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Title: The Evolution of Cities Author: Elisée Reclus Date: 1895 Language: en Topics: cities, municipalism Source: http://www.bastardarchive.org/books/Reclus-evolution_of_cities-read.pdf
To look at our enormous cities, expanding day by day and almost hour by
hour, engulfing year by year fresh colonies of immigrants, and running
out their suckers, like giant octopuses, into the surrounding country,
one feels a sort of shudder come over one, as if in presence of a
symptom of some strange social malady. One could almost take up one’s
parable against these prodigious agglomerations of humanity and prophesy
against them as Isaiah prophesied against Tyre, «full of wisdom and
perfect in beauty», or against Babylon, «the son of the morning». Yet it
is easy to show that this monster growth of the city, the complex
outcome of a multiplicity of causes, is not altogether a morbid growth.
If, on the one hand, it constitutes , in some of it is incidents, a
formidable fact for the moralist, it is, on the other hand, in its
normal development, a sign of healthy and regular evolution. Where the
cities increase, humanity is progressing; where they diminish,
civilisation itself is in danger. It is therefore important to
distinguish clearly the causes which have determined the origin and
growth of cities, those which lead to their decay and disappearances,
and those, again, which are now transforming them little by little, in
the process of wedding them, so to speak, to the surrounding country.
Even in the earliest time, when the primitive tribes of men were still
wandering in woods and savannahs, nascent society was endeavouring to
produce the germs of the future town; already the shoots that were
destined to expand into such mighty branches were beginning to show
themselves around the outline of the stem. Is is not among our civilised
populations, but in the full heyday of primitive barbarism that we must
watch the creative forces at work on the production of those centres of
human life which were to be the precursors of the town and the
metropolis.
To begin with, man is sociable. Nowhere do we find a people whose ideal
of life is complete isolation. The craving for perfect solitude is an
aberration possible only in an advance stage of civilisation, to fakirs
and anchorets distraught by religious delirium or broken by the sorrows
of life; and even then they are still dependent on the society around
them, which brings them day by day, in exchange for their prayers or
benedictions, their daily bread. If they were really rapt in a perfect
ecstasy, they would exhale their spirits on the spot; or if they were
desperate indeed, they would slink away to die like the wounded animal
that hides itself in the black shadows on the forest.
But the sane man of savage society —hunter, fisher, or shepherd— loves
to find himself among his companions. His need may oblige him often to
keep solitary watch for the game, to follow the shoal alone in a narrow
skiff, beaten by the waves, to wander far from the encampment in search
of fresh pastures for his flocks; but as soon as he can rejoin his
friends with a fair supply of provisions he hies back to the common
camp, the nucleus of the city that is to be.
Except in countries where the population is extremely sparse and
scattered over immense distances, it is usual for several tribes to have
a common trysting-place, generally at some chosen spot easily accessible
by natural roadways —rivers, defiles, or mountain passes. Here they have
their feasts, their palavers, their exchange of the goods which some
lack and others have to spare. The Redskins, who in the last century
still overran the forest tracts and prairies of the Mississippi,
preferred for their rendezvous some peninsula dominating the confluence
of the rivers —such as the triangular strip of land that separates the
Monongahela and the Allegheny; or bare hills commanding a wide and
uninterrupted view, whence they could see their companions travelling
over the distant prairie or rowing on the river or the lake —such as,
for instance, the large island of Manitou, between Lake Michigan and
Lake Huron. In countries rich in game, fish, cattle, and cultivable
land, the grouping becomes closer, other things being equal, in
proportion to the abundance of the means of living. The sites of future
towns are indicated already by the natural meeting-place common to the
various centres of production. How many modern cities have sprung up in
this way in places which have been a resort from all antiquity!
The traffic in commodities carried on at these trysting-places becomes
an additional incentive, over and above the instinctive social need, to
the formation of fresh nuclei among the primitive populations; and
further, some nascent industry generally accompanies these beginnings of
trade. A bed of flint for cutting and polishing weapons and other
implements, a layer of pottery clay or pipe clay for vessels of
calumets, a vein of metal which might be cast or hammered into trinkets,
a heap of beautiful shells suitable for ornaments or money —all these
are attractions which draw men together; and if at the same time this
places are favourable situated as centres of food-supply, the combine
all the requirements necessary for the formation of a town.
But man is not guide only by his interest in the conduct of his life.
The fear of the unknown, the terror of mystery, tends also to fix a
centre of population in the neighbourhood of places regarded with
superstitious dread. The terror itself attracts. If vapours are seen
ascending from fissures in the soil, as if from the furnace where the
gods are forging their thunderbolts; if strange echoes are heard
reverberating among the mountains like voices of mocking genii; if some
block of iron falls from heaven, or some mysterious q akes human form
and stalks the air no sooner does such a phenomenon mark out some
special spot, than religion consecrates it, temples rise above it, the
faithful gather round, and we have the beginnings of a Mecca or a
Jerusalem.
