The Transformation of the World (66 page)

Even London, the center of the only world empire of the age, did not display its imperial side too obtrusively. In 1870 Calcutta looked more “imperial” than the great metropolis itself. For a long time London refrained from imperial monumentality, and in the architectural contest with Paris it often ended up the loser. John Nash's Regent Street was a feeble answer to the Arc de Triomphe (on which work lasted from 1806 to 1836), and the reshaping of the French capital under Napoleon III elicited nothing comparable on the other side of the Channel. Over time the French also learned better how to glamorize their world's fairs and colonial exhibitions. London remained the ugly duckling of Europe's metropolises, always looking poorer than it really was, although throughout the nineteenth century it had better drains and street lighting than its immodest sister capital.

When reasons were sought for London's imperial reticence, many pointed to traditions of private and public parsimony or the antipathy toward absolutist pomp in a constitutional monarchy. Besides, there was not a unified city administration with sufficient planning powers. Complaints grew louder that the great capital city had to hide its face in shame when confronted with the glamour of Vienna or Munich, and that tourism was suffering from the lack of sights and well-run hotels—yet still nothing was done. Only Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee in 1887, followed by her Diamond Jubilee ten years later, finally roused the nation from its imperial slumber; she was after all empress of India as well as the reigning monarch. Admiralty Arch was erected on the southwest corner of Trafalgar Square, but little else happened architecturally.
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Apart from a couple of statues of conquering heroes and the plethora of imperial imagery on the Albert Memorial, London before 1914 did not look very imperial—considerably less so than Chengde (Jehol) in Inner Mongolia, for example, the summer residence of the Chinese emperor, where claims to power over Central Asia were subtly represented in the architecture. Buildings like Australia House or India House appeared only after the First World War, functionally defined as high commissions (or de facto embassies). Nevertheless, in matters other than city planning or
architecture, London was truly an imperial metropolis: in its docks and constant inflow of people from Asia and Africa, in its dark-skinned visitors from overseas, in the ornamentation and lifestyle displayed by colonial officials on their return home, or in the exotic subjects of music-hall merriment. The imperial nexus had its maximum impact away from the limelight.
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London did not need to lay the symbols on thick.

7 Internal Spaces and Undergrounds

Walls

The premodern city was a walled space protected by defensive installations. Even when walls no longer fulfilled a military purpose, they continued to operate as customs boundaries. When they lost that function too, they served as symbolic markers of space. Whole empires expressed their superiority over the “barbarians” around them by the sheer force of their technological, organizational, and financial capacity to build walls. Barbarians might destroy walls—they could not put them up. Walls and gates separate city from country, compression from dispersion. The “typical” city in Europe, Asia, and Africa was walled, but not every single one was. Damascus and Aleppo had walls; Cairo, though crisscrossed by inner walls between districts, was never protected by a closed outer ring of fortifications. For military reasons the French removed many of those inner walls when they briefly occupied the city in 1798–1801. They were promptly replaced when the French left, but after the 1820s were guarded by policemen instead of the older private militia.
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In the New World city walls were a rare sight—visible in Quebec or Montreal, for example. Australian and US cities never had them. On the other hand, since the 1980s Americans have enjoyed putting up new walls: the “gating” of prosperous apartment complexes and city districts, combined with protective walls, tall fences, and watchtowers, is still a growing trend. This colonial practice spreads whenever income differences and socially segregated housing reach a certain threshold. It has become common even in the big cities of (still officially socialist) China.

