Seduction of Place (eBook)

How We Got There two huge, successive waves of dispossessed rural populations rose over the cities of the world, flooding the urban fabric and swelling it to breaking point. It was the first of these waves, at the end of the eighteenth and in the early nineteenth centuries, that shaped the urban fabric that we know. The recent and much bigger one that billowed up at the half-century has not subsided: we are still floundering in it and cannot yet read its modalities or estimate its impact accurately. It has transformed Cairo and Moscow, Bombay, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, So Paulo-but most of all Mexico. Any account of the response to those two waves must take into account the forces that brought about the first one. I am writing this not because I am a revivalist or historicist, but because the past is all we know. What the shrewd Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter1 wrote fifty years ago or more about economic life is also true of the urban fabric: . . . only detailed historic knowledge can definitively answer most of the questions of individual causation and mechanism. . . . Contemporaneous facts or even historic facts covering the last quarter or half a century are perfectly inadequate. For no phenomenon of an essentially historic nature can be expected to reveal itself unless it is studied over a long interval. The first of these two waves hit British cities first and then French ones, spreading to the rest of Europe-and then the world beyond. What resulted in England and France was very different, though there were many parallels. The French monarchy had for two centuries (but especially in the reign of Louis XIV) managed to concentrate the landed nobility around the court by a system of favor and intrigue so that Paris became a center of political and economic power as well as of culture. The newly urbanized nobility were seen-notably by Voltaire-as the civilizing leaven of the capital. Other brilliant and influential writers such as Rousseau hated the city, and Paris in particular. As a young man, Rousseau had arrived there from Turin, the small, neat handsome capital of the dukes of Savoy, and the dirt and squalor he encountered in the Paris suburbs set him against the big city for good. He only went there, if one is to believe his Confessions, to earn enough money to allow himself long absences.2 Voltaire, despite the Parisian triumphs of his last years, did not think of it as his preferred city either: he found the values of the old and urbane aristocracy too constricting. As Rousseau admired Turin, so Voltaire admired London as the model of a truly meritocratic city. And he was right, since even the pre-Hanoverian English crown never succeeded in establishing a powerful centralizing court, though the Stuart kings tried, and one of them, Charles I, lost his head in the process. Their failure was clearly represented by the ramshackle modesty of the palaces at Whitehall and Saint James's, which were never aggrandized, despite plans to do so and reconstruction after fires. This was the great age of European palace building when very modest sovereigns indeed, like the prince-bishops of W?rzburg, built themselves residences the British Empire would never equal-not even in the nineteenth century. British magnates, on the other hand, did build themselves palaces grander than the king's, as the duke of Marlborough did at Blenheim, the earl of Carlisle at Castle Howard, or the earl of Leicester at Holkham. Meanwhile, Charles II's attempt in the 1670s to build his own Versailles on borrowed French money, an out-of-London palace at Winchester, was frustrated by Parliament. The Whitehall court of the...