Human hatred, even, has had its share in the founding of cities; even in
our own day it founds them still. It was one of the constant cares of
ancestors to guard themselves from hostile incursions. There are vast
regions in Asia and Africa where every village is surrounded by its
breastwork and palisades; and even in our own Southern Europe every
group of dwellings situated in the vicinity of the sea has its walls,
its watch-tower, and its keep or fortified church, and on the least
alarm the country-folk take shelter within its ramparts. All the
advantages of the ground were utilised to make the place of habitation a
place also of refuge. An islet afforded an admirable site for a maritime
or lacustrine city, which might at once overlook its enemies, and
receive its friends in the port cut off by its cluster of cabins from
the open sea. Steep rocks, with perpendicular sides, from which blocks
of stone could be rolled down upon the assailant, formed a sort of
natural fortress which was much appreciated. Thus the Zuñi, the Moqui,
and other cliff-dwellers poised themselves on their lofty terraces, and
dominated space like eagles.
Primitive man, then, looked out the site; civilised man founded and
built the city. At the earliest beginnings of written history, among the
Chaldaeans and the Egyptians, on the borders of the Euphrates and the
Nile, the city had long existed, and it appears by that time to have
numbered its inhabitants by tens and hundreds of thousands. The
cultivation of these river-valleys required an immense amount of
organised labour, the draining of swamps, the deflecting of river-beds,
the construction of embankments, the digging of canals for irrigation;
and the completion of these works necessitated the building of cities in
the immediate neighbourhood of the stream, on an artificial platform of
beaten earth raised well above the level of inundation. It is true that
in these far-distant times, sovereigns who had that lives of innumerable
slaves at their disposal had already begun to choose the sites of their
palaces at their own caprice; but personal as their power was, they
could but carry on the normal movement initiated by the populations
themselves. It was the country folk, after all, who gave birth to the
cities which in later times have so often turned against their forgotten
creators.
Never was the normal and spontaneous birth of cities more strikingly
illustrated than in the Greek era, when Athens, Megara, Sicyon sprang up
at the foot of their hills like flowers in the shade of the olives
trees. The whole country —the fatherland of the citizen— was contained
within a narrow space. From the heights of its acropolis he could follow
with his eye the limits of the collective domain, now along the line of
the sea-shore, traced by the white selvage of the waves, then across the
distant blue of wooden hill, and past ravines and gorges to the crests
of the shining rocks. The son of the soil could name every brooklet,
every clump of trees, every little house in sight. He knew every family
that sheltered under those thatched roof, every spot made memorable by
the exploits of his national heroes, or by the fallen thunderbolts of
his gods. The peasant, on their part, regarded the city as peculiarly
their own. They knew the beaten paths that had grown to be its streets,
the broad roads and squares that still bore the names of the trees that
used to grow there; they could remember playing round the spring which
now mirrored the statues of the nymphus. High on the summit of the
protecting hill rose the temple of the sculptured deity whom they
invoked in hours of public danger, and behind its ramparts they all took
refuge when the enemy was in possession of the open country. Nowhere did
any other soil beget a patriotism of such intensity, a life of each so
bound up with the prosperity of all. The political organism was as
simple, as sharply defined, as one and indivisible, as that of the
individual himself.
Far more complex to begin with was the commercial city of the Middle
Ages, which lived by its industries or its foreign trade, and which was
often surrounded only by a little belt of gardens. It saw around it in
disturbing proximity the fortresses of its feudal friends or
adversaries, clasping the wretched hovels of the villagers between their
feet, like eagles planting their talons in their prey. In this medieval
society the antagonism between town and country sprang up as the result
of foreign conquest; reduced to mere serfdom under the baron, the
labourer —a fixture of the soil, in the insulting language of the law—
was flung like a weapons against the towns, by no will of his own;
whether as workman or as armed retainer, he was forced into opposition
against the borough with its rising industrial class.
Of all European countries, Sicily is the one in which the pristine
harmony between town and country has most nearly survived. The open
country is uninhabited except by day, during the hours of field-labour.
There are no villages. In the evening labourers and herdsmen return to
the city with their flocks; peasants in the daytime, they becomes
citizens at night. There is no sweeter or more touching sight than that
of the processions of toilers returning to the towns at the moment when
the sun sinks behind the mountains, casting up the vast shadow of the
earth against the eastern horizon. The unequal groups follow each other
at intervals up the ascending road —for, with the view to security, the
towns are almost always perched on the summit of some cliff, where their
white walls can be seen for ten leagues round. Families and friend join
each other for the climb, and the children and the dogs run with joyous
cries from group to group. The cattle pause from time to time to crop a
bit of choice herbage by the roadside. The young girls sit astride on
the beast, while the lads help them over the difficult places, and sing
and laugh and sometimes whisper softly with them.
But it is not only in Sicily —the Sicily of Theocritus— that one meets
these gracious evening groups. Round the whole on the Mediterranean
coast, Asia Minor to Andalusia, the antique customs are partially
retained, or at least have left their traces. All the little fortified
towns that line the shores of Italy and Provence belong to the same type
of miniature republic, the nightly resort of all the peasants of the
agricultural outskirts.
If the earth were perfectly uniform in the shape of its relief and the
qualities of its soil, the towns would occupy, so to speak, and almost
geometrical position. Mutual attraction, the social instinct, the
convenience of trade, would have caused them to spring up at pretty
nearly equal distances. Given a flat plain without natural obstacles,
without rivers or favourably situated ports, and with no political
divisions carving the territory into distinct States, the chief city
would have been planted full in the centre of the country; the large
towns would have been distributed at equal distances round it,
rhythmically spaced out among themselves, and each possessing its
planetary system of smaller towns, the normal distance being the
distance of a day’s march —for, in the beginning, the step of man as the
natural measure between place and place, and the number of miles that
can be covered by and average walker between dawn and dusk was, under
ordinary conditions, the regular stage between one town and the next.
