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作者

Andrew Lees

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JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY,Vol.48,Issue1,P.

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英文

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摘要

Berlin, Europe, industrialization, London, Paris, planning, policing, sanitation, transportation, ViennaHaving established herself as an expert on the urban history of France in the mid-twentieth century in books on Toulouse and Paris,1 Rosemary Wakeman has recently produced a major thematic overview of the urban scene in Europe as a whole during the past two centuries. In so doing, she has extended her vision to encompass four dozen additional European cities, located in more than two dozen countries. Her geographic reach thus extends from Moscow to Lisbon and from Helsinki to Athens. Her decision not to focus in the book under review here on the very large capital cities in western and Central Europe (e.g., London, Paris, Vienna, and Berlin) but instead to include eastern Europe goes hand-in-hand with her emphasis on difference and variety. “There is,” she writes, “no real homogenous view on urban modernity in this volume.” She asks rhetorically, “Is there a European city, and if so what are its characteristics? . . . What makes a city ‘European?’” She answers these questions in part by stating, “Clearly there is no single European city type: there are many European cities and a plurality of urban modernities” (p. 2). Emphasis on variety is further enhanced by inclusion of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. During these years, city dwellers had to contend with a whole host of problems and challenges, many of which were quite different from those experienced by their nineteenth-century forebears. An opening chapter on “The Grand Tour of Urban Europe (1815)” (pp. 9-28) surveys the urban scene in the early nineteenth century. London, which had a population of nearly a million, followed by Paris, with a population of about 600,000, and Vienna, with 230,000, led the pack. But there was a substantial number of smaller albeit important towns too, in Southern and Eastern as well as Western Europe. For example, five cities in Italy had populations of 10,000 or more, while Warsaw had a population of 64,000, followed by Budapest, with a population of 54,000. Most of these places had been in existence for centuries, and many of them were marked by handsome churches and town halls and by market places and walls that dated back to the Middle Ages. These settlements were not, however, sleepy backwaters. Port cities in particular embodied a dynamism that was intimately linked to their prominence in the grain trade. Not only London, Amsterdam, and Hamburg but also Danzig, Riga, and scores of additional places that were situated on rivers or on coasts made manifest a high degree of urban energy in the area of trade and commerce that spilled over into other sectors of urban life. Another chapter takes up the theme of industrialization, beginning with the production of textiles in and around Manchester. It continues through developments in Scotland and Barcelona, in numerous cities in Germany (especially in the Ruhr Valley and Upper Silesia), in Polish Lodz, another textile town, and in Bucharest. By the end of the century, it had become not only the capital of a newly sovereign Romania but also the center of the largest oil-producing region in Europe and the fourth largest in the world. Wakeman draws on the likes of Friedrich Engels, author of The Condition of the Working Class in England, in order to write scathing denunciations of deleterious living conditions. She quotes the musician Artur Rubinstein, one of the most famous citizens of Lodz, as follows with regard to his home town: Lodz was the most unhealthy and unhygienic city imaginable . . . The air was so infected with gas from the chemical plants, and the black smoke from the chimneys which hid the sky so thick, that our daily walks were, from a health standpoint, nothing but a ritual. (p. 46) From the early nineteenth century up through the early twentieth century, cities were sites of another sort of disruption in addition to industrialization: namely, class conflict and political turmoil. These phenomena do not receive attention in a separate chapter, but they are referred to in several places. Wakeman mentions a number of urban uprisings that occurred across the Mediterranean in the 1820s, street fighting that took place in Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and elsewhere in 1848, tumultuous strikes that broke out in many cities early in the twentieth century, and the revolution of 1905 in the Russian Empire, which raged in St. Petersburg, Riga, and elsewhere (pp. 53-54, 137-38, 151-54). Depending on one’s position in the social hierarchy, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cities could be dangerous places in which to live, marked and marred by conflict and upheaval as well as other sorts of