The Transformation of the World (60 page)

An example of a real mining city was Aspen, Colorado, where silver deposits were discovered in 1879 and urban developers followed hard on the heels of the first “prospectors.” By 1893 two isolated log cabins had grown into the third-largest city in Colorado, with paved streets, gas lighting, two kilometers of streetcar tracks, a municipal water supply, three banks, a post office, a city hall, a prison, a hotel, three newspapers, and an opera house. But, also in 1893, what was called “the finest mining city in the world” lost the economic basis for its existence when the price of silver fell through the floor.
⁹⁴

Capitals

The opposite of such specialized cities were the metropolises, which, in addition to many particular tasks, carried out the
central
functions of the city: (a) civil and religious and administration; (b) overseas trade; (c) industrial production; and (d) services.
⁹⁵
While a large number of cities have services constantly on offer,
the importance of the other three functions may be said to define three different kinds of city: the capital, the industrial city, and the port. Of course, it is possible for the same city to be all three at once, but there are surprisingly few examples of this. New York, Amsterdam, and Zurich are not national capitals; Paris, Vienna, and Berlin are not ports; Beijing, a long way from the sea, had scarcely any industry until a few decades ago. At most London and Tokyo are seats of government
and
seaports
and
industrial centers. Nevertheless, the functional emphases diverge so much that it is not entirely arbitrary to isolate the three distinct types.

A capital, however large or small in terms of population size, stands out from other cities in being the center of political and military power. Other distinctive features follow from this. A capital is also a residential location—the seat of a court and of a central bureaucracy. The labor market of a capital is more geared to services here than in other cities—services that range from supplying members of the ruling apparatus to an especially active, artistically demanding, construction industry. Rulers must attend especially well to the population of the capital, since even in the most repressive political systems it is the stage of mass politics. In premodern societies the grain supply to the capital was a hugely important political issue—in imperial or papal Rome no less than in Beijing, which obtained most of its food by canal from central China. The Ottoman sultan was directly responsible for the population of Istanbul, and he was expected not only to ensure its basic food supply but also to protect it from usury and other abuses; this had not changed by the early nineteenth century.
⁹⁶
The urban “mob,” especially feared in London but also active elsewhere, contained revolutionary dynamite; it could be manipulated or repressed but not always reliably kept under control. The nineteenth-century capital was a place where sovereigns were crowned, and often buried, with pomp and circumstance. It was also a symbolic terrain, on which conceptions of political order were converted into geometry and stone. No other cities are as charged as capitals with layers of historical meaning; their prestige architecture expresses in visual terms the sovereign will of their past rulers.

With the notable exception of Rome, capitals have rarely been religious centers of the first order. Places such as Mecca, Geneva, and Canterbury never functioned as capitals within the framework of a nation-state. Yet, by virtue of the sacralized monarchy, the capital was automatically an arena of religious ritual. The Chinese emperors of the Qing Dynasty performed the prescribed rites in the course of the year; and the Ottoman sultan, in his capacity as caliph, was the supreme head of Sunni believers. In Catholic Vienna the alliance of throne and altar consolidated itself after 1848. Emperor Franz Joseph never missed an opportunity to take part in the magnificent Corpus Christi processions or to perform the Maundy Thursday ritual foot washing on twelve carefully chosen residents of municipal retirement homes.
⁹⁷

Finally, capital cities always strove to be independent in their exercise of key cultural functions. But true cultural capitals are not selected by governments or
commissions; their decisive magnet effect can arise only through communicative compression and the development of culture markets, neither of which is really susceptible to planning. The outcome is not always successful, however. In the eighteenth century Philadelphia was for a time what it wished to be: the “Athens of the New World.” But its successor as capital of the United States, Washington, DC, was never able to establish such a degree of cultural hegemony vis-à-vis other American cities. Nor did Berlin, at least before 1918, acquire the cultural weight of a dominant national metropolis, in the manner of London, Vienna, or Paris.

