The Transformation of the World (55 page)

Tendencies in the Nineteenth Century

What happened with the city in the nineteenth century? The second half, in particular, was a period of intensive urbanization.
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No other age had experienced such a spatial densification of social existence. The growth of the urban
population accelerated in comparison with earlier centuries. For the first time, the city-dweller's way of life became economically and culturally dominant in a number of large countries. This had previously happened, if at all, only in core areas of the ancient Mediterranean, in central China during the Song period (960–1279), and in early modern northern Italy. None of the established urban systems, whether in Europe, China, or India, was prepared for the huge influx into the cities. The adjustment, especially in the early stages, therefore led to crises. Part of the growth was channeled off into new cities outside the existing systems. Socially, if not always aesthetically, the most successful instances were in regions where no cities had existed before, especially in the American Midwest and Pacific West and in Australia. There urbanization started from scratch in the 1820s, although sometimes this meant taking over well-selected sites from their native inhabitants. The question of continuity and discontinuity was irrelevant.

In other parts of the world, the development was rarely continuous. Many people living at the time in Europe had the impression that the modern metropolis, as it existed from midcentury onward in nearly every country of the continent, represented a fundamental break with the past. Late-eighteenth-century French economists, evidently with Paris in mind, had been the first to observe that the big city was where “society” came together, and where the prevailing social norms took shape. The big city acted as the powerhouse of economic circulation and the multiplier of social mobility. Value increased not only through production—that happened in the country too—but also through the sheer force of human interaction. Rapid turnover created wealth.
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Circulation was regarded as the essence of the modern big city: that is, the ever-faster movement of people, animals, vehicles, and goods within the city, as well as its speedier exchanges with surrounding areas both near and distant. Critics complained of the pace of life in the metropolis, while urban reformers wanted to adapt its physical aspect to its modern essence and to unblock its vital flow (to improve transportation by building railroad tracks, wider streets, and boulevards; to manage the water and wastewater with a systems of drains and underground sewers; and to purify the air by clearing slums and developing more evenly spaced housing). This was the basic impulse behind a large number of municipal programs, from English promoters of public health to Baron Haussmann, the creator of postmedieval Paris.
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The European metropolis of the late nineteenth century was socially more differentiated than the early modern city. Its oligarchies were less homogeneous. The simple threefold division into a patrician elite that made the political decisions, an intermediate stratum of artisans and tradespeople, and a mass of urban poor had become obsolete. Even the elite consensus on taste had lost much of its strength. City complexes were only rarely designed as a single whole—which would earlier have been the case not only for princely residences but also for many nonaristocratic towns. Aesthetically as well as socially and politically, the Victorian city was “a battlefield.”
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But it was more robustly built: less stucco,
more solid brickwork, more iron. A city for eternity. And it was larger in volume. The average city hall and railroad station was of a size that only cathedrals or Versailles-style palaces would have reached in the past. Paradoxically, grand civic architecture made people smaller than princely ostentation had ever done.

Apart from its sheer growth of spatial size, number of inhabitants, and share in the total national population, the nineteenth-century big city underwent several other major transformations:

(1) Urbanization and the growth of cities took place at varying speeds in different parts of the world. In few other respects are regional discrepancies in the pace of social development—a fundamental characteristic of modernity—so clearly visible.

(2) Cities became increasingly varied around the world. Few old types of city disappeared, but many new types came to join them. This diversification stemmed from the appearance of further special functions: the railroad created the junction city, while greater leisure time and a middle-class need for relaxation led to development of the coastal resort.

(3) Since the days of Babylon and ancient Rome, there had been metropolises that stretched out and dominated large areas. The nineteenth century brought networking on a scale that permanently linked the world's largest cities with one another. This global city system is still with us today, even more interconnected and with a different weight distribution of its component parts.

(4) City infrastructure was built in ways that had no historical precedent. For millennia the “built environment” had consisted essentially of buildings. Now streets were paved, harbors lined with brick, railroad and streetcar tracks laid, street lighting installed, and clinker-clad underground tunnels dug for sewage and subway trains. New structures went downward as well as upward. By the end of the century cities were cleaner and brighter. At the same time, the great metropolises added a mysterious underworld, which gave birth to a all kinds of fears and escape fantasies.
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The new infrastructure absorbed huge private and public investments—along with industrial plants, the greatest employment of capital during industrialization.
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(5) Closely bound up with this new material solidity were the commercialization and steadily increasing value of urban real estate and the growing importance of the rental market. Only now did
urban
land become an investment and an object of speculation, valued not for its agricultural uses but simply because of its location. The “skyscraper” was emblematic of this trend.
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Land values could soar at a speed unimaginable in productive sectors of the economy. A plot of land that changed hands in 1832 for $100 in the newly founded city of Chicago was sold in 1834 for $3,000 and was valued twelve months later at $15,000.
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In an old
city such as Paris, real estate speculation began in earnest in the 1820s.
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The same market mechanisms were at work in the boom years of Asian cities such as Tokyo and Shanghai. Under these conditions, land registers attained a new precision and economic significance; chapters on landownership, construction, and landlord-tenant relations were added to the law books; it was no longer possible to imagine the financial sector without mortgages. New social types appeared on the scene, such as the estate agent, the property speculator, the contractor or “developer” (who built standardized accommodation units for the middle and lower classes), and the tenant.
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(6) Cities have always been planned. They projected cosmic geometries onto the earth below. Princes laid out ideal cities; it was one of their favorite occupations during the European Baroque era. Only in the nineteenth century, however, did city planning come to be understood as an ongoing task of central or local government. Continually struggling against unbridled expansion, and often losing the struggle, city councils nevertheless continued to plan—and this impetus became an essential part of municipal politics and administration. If a city wished to be “modern,” it outlined visions of its future complete with technical know-how.