The domestication of animals, and, later, the invention of the wheel,
modified these primitive measurements; the stride of the horse, and then
the turn of the axle-tree, became the unit of calculation in reckoning
the distance between the urban inhabited countries —in China, in the
neighbourhood of the Ganges, in the plains of the Po, in Central Russia
and even in France itself— one may discern beneath the apparent disorder
a real order of distribution, which was evidently regulated long ago by
the step on the traveller.
A little pamphlet in 1850, or thereabouts, by Gobert, an ingenious man
and an inventor, living as a refugee in London, drew attention to the
astonishing regularity of the distribution of the large towns in France
before mining and other industrial operations came in to upset the
natural balance of the population. Thus Paris is surrounded, towards the
frontiers of the country, by a ring of great but subordinate cities
—Lille, Boreaux, Lyons. The distance from Paris to the Mediterranean
being about double the ordinary radius, another great city had to arise
at the extremity of this line, and Marseilles, the old Phoenician and
Greek colony, developed itself splendidly. Between Paris and these
secondary centres arose, at fairly equal distances, a number of smaller,
but still considerable cities, separates from each other by a double
distance, say, of about eighty miles —Orleans, Tours, Poitiers,
AngoulĂŞme. Finally, halfway between these tertiary centres, in a
position suggestive of the average distance, there grew up the modest
towns of Etampes, Amboise, ChatĂŞllerault, Ruffec, Libourne. Thus the
traveller, in his journey through France, would find, as it were,
alternately a halting-place and a resting-place, the first adequate for
the foot-passenger and the second convenient for the horseman and the
coach. On almost all the high roads the rhythm of cities follows the
same plan —a sort of natural cadence regulating the progress of men,
horses, and carriages.
The irregularities of this network of stations are all explicable by the
features of the country, its ups and downs, the flow of its rivers, the
thousand points of geographical variation. The nature of the soil, in
the first place, influences men in their spontaneous choice of a site
for their dwellings. Where the blade cannot grow the town cannot grow
either. It turns away from the sterile heath, from the hard gravels and
the heavy clays, and expands first in such of the more fertile districts
as are easy of cultivation —for the soft alluvium of the marshes,
fertile enough in its way, is not always easily accessible, and cannot
be brought under culture without an organisation of labour which implies
a very advanced stage of progress.
Again, the unevenness of the land, as well as the niggardliness of the
soil, tends to repel population, and prevents, or at least retards, the
growth of cities. The precipices, the glaciers, the snows, the bitter
winds, thrust men out, so to speak, from the rugged mountain valleys;
and the natural tendency of the towns is to cluster immediately outside
the forbidden region, on the first favourable spot that presents itself
at the entrance of the valleys. Every torrent has its riverside town in
the lowland, just where its bed suddenly widens and it breaks into a
multitude of branches among the gravels. In the same way every double,
triple, or quadruple confluent of the valley has its important town, a
town so much the more considerable, other things being equal, as the
branches of the delta carry a greater abundance of water. Take, for
instance, from this point of view the geography of the Pyrenees and of
the Alps. Could any situation be more naturally indicated than that of
Zaragoza, placed on the mid course of the Ebro, at the crossing of the
double of the Gallego and the Huerva? The city of Toulouse, again, the
metropolis of Southern France, stands on a spot which a child might have
pointed out beforehand as a natural site, just where the river becomes
navigable below the confluence of Upper Garonne, the Ariège and the Ers.
At the opposite corners of Switzerland, Basle and Geneva stand at the
great cross-roads followed by the ancient migrations of peoples; and on
the southern slope of the Alps every valley without exception has its
warden town at its gates. Great cities like Milan and so many others
mark the chief points of convergence; and the whole upper valley of the
Po, forming three-quarters of an immense circle, has for its natural
centre the city of Turin.
But the rivers must not be regarded as simply the median artery of the
valleys; they are essentially movement and life. Now life appeals to
life; and man with his ever-wandering spirit, continually impelled
towards the distant horizon, loves to linger beside the flowing stream
which bears at once his vessels and his thoughts. Nevertheless, he will
not settle indifferently on either side the stream, making no
distinction between the outer and the inner curve, the rapid and the
lazy current. He tries hither and thither before he finds the site that
pleases him. He chooses by preference the points of convergence or
ramification, where he can take advantage of the three or four navigable
ways that offer themselves at starting, instead of two directions only,
up stream and down stream. Or he plants himself at the necessary point
of stoppage —rapids, waterfalls, rocky defiles, where vessels come to
anchor and the merchandise is transhipped; or where the river narrows
and it becomes easy to cross from side to side. Finally, in each river
basin the vital point is found to be the head of the estuary, where the
rising tide checks and bears up the downward current, and where the
boats borne down by the fresh water meet the ocean vessels coming in
with the tide. This place of meeting of the water, in the hydrographic
system, may be likened to the position held by the stock of a tree
between the system of serial vegetation above and that of the
deep-spreading roots below.
The deviations of the coast-line also affect the distribution of towns.