In 1800 the average European city still took it for granted that it should have outer walls. People did not always live in the area enclosed by them: many Russian cities were wide and sprawling. Sometimes suburbs would spill out and overrun the masonry, but the actual structures remained intact. Their eventual disappearance was not a linear process and should not be taken as a measure of modernity. In a place like Hamburg, certainly modern in many respects, the city gates were closed at night until the end of the 1860s, and in Rabat in 1912, not long before it became the capital of French Morocco, every sundown witnessed the locking of the gates and the handing over of the keys to the governor.
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The “defortification” of cities was not just a question of removing walls, filling in ditches, and developing bare slopes. Such changes always had a colossal
impact on the real estate market. Different interests often stood sharply opposed to one another. The municipal authorities had to weigh not only the costs and benefits of demolition work but also of the development of newly released land. Often its incorporation became inevitable as the physical city limits fell away, and that, too, was associated with numerous conflicts.
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Defortification usually began in the big cities and later spread to small and medium-sized ones. In Bordeaux the city walls succumbed as early as the mid-eighteenth century to an extensive modernization program that replaced them with squares and avenues. Nîmes likewise converted its walls into promenades.
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But not all French cities followed so quickly; Grenoble left its walls intact until 1832, and even then they were initially not demolished but widened.
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In Germany a number of large cities had removed their walls by 1800: Berlin, Hanover, Munich, Mannheim, Düsseldorf. During the Napoleonic Wars, many cities were compelled to pull down their fortifications: for example, Ulm, Frankfurt am Main, and Breslau (today Wrocław). If the land was converted into green spaces or promenades, the former perimeter of the walls remained recognizable in the cityscape. In the decades following the Congress of Vienna, the general stagnation of society in Germany was reflected in a slower pace of defortification compared to other parts of Europe. The last city walls vanished in the second half of the century, by 1881 in Cologne and 1895 in Danzig (today Gdańsk). None of Europe's major cities clung to its city walls more firmly than Prague; it had reinvented itself only in the 1830s as a Romantic-medieval-magical city, in opposition to the resolute modernism of Budapest.
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In Britain, by midcentury there were no more city walls to cater to the aesthetic nostalgia of others; in the Netherlands they were all gradually removed between 1795 and 1840.
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It took rather longer where conservative patricians ran things and indulged in a dream of the enclosed city—until 1859 in the case of Basel, whereas in Zurich and Bern the rural population and urban radicals had together ensured the walls' disappearance in the 1830s.
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In Spain the the dynamic city of Barcelona had been hemmed in until 1860, when its walls were demolished. In Italy only the port cities of Genoa and Naples gave up their walls early; most Italian cities remained until century's end “in the wall garb with which the late Middle Ages or the early modern period had fitted them.”
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When the demolition occurred in the age of intensive road building, planners recommended using the freed strips of land for prestigious rings that would unclog the city center, which is what happened in Vienna, Milan, and Florence. In 1857 Emperor Franz Joseph ordered the removal of old fortifications left in Vienna since the time of the Turkish wars, with the express aim of creating a new stage for the imperial court to display its splendor.
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Especially in smaller cities, entrance gates were sometimes left standing for decorative reasons, and now and again city walls were even rebuilt in the nineteenth century. In Paris, which still vividly recalled the Russian and German occupation of 1814/15, it was decided in 1840—when the threat of war loomed again—to construct a new defensive perimeter. Between 1841 and 1845, a city
wall thirty-six kilometers long was put in place, with ninety-four bastions and a fifteen-meter moat that even encompassed areas not yet administratively part of the capital. The remains of this long-obsolete wall were finally removed in 1920 and partly replaced with parks and sports grounds.
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In India the British scored an architectural “own goal”: an earthquake in 1720 had severely damaged the Delhi city walls, and so between 1804 and 1811 the British rebuilt them so thoroughly that it would take four months and a great deal of effort to capture the city in the Rebellion of 1857/58. In response to those events, they then tore down fortifications wherever they still existed. In Delhi, where it would have been too expensive to blow up seven kilometers of thick masonry, the “walled city” remained in place with its perforated bastions, but the gates were no longer shut.
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After the land and sea walls gradually came down in Istanbul, the walls of Beijing endured into the new century as the last monuments of bygone days, a kind of urban mirror image to the Great Wall a few dozen kilometers north of the capital. During the Boxer Rebellion, photographs made the huge city walls from the Qing period familiar all over the world. They seemed to symbolize the medieval character of the Chinese empire, especially as they followed classical Chinese models and, unlike the bastions of Istanbul, showed no influence of European fortress architecture. The assault on Beijing by the armed forces of eight powers, which began in early August 1900, resembled the medieval storming of a fortified city, the main initial targets being the gates in the east. After breaching the levees, the attackers placed ladders against the walls and engaged in hand-to-hand fighting on the top. For the last time the Chinese double perimeter served its purpose, as the space between the outer and inner walls became a death trap especially for the Russian soldiers. The Chinese capital was the largest walled area in the world, holding within it the imperial palace, the so-called Forbidden City, itself surrounded by the walls of the Imperial City, which also contained lakes, parks, and official and business institutions. The two evenmore-extensive outer walls around the northern city (dubbed “Tatar City” by nineteenth-century Europeans) and the southern city (or “Chinese City”), with their thirteen well-guarded monumental gates, mostly dated from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and had been enlarged in the mid-eighteenth century. Following their victory against the boxers, the eight powers spared the empire further humiliation and expense by not insisting that the walls be pulled down. Only in 1915 was a short stretch removed near one of the city gates to ease the flow of traffic.
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All Chinese cities were girded by walls—the
cheng
character may be translated as either “wall” or “city”—and followed approximately, though not schematically, the same cosmologically derived pattern. Local considerations also played a part in planning decisions. The walls of Shanghai were built in the 1550s, when pirate attacks all along the coast made life insecure for the population of the city, but a few decades later the danger receded and the defensive perimeter no longer served a purpose. By the mid-nineteenth century the fortifications,
mostly built of clay and unfired brick, were in an advanced state of dilapidation, with the ditches and watercourses clogged up inside the city. In the late 1850s China's aspiring southern metropolis began to develop a new image for itself; the crumbling walls survived in unsalutary neglect.