Few new capitals appeared on the scene in the nineteenth century, apart from those of the Spanish American republics, which had already been the main administrative centers in colonial times. Exceptions were Addis Ababa, Freetown in Liberia (a “real” European-style capital
⁹⁸
), and Rio de Janeiro, which, as the seat of the Portuguese monarchy after 1808 and then the capital of the independent Empire of Brazil after 1822, was built up into a “tropical Versailles.”
⁹⁹
In Europe the most important new national capitals were Berlin, Rome (which followed Turin and Florence for the honor in 1871), Bern (since 1848 the “federal city” of the Swiss confederation), and Brussels (which could look back to a past as capital but only in 1830 concentrated all the central functions of the Kingdom of Belgium). Another interesting case is Budapest, which became the second capital of the Danubian monarchy after the “Compromise” of 1867. In the competition with Prague, it was a factor of utmost importance that the Czech metropolis never obtained the status of capital within the Habsburg Monarchy. Budapest, formed as such through the fusion of Buda and Pest in 1872, became one of the great showcases of urban modernization in Europe, and by the end of the century its gradual Magyarization had also given it a markedly national character in cultural as well as ethnic terms. The tension between Vienna and Budapest nevertheless continued within the new imperial context.

The Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy was an expression of a broader nineteenth-century trend toward twin metropolises, which often involved a deliberate separation of political and industrial functions. Not only Washington, DC, but also Canberra and Ottawa were tranquil provincial centers in comparison with the towering commercial, industrial, and service-providing cities of New York, Melbourne, Sydney, Montreal, and Toronto. Many other regimes encouraged such forms of competition. The pasha of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, stuck with Cairo as his capital, but he did more to raise Alexandria out of the decay into which it had fallen.
¹⁰⁰
Elsewhere, “second cities” came forward with the strength of bourgeois assertiveness. Moscow got over its loss of capital status in 1712 and became the main center of early industrialization in Russia. Osaka, which received little support from the central government after the Meiji turnaround in 1868, strengthened its position as a port and industrial city; a modern rivalry between Osaka as business center and Tokyo as seat of government replaced the old antagonism between the shogun in Edo and the
emperor in Kyoto. In China, the rise of Shanghai from the 1850s onward was a serious challenge to Beijing as the seat of government such as the centralized system of rule had not experienced since the fifteenth century. The tension between bureaucratic-conservative Beijing and commercial-liberal Shanghai persists to this day. A similar dualism, not at all politically planned, took shape in colonial urban geography, especially in the older colonies. Economic centers such as Johannesburg, Rabat, and Surabaya gained ground at the expense of capital cities such as Cape Town (replaced in 1910 by Pretoria), Fez, or Batavia/Jakarta. In Vietnam the roles were similarly distributed between the political capital in the North, Hanoi (which had been the ruler's residence before 1806 and again became the seat of government in 1889 under the French) and the economic center in the South, Saigon. In the new Italian nation-state, an opposition developed between Rome and Milan. In India the conflicts sharpened in 1911, when the government apparatus was transferred from the economic center, Calcutta, to the recently built capital of New Delhi. It is a striking fact that few nineteenth-century cities in the world followed the model of London or Paris to become metropolises with all-embracing functions. Even in dynamic counterexamples such as Tokyo and Vienna, which rested on foundations going back hundreds of years, the challenge of a “second city” was not far away. In Rome itself a dualism persisted between the secular regime and the Vatican.

Princely and Republican Residences

None of the top five European metropolises (and population centers) in 1900—London, Paris, Berlin, Saint Petersburg, and Vienna—was a creation of industry like Manchester, which since 1800 had risen from twenty-fourth to seventh place among the cities of Europe and pushed up close to the frontrunners. But these were also too big to be purely political capitals, or to allow themselves to be dominated by a royal court. In France, Napoleon and Joséphine had created a new-style court of parvenus and winners from the revolution, but since the emperor was often away, no physical center of rule established itself in Paris before his final demise in 1815. Subsequently, the restored Bourbons and even more the “bourgeois monarch,” Louis Philippe, cultivated a rather modest style of self-presentation, which Ahmed Bey of Tunis liked so much that he faithfully copied it to mark his distance from the Ottoman rulers in Istanbul.
¹⁰¹
In London the monarchy projected itself even more soberly: Prince Pückler-Muskau, the penetrating observer of things British, wrote in 1826 that it was only thanks to John Nash and his lavish work on Regent Street that the English capital had retained the aspect of a seat of government.
¹⁰²
But the conversion of the ruined Buckingham House into Buckingham Palace between 1825 and 1850 was no architectural masterstroke, and Queen Victoria preferred her other palaces at Windsor, Balmoral, and the Isle of Wight. In Vienna the imperial Hofburg residence looked positively unassuming beside the pomp of the Ringstrasse.