Straight sandy shore, almost unbroken, inaccessible to large vessels
except on the rare days of dead calm, are avoided by the inhabitants of
the interior as well as by the seafaring man. Thus, the 136 miles of
coast which run in a straight line from the mouth of the Gironde to that
of the Adour have no town at all except Arcachon, which is simply a
small watering-place, set well back from the sea behind the dunes of the
Cap Ferré. In the same way, the formidable series of littoral barriers
that flanks the Carolinas along their Atlantic shore gives access, for
the whole distance between Norfolk and Wilmington, only to a few petty
towns carrying on with difficulty a dangerous traffic. In other
sea-coast regions, islets and islets, rocks, promontories, peninsulas
innumerable, the thousand jags and snippings of the cliffs, equally
prevent the formation of towns in spite of all the advantages of deep
and sheltered waters. The violence of a too tempestuous coast forbids
the settlement of more than very small groups of persons. The most
favourable situations are those which afford a temperate climate and a
coast accessible both by land and see, alike to ships and wheeled
vehicles.
All the other features of the soil, physical, geographical, climatic,
contribute in the same way to the birth and growth of cities. Every
advantage augments their power of attraction; every disadvantage
detracts from it. Given the same environment and the same stage of
historical evolution, the size of the cites is measured exactly by the
sum of their natural privileges. An African city and a European city,
existing under similar natural condition, will be very different from
one another, because their historical environment is so totally
different; but there will, nevertheless, be a certain parallelism in
their destinies. By a phenomenon analogous to that of the disturbance of
planets, two neighbouring urban centres exercise a mutual influence on
each other, and either promote each other’s development by supplying
complementary advantages —as in the case of Manchester, the
manufacturing town, and Liverpool, the commercial town— or injure each
other by competition where their advantages are of the same kind. Thus
the town of Libourne, which stands of the Dordogne, only a little
distance from Bordeaux, but just on the other side of the neck of land
that separates the Dordogne from the Garonne, might have rendered the
same services to trade and navigation that Bordeaux actually renders;
but the neighbourhood of Bordeaux has been her ruin; she has been eaten
up, so to speak, by her rival, has almost completely lost her maritime
importance, and is little else but a halting-place for travellers.
There is another remarkable fact which must be taken into account —the
way in which the geographic force, like that of heat or electricity, can
be transported to a distance, can act at a point remote from its centre,
and may even give birth, so to speak, to a secondary city more
favourably placed that the first. We may instance the port of
Alexandria, which, in spite of its distance from the Nile, is
nevertheless the emporium of the whole Nile basin, in the same way as
Venice in the port of the Paduan plain, and Marseilles that of the
valley of the Rhone.
Next to the advantages of climate and soil come the subterranean riches
which sometimes exert a decisive influence on the position of towns. A
town rises suddenly on an obviously unfavourable site, where the ground
is nevertheless rich in quarrying stone, in pottery clay or marbles, in
chemical substances, in metals, in combustible minerals. Thus Potosi,
Cerro do Pasco, Virginia City, have sprung up in regions where, but for
the presence of veins of silver, no city could ever have been founded.
Merthyr Tydvil, Ceuzot, Essen, Scraton, are creations of the coal
measures. All the hitherto unused natural forces are giving rise to new
cities in precisely the places which were formerly avoided, now at the
foot of the cataract, as at Ottawa, now among the high mountains, within
reach of the natural conduits of electricity, as in many Swiss valleys.
Each new acquisition of man creates a new point of vitality, just as
each new organ forms for itself new nervous centres.
In proportion as the domain of civilisation expands and these
attractions make themselves felt over a wider area, the towns, belonging
themselves to a larger organism, may add to the special advantages which
have given them birth advantages of a more general kind, which may
secure them an historical rĂ´le of the first importance. Thus Rome,
already occupying a central position in relation to the country enclosed
within the semicircle of the volcanic Latin hills, found herself also
placed in the centre of the oval formed by the Apennines; and later,
after the conquest of Italy, her territory occupied the median point of
the whole peninsula bounded by the Alps, and marked almost exactly the
halfway station between the two extremities of the Mediterranean, the
mouths of the Nile and the Straits of Gibraltar. Paris, again, so finely
situated near a triple confluence of the water, at the centre of an
almost insular river-basin, and towards the middle of a concentric
series of geological formations, each containing its special products,
has also the great advantage of standing at the convergence of two
historic road —the road from Spain by Bayonne and Bordeaux, and the road
from Italy by Lyons, Marseilles, and the Cornice; while at the same time
it embodies and individualises all the forces of France in relation to
her Western neighbours —England, the Netherlands, and Northern Germany.
A mere fishing-station at first between two narrow arms of the Seine,
the opportunities of Paris were limited to her nets, her barges, and her
fertile plain that stretches from the Mont des Martyrs to Mont
Geneviève. Next, her confluence of rivers and stream —The Seine, the
Marne, the Oureq, the Bièvre— turned her into a fair or market; and the
convergent valley of the Oise added its traffic to the rest. The
concentric formations developed around the ancient sea-bottom gradually
gave an economic importance to their natural centre, and the historic
road between the Mediterranean and the ocean made her the nucleus of its
traffic.
Of the local advantages of London, seated at he head of the maritime
navigation of the Thames, there is little need to speak; for has she not
the further privilege of being of all cities of the world the most
central —the one most readily accessible, on the whole, from all parts
of the globe?
