the bazaar and the obelisk—went beyond the effect of individual buildings. From the first shopping arcade to be called a bazaar in the West (in 1816) to the shopping malls of the present day, the Oriental form of the covered market has enjoyed persistent popularity. There was no haggling in European “bazaars,” however. On the contrary, they were pioneers of the fixed and marked price.
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Obelisks have a special history. In Renaissance Europe they were the aesthetic symbol for the profound wisdom that was supposed to have been attained in ancient Egypt; they stood less for the contemporary Orient than for the early perfection of civilization in the depths of time. What was new was the idea of adorning optically central locations in European metropolises with such culturally remote objects. Later, in 1885, the Americans would take the simpler approach of building their own fifty-meter high obelisk and erecting it in their capital city as the Washington Memorial, but the imperial powers of the nineteenth century became fixed on the idea of shipping home lapidarian monuments. A “Cleopatra's Needle” was installed in 1880 on the Thames embankment, and another one the following year in New York's Central Park. But the ultimate example was the unveiling of a giant obelisk in the middle of the Place de la Concorde, on October 25, 1836—a gift to the French king from Muhammad Ali. In fact, the pasha of Egypt was personally indifferent to the art treasures of pre-Islamic antiquity. The aim of his gift-dispensing diplomacy was to delight the French public, who since Bonaparte's Egyptian campaign of 1798 had shown much enthusiasm for ancient times on the Nile. He would eventually need French support in his efforts to shake off his overlord, the sultan in Istanbul.

The only problem for the French was that they had to ship the 220-ton colossus themselves. No less a person than Jean-François Champollion, the decipherer of hieroglyphs honored in France as much as in Egypt, traveled out in 1828 to confirm the offer and recommended trying to obtain the obelisks at Luxor. In 1831 the new government of the July Monarchy sent a special ship and a team of engineers to Upper Egypt, but it took more than five years for the obelisk to
be taken down, loaded, shipped north on the Nile, Mediterranean, and Seine, and finally erected in a spectacular public ceremony. As a result of this extremely costly venture, the “capital of the nineteenth century” furnished one of its most animated public spaces, the domain of the guillotine, with a Near Eastern monument dating back thirty-three centuries.
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The tranquil solemnity of the huge stone stood in stark contrast to the bloody spectacles that had been enacted on the square during the Revolution. The obelisk, covered with markings obscure to the layman and thus politically neutral, had the great advantage that no one was likely to take umbrage at it. An integrative symbol, not a divisive one, it was quite unlike that other postrevolutionary monument in France: the penitential Sacré-Coeur on the hill of Montmartre (built between 1875 and 1914), which would be erected to affirm the triumph of law and church after the suppression of the insurrectionary Commune—a provocation to many.

North American and Australian cities adapted various European models to their own environments and social needs. The suburb—an English invention, as we have seen—became thoroughly naturalized in the United States and Australia. Some details even migrated in the opposite direction. The Panopticon—that model prison with cells radiating like spokes from a central observation hall, which the English philosopher, political theorist, and social reformer Jeremy Bentham conceived in 1791—actually was first built in the United States and later exported back to the old country. The Americans also pioneered the construction of giant hotels, which in the 1820s initially struck Europeans as graceless imitations of army barracks. Structures of comparable size and splendor reached Europe only in 1855, when the Grand Hôtel du Louvre opened with an unprecedented seven hundred rooms on offer. So successful was the new model that by 1870, Edmond de Goncourt was already bewailing the “Americanization” of Paris.
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Every city in the world that claimed to be modern and sophisticated—and that, more prosaically, had to accommodate travelers—was now in need of hotels. The three decades before the First World War witnessed the birth of legendary luxury accommodations in Europe, Japan, and parts of the colonial world: the Mena House outside Cairo (1886), the Raffles in Singapore (1887), the Savoy in London (1889), the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo (1890), the Ritz in Paris 1898, the Taj Mahal Palace in Mumbai/Bombay (1903), the Esplanade in Berlin (1908), and so on. By 1849 Beirut already had a luxury hotel that Europeans could identify as such. North Africa and West Asia sometimes drew on the formula of the caravansery, which easily lent itself to modernization: often an enclosed courtyard where traders spent the night with their animals and conducted business.
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