The Transformation of the World (70 page)

Regulatory Planning and Development Planning

Were nineteenth-century cities planned?
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There probably has seldom been so much
and
so little planning as in that age. In the emblematic fast-growing “shock cities,” from Manchester to Chicago and Osaka, any will to plan gave way
before spontaneous forces of social change. There could not be planning unless political bodies made it their task. London, for instance, was more or less without a government; its first central body, the Metropolitan Board of Works, was not provided with adequate funding until 1869. Only in 1885 was the metropolis represented in Parliament in accordance with its position in the country, so that it could have a due influence on national policy; and only four years later was a directly elected council set up, the London County Council. Visitors to Manchester such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Charles Dickens were appalled at how little what was new in the city resulted from comprehensive planning. But critics easily overlooked the fact that precisely in Manchester an administration sensitive to social issues had begun to take shape just a few years after the opinion-changing reports of the 1830s and 1840s.
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A further necessary clarification—following suggestions by Josef Konvitz—concerns the two distinct kinds of urban planning:
development planning
, which constructs the outline and the general aesthetic image of the city; and
regulatory planning
, which conceives of the city as a space requiring permanent technical and social management. Common to both was the rise of professional city planners, who in some cases might exercise major influence.

Regulatory city planning arose in Europe and North America in the 1880s. Urban elites saw then that it was necessary to move beyond ad hoc palliatives, such as most of the measures involved in the early cleanups, and to take charge of the whole urban environment on an ongoing basis. Infrastructures were now understood as regulatory systems. A systems viewpoint in technical matters and social policy gained the upper hand over uncoordinated private economic motives (of which the anarchic construction of London's railway stations was a striking example). This implied not least that landownership interests would command less respect. The rise of regulatory city planning can be clearly seen in the lack of concern about compulsory land purchase in the public interest.
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Development planning
was an ancient practice, not a recent European invention. At least in China and India, the geometry of rule and the geometry of religion had older and stronger roots than in medieval and early modern western Europe, where often little more was required than the correct orientation of church axes. A uniform spatial alignment was one simple and effective form of planning; it may be found in the rectangular layout of ancient Chinese cities as well as in European geometric patterns (e.g., Mannheim, Glasgow, Valetta, Bari) and the grid pattern that was imprinted on both the land and the cities of the United States. With few exceptions (e.g., Boston and Lower Manhattan), these followed a logic of rectangular cell proliferation. Boston in the early nineteenth century constantly reminded travelers of an early medieval European city, but Philadelphia already faced them with an urban Enlightenment rationalism geared to the future; first the land was divided up in a grid and assigned to owners, then the grid was filled in.
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Again and again, however, land speculation meant that attempts at orderly urban development spun out of control.
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Nineteenth-century urban planning attracts so much attention because it was not the norm. Many cities on every continent expanded without restraint: planning in Osaka, for instance, began only in 1899.
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Whether anything was planned depended on special circumstances. A large fire might provide a stimulus—or it might not. After the Great Fire of 1812, Moscow was rebuilt in accordance with a plan of 1770; the reality looked less orderly. Another conflagration, in 1790, robbed Madrid of part of the Rococo charm that redevelopment had given it back in the age of Charles III; its golden times were never to return.
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Hamburg, on the other hand, obtained and used an opportunity for planning after the fire of 1842. In Chicago the whole business district (but not the factory area) went up in smoke in 1871, after which the city rose again as the world's first skyscraper metropolis.
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The sheer speed of expansion of the most dynamic metropolises condemned Baroque-minded authorities to failure, while making it all the more necessary to establish order amid the rampant growth. Moscow's accretion of houses, gardens, and streets, for example, created a picture in which foreign visitors could see nothing but a confused jumble. The reality of urbanization here clashed with all visions of city planning, whether traditional or modern, west European or Russian.
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It was similar in many other cities around the world. The contradictions could be especially blatant where a late absolutist regime with ambitions to shape the whole cityscape was replaced by one that gave free rein to private interests. A dramatic case in point was Mexico City. Under the liberal government of Benito Juárez, a brief transitional period in mid-century was succeeded by ruthless destruction of the Baroque cityscape—a process which, after the removal of ecclesiastical privileges, could roll on without meeting any resistance. The year 1861 saw the great demolition, when dozens of religious buildings were cleared within the space of a few months. Soldiers would burst into churches and rip images from altars with horses. Some were saved by allocation to other purposes, the National Library itself finding accommodation in a former church. Largescale iconoclasm corresponded to a political program: the liberal intellectuals of an independent nation were rejecting its colonial past and an art they considered to be a cheap imitation of European models. Like a half century earlier in France, public space underwent violent secularization.
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Haussmann's Paris and Luytens's New Delhi