In his interesting work on “The Geographical Position of the Capitals of
Europe,” J. G. Kohl shows how Berlin —long a mere village, without other
merit than that of affording to the natives an easy passage between the
marshes and a solid footing on an islet of the Spree— came, in the
process of the historical development on the country, to occupy, upon an
navigable waterway of lakes and canals, the halfway station between the
Oder and the Elbe, where all the great diagonal highroads of the country
naturally meet and cross, from Leipzig to Stettin, from Breslau to
Hamburg. In earlier times the Oder, where it reaches the point at which
Frankfort now stands, did not turn off sharply to the right to fall into
the Baltic, but continued its course in a north-easterly direction, and
emptied itself into the North Sea. This immense river, more than six
hundred miles long, passed the very spot now occupied by Berlin, which
stands almost in the middle of its ancient valley. The Spree, with its
pools and marshes, is but the vestige of that mighty watercourse. The
German capital, dominating, as it does, the course of both rivers,
commands also the two seas, from Memel to Embden; and it is this
position, far more than any artificial centralisation, which gives it
its power of attraction. Besides, like all the great cities of the
modern world, Berlin has multiplied her natural advantages tenfold, by
the converging railway lines which draw the commerce or her own and
other countries to her marts and warehouses.
But the development of the capital is, after all, factitious to a great
extent; the administrative favours bestowed on it, the crowd of
courtiers, functionaries, politicians, and all the interested mob that
presses round them, give it too distinctive character to admit of its
being studied as a type. It is safer reasoning from the life of cities
which owe their oscillations to purely geographical and historical
conditions. There is no more fruitful study for the historian than that
of a city whose annals, together with the aspect of the place itself,
permit him to verify on the spot the historical changes which have all
taken place in accordance with a certain rhythmic rule.
Under such conditions one sees the scene evolve before one’s eyes; the
fisher’s hut; the gardener’s hut close by; then a few farms dotting the
country-side, a mill-wheel turning in the stream; later on, a
watch-tower hanging on the hill. On the other side of the river, where
the prow of the ferry-boat has just grazed the bank, some one is
building a new hut; an inn, a little shop close to the boatman’s house,
invite the passenger and the buyer; then on its levelled terrace the
marked-place springs up, conspicuous amongst the rest. A broadening
track, beaten by the feet of men and animals, runs down from the
market-place to the river; a winding path begins to climb the hill; the
roadways of the future become distinguishable in the trodden grass of
the fields, and house take possession of the green wayside where the
cross-roads meet. The little oratory becomes a church; the open
scaffolding of the watch-tower gives place to the fortress, the barrack,
or the palace; the village grows into a town, and the town into a city.
The true way to visit one of these urban agglomerations which has lived
a long historic life, is to examine it in the order of its growth,
beginning with the site —generally consecrated by some legend— which has
served it as a cradle, and ending with its last improvements in
factories and warehouses. Every town has its individual character, its
personal life, a complexion of its own. One is gay and animated; another
keeps a pervading melancholy. Generation after generation, as it passes,
leaves behind it this inheritance of character. There are cities that
freeze you as you enter with their look on stony hostility; there are
other where you are blithe and buoyant as at the sight of a friend.
Other contrasts present themselves in the modes of growth of different
cities. Following the direction and importance of its overland commerce,
the town projects its suburbs like tentacles along the country roads; if
it stand on a river it spreads far down the bank near the places of
anchorage and embarkation. One is often struck by the marked inequality
of two riverside parts of a city which seem equally well situated to
attract the population; but here the cause must be sought in the
direction of the current. Thus the plan of Bordeaux suggests at once
that the true centre of the inhabited circle should have been on the
right bank of the river, at the place occupied by the small suburb of La
Bastide. But here the Garonne describes a mighty curve, and sweeps its
waters along the quays of the left bank; and where the life of the river
flings its force, the life of commerce is necessarily carried with it.
The population follows the deeper current, and avoids the oozy banks of
the opposite shore.
It has often been suggested that towns have a constant tendency to grow
westward. This fact —which is true in many cases— is easily explained,
so far as the countries of Western Europe and others of similar climate
are concerned, since the western side is the side directly exposed to
the purer winds. The inhabitants of these quarters have less to fear
from disease than those at the other from its passage over innumerable
chimneys, mouths of sewers, and the like, and with the breath of
thousands or millions of human beings. Besides, it must not be forgotten
that the rich, the idle, and the artist, who have leisure to take in the
full delight of the open sky, are much more apt to enjoy the beauties of
the twilight than those of the dawn; consciously or unconsciously, they
follow the movement of the sun from east to west, and love to see it
disappear at last in the resplendent clouds of evening. But there are
many exceptions to this normal growth in the direction of the sun. The
form and relief of the soil, the charm of the landscape, the direction
of the running waters, the attraction of local industries and commerce,
may solicit the advance of men towards any point of the horizon.
By the very fact of its development, the city, like any other organism,
tends to die. Subject like the rest the conditions of time, it finds
itself already old while other towns are springing up around it,
impatient to live their life in their turn. By force of habit, indeed by
the common will of its inhabitants, and by the attraction that every
such centre exerts upon the surrounding neighbourhood, it tries to live
on; but —not to speak of the mortal accidents which may happen to cities
as to men— no human group can incessantly repair its waste and renew its
youth without a heavier and heavier expenditure of effort; and sometimes
it gets tired. The city must widen its streets and its squares, rebuild
its walls, and replace its old and now useless buildings with structures
answering to the requirements of the time. While the American town
springs into being full-armed and perfectly adapted to its surroundings,
Paris —old, encumbered, dirt-encrusted— must keep up a laborious process
of reconstruction, which , in the struggle for existence, places her at
a great disadvantage in comparison with young cities like New York and
Chicago. For the selfsame reasons the huge cities of the Euphrates and
the Nile, Babylon and Nineveh, Memphis and Cairo, found themselves
successively displaced. Each of these cities —while, thanks to the
advantages of its position, it retained its historical importance— was
forced to abandon its superannuated quarters and shift its basis further
on, in order to escape from its own rubbish, or even from the pestilence
arising from its heaps to refuse. Generally speaking, the abandoned site
of a town which has moved on is found to be covered with graves.