(7) New conceptions of an urban public and community politics took shape and became more widespread. An oligarchy and an undifferentiated, unpredictable “people” were no longer perceived as the only actors in public space. A slackening of absolutist regimentation, together with wider electoral representation, new mass media, and the organization of interest groups and political parties in the municipal arena, changed the character of local politics. At least in constitutional states, the capital city was also the seat of a parliament where national politics was conducted: the electorate followed events there with an unprecedented level of involvement. A rich and lively world of clubs, associations, church communities, and religious sects, as it has been described with particular thoroughness for early modern England and Germany, also emerged in embryo under very different political conditions, for example, in the provincial cities of late imperial China.
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(8) New “urbanist” discourses and new critiques of urban life placed the city at the center of struggles over the interpretation of the world. Cities had always been something special, and those who lived in them—or at least in ones around the Mediterranean—had always tended to look on
rustici
with deprecation. But only the dynamic historical thinking of the nineteenth century elevated the big city into the pioneer of progress and real locus of cultural and political creativity. Jules Michelet even constructed a myth of Paris as the universal city of Planet Earth—a trope that later took root in the vision of the French metropolis as “the capital of the nineteenth century.”
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From now on, anyone who praised
rural life courted the suspicion that he was a simpleton or a reactionary; anyone who defended it no longer did so to strike a judicious balance between “court” and “country” but to sustain a robust critique of civilization, in the spirit of either agrarian romanticism or militant
Junkertum
. By the end of the century, even old pastoral ideals had been redefined in the urban context of the “garden city.” The new sociology, from Henri de Saint-Simon to Georg Simmel, was fundamentally a science of the life of city dwellers, more of
Gesellschaft
than
Gemeinschaft
, more of speed and edginess than of village placidity. Political economy no longer saw the land as the source of social wealth, as the eighteenth-century physiocrats still had. As one “production factor” among others, land was now viewed with skepticism as a stagnant obstacle to economic development. Value creation, for the generation of Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill, took place in an urban-industrial space. This new cultural preponderance of city over country mirrored the declining political importance of the peasantry. Between the Pugachev Rebellion in southeastern Russia (1773–75) and the wave of protests at the turn of the twentieth century (the Chinese Boxer Rebellion in 1900, the Romanian peasant revolt in 1907, the beginning of the Zapatista movement in Mexico in 1910), there were few great peasant upheavals anywhere in the world that mounted a challenge to the existing order. Many great rebellions that might come to mind—especially the Indian Mutiny in 1857/58 and the almost contemporaneous Taiping uprising in China—had a social base that extended beyond the peasantry. They were more than spontaneous outbreaks of peasant rage.

In the nineteenth century, it is often said, the city became “modern,” and “modernity” came into being in the city. If we wish to define urban modernity, and perhaps even to gain some chronological bearings about modernity in general, then we must take into account all of the above processes. The usual concepts of urban modernity as it emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century tend to be one-sided. Attempts have been made to define it as a combination of rational planning and cultural pluralism (David Ward and Olivier Zunz), as order in compression (David Harvey), or as a space of experimentation and “fractured subjectivity” (Marshall Berman).
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Early Victorian London; Second Empire Paris; post-1890 New York, Saint Petersburg, or Vienna; 1920s Berlin; and 1930s Shanghai have been described as loci of such modernity. This has nothing to do with sheer magnitude. No one has ever thought of describing Lagos or Mexico City, two present-day metropolises, as epitomes of modernity. The heroic modernity of cities is a fleeting moment that sometimes lasts just a few decades: an equipoise of order and chaos, a conjunction of immigration and functioning technical structures, an opening of unstructured public spaces, a flow of energy in experimental niches. The moment of modernity presupposes a certain form
of the city, which was still discernible at the end of its classical era, and an opposition to what is non-city. Inner and outer boundaries are lacking in the present-day megalopolis of endless, diffuse, polycentric “conurbations” with middling degrees of compression. There is not even a “countryside” that can be exploited or consumed as a local recreation area. The urban nineteenth century ends with the big cities' loss of shape.

2 Urbanization and Urban Systems

Urbanization used to be understood in a narrow sense as the rapid growth of cities in conjunction with the spread of mechanized factory production; urbanization and industrialization appeared as two sides of the same coin. This view can no longer be upheld. The definition that is common today takes urbanization to be a process of social acceleration, compression, and reorganization, which may occur under a range of very different circumstances.
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The most important outcome of this process was the formation of spaces of increased human interaction in which information was swiftly exchanged and optimally employed, and new knowledge could be created under favorable institutional conditions. Cities—especially large cities—were concentrations of knowledge; sometimes that is why people headed to them.
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Some historians distinguish between the growth of cities, seen as a
quantitative
process of spatial compression triggered by the concentration of new job opportunities, and urbanization proper, seen as the
qualitative
emergence of new spaces of action and experience, or in other words, the development of specific urban lifestyles.
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This distinction calls attention to the wealth of aspects involved in the phenomenon, but it is a little schematic and difficult to sustain in practice.