Development planning sought to make a new start, and it did this in three different ways. The first was surgical interventions in city centers that sacrificed them to a broad aesthetic vision: the Haussmann model. At first it was a Parisian specialty, stemming from the resolve of the president and later emperor, Louis Napoleon, to modernize France so thoroughly that it would regain the hegemonic position in Europe that it had occupied under the first Napoleon. In 1853 Baron Georges Haussmann, the prefect of the Seine
département
, was appointed director of public works and provided with sweeping powers and lavish funding.
For a long time his goals and methods were the subject of intense controversy in France, but the results eventually proved him right, and his ideas on city planning set the tone for the rest of Europe.

Few other cities were capable of planning on such a scale; first among them perhaps Barcelona.
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Often a city would take over individual elements, as Nottingham did early on with the Haussmann boulevard. The adoption of this by Buenos Aires in the 1880s heralded its general switch from English to French cultural models, which were now perceived as more comprehensive in their modernizing ambitions; the
salons de thé
built around this time would survive until the McDonald's invasion of the 1980s.
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As soon as the Parisian model was there for every visitor to behold, others could do with it what they wished. In Budapest, they decided to build the finest opera house in the world and cast their eyes around selectively: at Paris, but also at Gottfried Semper's splendid opera house in Dresden and the Burgtheater in Vienna. In one respect, the result in the Hungarian capital surpassed all others when it opened in 1881: the Budapest opera house had all the latest equipment and was considered one of the most fireproof in the world.
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As a late developer, which had made the transition from timber to stone only in the final years of the eighteenth century, Budapest generally showed a sure hand in choosing its models, especially at the height of the construction and development boom between 1872 and 1886. From London it took the organization of projects by a central committee, the building of embankment roads, and the design of its parliament; from Vienna, much of the Ringstrasse conception; from Paris, the boulevard. By the turn of the century, Budapest had become a pearl studied with interest by German and American architects.
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The immediate impulse for the redevelopment of French cities was the need to create space for new railway stations and their access roads. Other factors were the removal of slums from city centers and a nostalgia for the grand planning of the empire. Not least, a construction boom promised to have spin-offs for the whole of the economy, providing a stimulus both locally and nationally. Politically initiated, though increasingly driven by private investment, the dynamic was of greatest profit to Paris, where many attempts at redevelopment had already been undertaken in the 1840s but fallen afoul of the lack of legal provision for massive state intervention. Now a government decree created the necessary framework, making it much easier for the municipality to buy up land in the inner city. Haussmann took advantage of a period in which the courts, infected by the construction boom, were prepared to interpret the new legal tools to the authorities' advantage. But he was by no means omnipotent, and many of his plans for street widening were thwarted by real estate interests. The fact that most of his visions became reality was due both to political will and to the calculations of many small investors that they would gain from rising land prices. Haussmann, as Peter Hall put it, “was gambling on the future.”
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The prefect was driven by three passions: a love of geometry; a wish to create spaces that were both useful and pleasant, such as the boulevards on which
traffic could flow and walkers stroll for relaxation; and an ambition to place Paris at the pinnacle of metropolises. The city was to be a wonder of the world, and after 1870 that was indeed how it was perceived. Huge as the technical effort was for this redevelopment of a whole city core, Haussmann and his colleagues also played close attention to aesthetic detail in their successful adaptation of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Parisian classicism to the dimensions of a mass city. Stylistic unity held the project together; local variations and the high quality of architectural execution prevented monotony. The basic element was the five-story apartment house, whose facades formed integrated horizontal lines along the new boulevards, their ubiquitous limestone brought en masse to Paris by the new railroads. Squares and monuments lent a characteristic structure to the cityscape.
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The second form of urban planning bears a German signature. In Germany a certain tradition of planning came together with one of strong local authorities. The later onset of industrialization, in comparison with Britain and some other parts of Western Europe, made it possible to become familiar with the problems of fast-growing modern big cities and to look for solutions in time. The German model of urban planning focused less on the grand reshaping of city centers than on growth in the periphery; it was essentially a question of expansion. This began in the mid-1870s and developed into comprehensive urban planning in the early 1890s.
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Around the turn of the century Germany was widely regarded as a model of orderly urban expansion and holistic planning of the city as social space, traffic system, aesthetic ensemble, and collection of privately owned real estate.
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In other words, development planning was coordinated at an early date and in an exemplary manner, with an awareness of the need for regulatory planning.