Other causes of decay, more serious than these, because arising out of
the natural development of history, have overtaken many a once famous
city; circumstances analogous to those of its birth have rendered its
destruction inevitable. Thus the superseding of an old highroad or
crossway by some improved mode of conveyance may destroy at one blow a
town created by the necessities of transport. Alexandria ruined
Pelusium; Carthagena in the West Indies gave Puerto Bello back to the
solitude of its forest. The demands of commerce and the suppression of
piracy have changed the sites of almost all the towns built on the rocky
shores of the Mediterranean. Formerly they were perched on rugged hills
and girt with thick walls, to defend them from the seigneurs and the
corsairs; now they have come down from their fortresses and spread
themselves out along the seashore. Everywhere the citadel is exchanged
for the esplanade; the Acropolis has come down to the Piraeus.
In our societies, where political institutions have often given a
preponderating influence to the will of a single person, it has
frequently happened that the caprice of the sovereign has founded a city
in a spot where it could never have sprung up of itself. Thus planted on
an unnatural site, the new city has not been able to develop without a
tremendous waste of living force. Madrid and St. Petersburg, for
example, whose primitive huts and hamlets would never have grown into
the populous cities of to-day but for Charles the Fifth and Peter the
First, were built at an enormous cost. Yet, if they owe their creation
to despotism, it is to the associated toil of men that they owe the
advantages which have enabled them to live on as if they had had a
normal origin; and though the natural relief of the soil had never
destined them to become centres of human life, centres they are, thanks
to the convergence of artificial communications —roads, railways and
canals— and the interchange of thought. For geography is not an
immutable thing; it makes and remakes itself day by day; it is modified
every hour by the action of men.
But nowadays we hear no more of Caesars building cities for themselves;
the city-builders of to-day are the great capitalist, the speculators,
the presidents of financial syndicates. We see new towns spring up in a
few months, covering a wide surface, marvellously laid out, splendidly
furnished with all the implements of modern life; the school and the
museum, even, are not wanting. If the spot is well chosen, these new
creations are soon drawn into the general movement of the life of the
nations, and Creuzot, Crewe, Barrow-in-Furness, Denver, La Plata, take
rank among the recognised centres of population. But if the site is a
bad one, the new towns die with the special interests that gave them
birth. Chyeyenne City, ceasing to be a railway terminus, sends its
cottages forward, so to speak, by next train; and Carson City disappears
with the exhausted silver mines which alone had peopled that hideous
desert.
But if the caprice of capital sometimes attempts to found cities which
the general interest of society condemn to perish, on the other hand it
destroys many small centres of population which only ask to live. In the
outskirts of Paris itself, do we not see a great banker and landed
proprietor adding year by year another two or three hundred acres to his
domain, systematically changing cultivated land into plantations, and
destroying whole villages to replace them by keepers’ lodges built at
convenient distances?
Amongst the towns of wholly or partially artificial origin, which answer
to no real need of industrial society, must be mentioned also those
which exist for purposes of war, at any rate those which have been built
in our own day by the great centralised States. It was not so in the
days when the city was capable of containing the whole nation, when it
was absolutely necessary for purposes of defence to built ramparts
following the exterior outline of all quarters of the town, to construct
watch-towers at the angles, and to erect alongside the temple, on the
summit of the protecting hill, a citadel where the whole body of the
citizens could take refuge in case of danger; and when, if the town were
separated from its port by a strip of intervening country —as at Athens.
Megara, or Corinth— the road from the one to the other must itself be
protected by long walls. The whole pile of fortifications explained
itself by the nature of things, and took a natural and picturesque place
in the landscape. But in our days of extreme division of labour, when
the military power has become practically independent of the nation, and
no civilian dare advise or meddle in matters of strategy, most fortified
towns have a quite unnatural form, in no sort of agreement with the
undulations of the soil; they cut the landscape with an outline
offensive to the eye. Some of the old Italian engineers at least
attempted to give a symmetrical outline to their fortifications by
shaping them like an immense Cross or Star of Honour, with its rays, its
jewels, its enamels; the white walls of its bastions and redans
contrasting regularly with the calm and large placidity of the open
fields. But our modern fortresses have no ambition to be beautiful; the
thought never enters the head of the strategist; and a mere glance at
the plan of the fortifications reveals their monstrous ugliness, their
total want of harmony with their surroundings. Instead of following the
natural outlines of the country and stretching their arms freely into
the fields below, they sit all of a heap, like creatures with cropped
ears and amputated limbs. Look at he melancholy form that military
science has given to Lille, to Metz, to Strasburg! Even Paris, with all
the beauty of her buildings, the grace of her promenades, the charm of
her people, is spoil by her brutal setting in a framework of
fortifications. Released from that unpleasant oval in broken lines, the
city might have expanded in a natural and aesthetic manner, and taken
the simple and gracious form suggested by natural and life.