In the early twentieth century, the fate of these walls became the object of a heated dispute between modernizing “demolition men” and their traditionalist opponents. Bustling suburbs with narrow winding streets had sprung up outside the walls, and alongside this “southern city,” as foreigners called it, a “northern city” had come into being within the space of a few years. After the end of the Opium War, Shanghai had been opened to foreigners by treaty, and in subsequent years the British and French had brought large areas of the city under their control. A European-style city had then taken shape, with a grid system of streets and squares, a park, a racecourse, and a riverside boulevard where major European corporations gradually opened their Chinese headquarters.
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As foreigners in Shanghai built themselves a kind of counter-city (they would later do the same in Tianjin and Saigon), the Ming-era walls reversed their function, serving not to repel attackers but to shut out an old “walled city” that symbolized in foreign eyes the filth and decay of native China. In the crown colony of Hong Kong too, the little “walled city” remained an enclave where British police and officials did not care to meddle—almost up to the end of the colonial period. British maps of Shanghai in the late-nineteenth century often left blank the area inside the city walls. Foreigners did not surround themselves in Shanghai with physical walls of their own making, but elsewhere they did retreat behind protective installations. The diplomatic quarter in Beijing had a wall around it, and this was further strengthened after the Boxer Rebellion. In Canton, in the far South, foreigners resided on an artificial island in the Pearl River.

The Railroad Invasion

If anything made city walls obsolete it was the railroad (they can coexist more easily with the automobile).
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No other infrastructural innovation has ever cut so deeply into the social organism of the city; it brought about “the first great laceration of the traditional urban fabric.”
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One thinks primarily of new links: the first intercity line in Britain opened in 1838 between London and Birmingham; the first in India in 1853 between Bombay and the small town of Thana. Proximity to a river or the sea was no longer decisive for the development of a locality. Cities became enmeshed in national and later in cross-border networks. This happened in Europe and the East Coast of North America within the space of two or three decades, mostly in the 1850s and 1860s. More interesting than the chronology of individual lines, however, is the threshold beyond which it becomes possible to speak of a railroad
system
. This is not only a question of the number and distribution of lines in a network; there must also be a certain mastery of equipment and organization, a basic level of safety, regularity, profitability, and passenger comfort. France and the non-Habsburg German lands
achieved such a degree of systematic cohesion in the 1850s; the New England states had done so some years earlier. By 1880 Europe all the way to the Urals, excluding only the Balkans and northern Scandinavia, was covered with a railroad network that met the requirements of a system.
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By 1910 the same was true of India, Japan, North China, and Argentina.