In comparison with France and Germany, Britain had no really distinctive model—unless its early and strong public concern with urban hygiene is regarded as such. London had been rather conservatively rebuilt in the wake of the Great Fire of 1666, and after the work on Regent Street in the 1820s, linking the palace of the prince regent (Carlton House) with the new Regent's Park to the north, no further intervention took such a radical character. Regent Street was the first new main street, after centuries of uncompleted projects, to be driven through a densely populated European city core.

There was much building and transformation in London, but nothing comparable to Haussmann's great achievement. To find another example of such energy, we must look to the empire and the building of a new capital for India. Work on it began shortly before the First World War and was not completed until the 1930s: for this reason, and also because of its basic modernizing impulse despite many Orientalist touches, it goes beyond the limits (however defined) of the nineteenth century. Yet the imperial political will to launch and fund the project (or, more precisely, to get taxpayers to fund it) bears the hallmarks of the prewar period, when the British liked to think that colonial rule would
last forever, or almost. In New Delhi the architects Edwin Luytens and Herbert Baker, assisted by a large planning department and an Indian workforce of up to 30,000, could implement grand visions for which the conditions were present neither in the mother country nor anywhere else in the empire. The outcome was not so much a smoothly functioning, “livable” city as a prestigious urban complex, but—unlike 1880s Hanoi or Albert Speer's remorselessly vulgar plan for the capital of the “Greater Germanic world empire”—it was not one in which an imperial aesthetic brutally proclaimed its superiority. The Viceroy's House, government offices, and missions of larger princedoms were intended to form a harmonious ensemble together with the public archives, gardens, fountains, and avenues.

The New Delhi of Luytens and Baker was to be a stylistic synthesis, in which long-imported architectural idioms fused with Indian elements of Muslim or Hindu origin. Luytens had closely studied the work of early city planners, especially Haussmann's Paris and L'Enfant's Washington, DC. Being as familiar with the sketches of garden cities (an old Islamic idea recently revived in Europe) as with the latest currents of architectural modernism, he nurtured a deep aversion against the kind of Victorian bombast that he had seen at the railroad station in Bombay. It was not in Europe, or even in Washington or Canberra (Australia's new capital since 1911), but in India, on the soil of an ancient architectural tradition, that the greatest extravaganza of urban planning was launched at the end of the age that is the object of our study.
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In the surfaces and straight lines designed by Luytens and Baker, we find a “de-kitschified” Orient combined with a modernist distaste for ornamentation, epitomized by Luytens's exact contemporary, the Austrian architect Adolf Loos. This gave their post-Victorian architecture a degree of timelessness, bringing it remarkably close to a cultural synthesis in stone.