Another cause of ugliness in our modern towns springs from the invasion
of the great manufacturing industries. Almost every town we have is
encumbered with one or more suburbs bristling with stinking chimneys,
where immense buildings skirt the blackened streets with walls either
bare and blind, or pierced, in sickening symmetry, with innumerable
windows. The ground trembles under the groaning machinery and beneath
the weight of waggons, drays and luggage trains. How many towns there
are, especially in young America, where the air is almost unbreathable,
and where everything within sigh —the ground, the walls, the sky— seems
to sweat mud and soot! Who can recall without a horror of disgust a
mining colony like that sinuous and interminable Scranton, whose seventy
thousand inhabitants have not so much as a few acres of foul turf and
blackened foliage to clear their lungs? And that enormous Pittsburg with
its semi-circular coronet of suburbs fuming and flaming overhead, how is
it possible to imagine it under a filthier atmosphere than now, though
the inhabitants aver that it has gained both in cleanliness and light
since the introduction of natural gas into its furnaces? Other towns,
less black than these, are scarcely less hideous, from the fact than the
railway companies have taken possessions of streets, squares, and
avenues, and send their locomotives snorting and hissing along the road,
and scattering the people right and left from their course. Some of the
loveliest sites on the earth have been thus desecrated. At Buffalo, for
instance, the passenger strives in vain to follow the bank of the
wonderful Niagara across a wilderness, of rails and quagmires and slimy
canals, of gravel heaps and dunghills, and all the others impurities of
the city.
Another barbarous speculation is that which sacrifices the beauty of the
streets by letting the ground in lots, on which the contractors build
whole districts, designed beforehand by architects who have never so
much as visited the spot, far less taken the trouble to consult the
future inhabitants. They erect here a Gothic church for the
Episcopalians, there a Norman structure for the Presbyterians, and a
little further on a sort Pantheon for the Baptist; they map out their
streets in squares and lozenges, varying grotesquely the geometrical
designs of the interspaces and the style of the houses, while
religiously reserving the best corners for the grog-shops. The absurdity
of the whole heterogeneous mixture is aggravated in most of our cities
by the intervention of official art, which insists on the types of
architecture following a given pattern.
But even if the rich contractor and the official Maecenas were always
men of cultivated taste, the towns would still present a painful
contrast between luxury and squalor, between the sumptuous and insolent
splendour of some quarters, and the sordid misery of the others, where
the low and crooked walls hide courts oozing with damp, and starving
families crouched under tumble-down styes of lath or stone. Even in
towns where the authorities seek to veil all this behind a decent mask
of whitewashed enclosures, misery still stalks outside, and one knows
that death is carrying on its cruel work within. Which of our cities has
not its Whitechapel and its Mile End Road? Handsome and imposing as they
may be to the outward eye, each has its secret or apparent vices, its
fatal defect, its chronic malady which must end by killing it, unless a
free and pure circulation can be re-established throughout the whole
organism. But from this point of view the question of public buildings
involves the whole social question itself. Will the time ever come when
all men, without exception, shall breathe fresh air in abundance, enjoy
the light and sunshine, taste the coolness of the shade and the scent of
roses, and feed their children without fear than the bread will run
short in the bin? At any rate, all those of us who have not reserved
their ideal for a future life, but think a little also of the present
existence of man, must regard as intolerable any ideal of society which
does not include the deliverance of humanity from mere hunger.
For the rest, those who govern the cities are mostly governed themselves
—often against their will— by the very just idea that the town is a
collective organism, of which every separate cellule has to be kept in
perfect health. The great business of municipalities is always that
which relates to sanitation. History warns them that disease is no
respecter of persons, and that it is dangerous to leave the pestilence
to depopulate the hovels at the back door of the palace. In some places
they go so far as to demolish the infected quarters altogether, not
considering that the families they expel can only rebuilt their
habitations a little further on, and perhaps carry the poison into more
wholesome regions. But, even where these sinks of disease are left
untouched, everybody agrees as to the importance of a thorough general
sanitation —the cleansing of the streets, the opening of gardens and
grassy spaces shadowed by tall trees, the instant removal of refuse, and
the supply of pure and abundant water to every district and every house.
In matters of this kind a peaceful competition is going on among the
towns of the more advanced nations, and each is trying its particular
experiments in the way of cleanliness and comfort. The definitive
formula, indeed, has not yet been found; for the urban organism cannot
be made to carry on its provisioning, its sanguine and nervous
circulation, the repair of its forces and the expulsion of its waste, by
an automatic process. But at least, many towns have been so far improved
that life there is wholesomer on the average than that of many country
places where the inhabitants breathe day by day the reek of the
dunghill, and live in primitive ignorance of the simplest laws of
hygiene.
The consciousness of a collective urban life is shown, again, by the
artist efforts of the municipalities. Like ancient Athens, like Florence
and the other free cities of the Middle Ages, every one of our modern
towns is bent on beautifying itself; hardly the humblest village is
without its bell-tower, its column, or its sculptured fountain. Dismally
bad art it is, most of it, this work designed by qualified professors
under the supervision of a committee; and the more ignorant, the more
certain it is to be pretentious. Real art would go its committee. These
little gentlemen of the municipal councils are like the Roman General
Mummius, who was quite willing to give orders that his soldiers should
repaint every picture they injured; they mistake symmetry for beauty,
and think that identical reproductions will give their towns a Parthenon
or a St. Mark’s.