Nowhere did court overshadow city to such a degree as in the late-absolutist imperial centers of Istanbul and Beijing, where whole districts were reserved for the use of the rulers and their household. Over the course of the century, however, many imperial properties in Istanbul—often gardens or sites of wooden palaces—were converted for public use as arsenals or port or railroad installations.
¹⁰³
Beijing, a much older city in appearance, remained untouched by the railroad until 1897 and by modern industry even longer. At the turn of the century, the court and central government offices were still grouped together behind the walls of the Forbidden City, but they had already lost much of their power to representatives of the Great Powers in the diplomatic quarter, to governors in provincial capitals, and to the capitalists of Shanghai. Beijing was an architectural shell, a densely populated symbolic landscape with little political substance. When it was invaded in 1900 by peasant bands from the countryside and by troops of the Great Powers, an era came to an end. Army boots marched through the halls of the Forbidden City, horses were stabled in its temples, and officials had burned the state papers and fled. Beijing remained the capital of China until 1927 and became capital once again after the Second World War. The Christian churches sacked during the Boxer Rebellion were rebuilt, but scarcely any of the damaged temples were. Imperial Beijing never recovered from the shock of 1900, its dignity and ritual aura dispelled forever.
¹⁰⁴
A few years later Beijing, now equipped with modern hotels, beckoned alongside Rome, the Giza pyramids, and the Taj Mahal as one of the great attractions of the dawning age of international tourism.
¹⁰⁵

The core of the American republic in Washington, DC, also had a war behind it. In August 1814 the British set fire to the Capitol and the White House. The city on the Potomac was the prototype of a planned capital. The first design was approved by Congress as early as 1790, and in 1800 it became the seat of the presidency. The approximate location was a compromise between the Northern and Southern states, while the exact site was personally chosen by George Washington, who had engaged the architect Major Pierre Charles L'Enfant. The very first plan, like so much else, stemmed from Thomas Jefferson, who opted for a chessboard schema. L'Enfant then worked this out on a grand scale, with wide boulevards, “magnificent distances,” and splendid open spaces. The master builder, who had grown up as a boy at Le Nôtre's Versailles (where his father had served as a court painter), had learned there to think in terms of axial planes. His design for the American capital was therefore ultimately inspired by a late Baroque vision. It is striking that around the same time (between 1800 and 1840), but without any demonstrable connection, the Russian capital Saint Petersburg was redesigned as a neoclassical ideal city in a similar
esprit mégalomane
—at much greater expense and with more clearly defined results.
¹⁰⁶
In this case, the initiative came from a man who was the polar opposite of the republican George Washington: Tsar Paul I, one of the worst despots of the age. The Kazan Cathedral in Saint Petersburg was intended as a Russian match for the dome of Saint Peter's in
Rome, and Saint Isaac's Cathedral as a synthesis of the whole European cathedral tradition. In Washington, DC, sacred architecture played no role at all.

For a long time, the original plans were inconsistently applied in both spirit and detail. As early as 1792, following a violent argument with the good-natured President Washington, L'Enfant was dismissed and took many of his plans away with him.
¹⁰⁷
The urban area of “Washington” then became a field of experimentation, albeit on a smaller scale than L'Enfant had imagined; his official residence for the president would have been six times larger than today's White House. What first went up showed little sign of L'Enfant's sense of grandeur. Charles Dickens, who passed through in the spring of 1842, was distinctly unimpressed: it was a city not of magnificent distances but of “magnificent intentions”: “spacious avenues, that begin in nothing, and lead nowhere; streets, mile-long, that only want houses, roads and inhabitants; public buildings that need but a public to be complete.”
¹⁰⁸
Capitol Hill, the site of both Houses of Congress, acquired its domes and side wings only at the end of the 1860s. The final design of the Mall followed only in the 1920s. The Lincoln Memorial was finally inaugurated in 1922, the funds for the Jefferson Memorial approved only in 1934. The eclectically conceived classical complex, adorned with the late nineteenth-century neo-Romanesque Smithsonian Castle, is essentially a creation of the architect John Russell Pope from the period between the two world wars. Washington belies its own youthfulness.