And even if they could indeed recreate such works as they require the
architects to copy, it would be none the less an outrage on nature; for
no building is complete without the atmosphere of time and place that
gave it birth. Every town has its own life, its own features, its own
form, with what veneration should the builder approach it! It is a sort
of offence against the person to take away the individuality of a town,
and overlay it with conventional buildings and contradictory monuments
out of all relation to its actual character and history. We are told
that in Edinburgh, the lovely Scottish capital, pious hands are at work
in quite another way; breaking in upon its picturesque but unclean
wynds, and transforming them gradually, house by house —leaving every
inhabitant at home as before, but in a cleaner and more beautiful home,
where the air and light come through; grouping friends with friends, and
giving them places of reunion for social intercourse and the enjoyment
of art. Little by little a whole street, retaining its original
character, only without the dirt and smells, comes out fresh and crisp,
like the flower springing clean beneath the foot without a single sod
being stirred around the mother plant.
Thus, by destruction or by restoration, the towns are for ever being
renewed where they stand; and this process will doubtless go on
accelerating under the pressure of the inhabitants themselves. As men
modify their own ideal of life, they must necessary change, in
accordance with it, that ampler corporeity which constitutes their
dwelling. The town reflects the spirit of the society which creates it.
If peace and goodwill establish themselves among men, there can be no
doubt that the disposition and aspect of the cities will respond to the
new needs which will spring out of the great reconciliation. In the
first place, the hopelessly sordid and unhealthy parts of the city will
be improved off the face of the earth, or will be represented only by
groups of houses freely planted among tress, pleasant to look at, full
of light and air. The richer quarters, now handsome to the eye, but
often both inconvenient and insanitary nevertheless, will be similarly
transformed. The hostile or exclusive character which the spirit of
individual ownership now gives to private dwellings will have
disappeared; the gardens will no longer be hidden out of sight by
inhospitable walls; the lawns and flower-beds and plantations which
surround the house will run down by shady walks to the public promenades
outside, as they do already in some English and American University
towns. The predominance of the common life over a strictly enclosed and
jealously guarded private will have attached many a private house to an
organic group of schools or phalansteries. Here also large spaces will
be thrown open to admit the air and give a better appearance to the
whole.
Obviously, the towns which are already growing so fast will grow yet
faster, or rather they will melt gradually into the distant country, and
throughout the length and breadth of the land the provinces will be
scattered with houses which, in spite of the distance, really belong to
the town. London, compact as it is in its central districts, is a
splendid example of this dispersion of the urban population among the
fields and forests for a hundred miles round, and even down to the
seaside. Hundreds of thousands of people who have their business in
town, and who, as far as their work is concerned, are active citizens,
pass their hours of repose and domestic fellowship under the shadow of
tall trees, by running brooks, or within sound of the dashing waves. The
very heart of London, the City properly so-called, is little but a great
Exchange by day, depopulated by night; the active centres of government,
of legislation, of science and art, cluster round this great focus of
energy, increasing year by year, and elbowing out the resident
population into the suburbs. It is the same, again, in Paris, where the
central nucleus, with its barracks, its tribunals, and its prisons,
presents a military and strategical rather than a residential aspect.
The normal development of the great towns, according to our modern
ideal, consists, then, in combining the advantages of town and country
life, —the air and scenery and delightful solitude of the one with the
facile communication and the subterranean service of force, light, and
water which belong to the other. What was once the most densely
inhabited part of the city is precisely the part which is now becoming
deserted, because it is becoming common property, or at least a common
centre of intermittent life. Too useful to the mass of the citizens to
be monopolised by private families, the heart of the city is the
patrimony of all. It is the same, for the same reasons, with the
subordinate nuclei of population; and the community claims, besides, the
use of the open spaces of the city for public meetings and open-air
celebrations. Every town should have its agora, where all who are
animated by a common passion can meet together. Such an agora is Hyde
Park, which, with a little packing, could hold a million persons.
For other reasons, again, the city tends to become less dense, and to
open out a little in its central regions. Many institutions originally
planted in the heart of the town are moving out into the country.
Schools, colleges, hospitals, almshouses, convents, are out of place in
a city. Only the district schools should be retained within its limits,
and these surrounded with gardens; and only such hospitals as are
absolutely indispensable for accidents or sudden illness. The
transferred establishments are still dependencies of the town, detached
from it in point of place, but continuing their vital relation with it;
they are so many fragments of the city planted out in the country. The
only obstacle to the indefinite extension of the towns and their perfect
fusion with the country comes not so much from the distance as the
costliness of communication, for, in less time that it takes to walk
from one end of the town to the other, one may reach by rail the
solitude of the fields or the sea at a distance of sixty or seventy
miles. But this limitation to the free use of the railroad by the poor
is gradually giving way before the advance of social evolution.
Thus this type of the ancient town, sharply outlined by walls and
fosses, tends more and more to disappear. While the countryman becomes
more and more a citizen in thought and mode of life, the citizen turns
his face to the country and aspires to be a countryman. By virtue of its
very growth, the modern town loses its isolated existence and tends to
merge itself with other towns, and to recover the original relation that
united the rising market-place with the country from which it sprang.
Man must have the double advantage of access to the delights of the
town, with its solidarity of thought and interest, its opportunities of
study and the pursuit of art, and, with this, the liberty that lives in
the liberty of nature and finds scope in the range of her ample horizon.