unpleasantness. On balance, Wakeman’s book is far from being critical of urban life. Indeed, in many ways, she celebrates it. In her discussion of conditions in early nineteenth-century towns in England such as Rochdale, Wakeman points to a variety of amenities in the area of leisure time activity—from walking in parks to meeting with friends in pubs—that helped to off-set harsh conditions in work places and over-crowded dwellings (p. 34). Such cities as Budapest, Vienna, Berlin, and Paris were populated by numerous music halls, cabarets, and cafés. Above the realm of popular culture, a great profusion of middle-class associations stimulated a flowering of elite urban culture, which took shape in theaters, concert halls, and museums. Such places became sites of a bourgeois sociability that was increasingly prominent in European cities. Through it, members of the middle classes could assert and legitimate their leading roles in urban society. Wakeman points not only to the spread of entertainment but also more generally to the ascendance of a culture of consumption. Already in the 1840s, the French writer Flora Tristan observed rapturously, “London is superb! . . . Its shops are resplendent with every masterpiece that human ingenuity can devise” (p. 86). Later, consumer culture was embodied in the department store (depicted by French author Émile Zola in his 1883 novel The Ladies of Paradise). In all of these ways, according to Wakeman, living in cities entailed amusement and enjoyment. To a not insignificant extent, city dwellers experienced pleasure. Although a good deal in the way of urban improvement stemmed either from commercial or from philanthropic initiatives, Wakeman’s chapter on “Urban Reform and the Planned City” (pp. 107-34) emphasizes the role of public authorities in the struggle to remediate urban defects. Baron Haussmann’s efforts in Paris during the 1850s, which entailed both the construction of a network of wide, straight boulevards in place of old streets that were crooked and narrow and construction of a sewer system, stand out in this regard. Stimulated in part by the agitation by public health reformers that had arisen in England in the 1840s, Haussmann’s example inspired comparable efforts not only in Barcelona but also in Vienna, where demolition of the centuries-old city walls was an essential aspect of a program of urban reconstruction and modernization. Meanwhile, there was a plethora of city exhibitions, at which local officials as well as businessmen displayed their wares. Planned urban improvement, undertaken and spear-headed by public authorities, was an essential aspect of urban development around the turn of the century. Having written seven chapters that take the reader from 1815 into 1914, Wakeman has written five chapters on the slightly shorter period between 1914 and about 2000. The First World War had multiple impacts on European cities. Less far-reaching than the impacts of the Second World War, they were notable nonetheless. Louvain in Belgium, Rheims in northern France, and Belgrade in Serbia all experienced major damage, as did countless cities to the East. Fighting there resulted in an upsurge of refugees into Warsaw, 100,000 of whom crowded into that city, bringing about severe economic problems in the area of public health. Food shortages and spiraling prices afflicted would-be consumers, among them inhabitants of London as well as of Berlin and St. Petersburg. Rising discontent led not only to urban strikes but also to political protest and revolutions, beginning with revolutions in Russia in 1917 and continuing with comparable albeit unsuccessful efforts by communists in Germany in 1919. Wakeman’s views of cities during the interwar years are largely positive. The urban milieu, she argues, was marked by innovation and experimentation. Stimulated by the example of America, Europeans too made major breakthroughs in the production of automobiles, electricity, and films, which became increasingly essential elements of mass culture. Modern architecture as embodied in the Bauhaus in Dessau in Germany helped to inspire men and women who sought to improve urban life via municipal reform in cities such as Sheffield, Toulouse, and Vienna. Prefabricated housing, it was hoped, would help to provide dwellings that were salubrious and inexpensive. Two cities stood out in eastern Europe as recently anointed national capitals: Warsaw in Poland and Moscow in Russia. With a population of nearly 2 million inhabitants, the Polish capital was predicted by some to be the next London or Paris. It functioned as not only a major center of industry but also a center of national culture. Wakeman devotes more sustained attention to Moscow than to any other city. She shows how strikingly it became an embodiment of hopes for modernization and the belief that a new and better society was in the process of being created. “The 1917 revolution,” she writes, “was imagined as a blinding light that opened the possibility of an entirely new society. Every arena of urban life was open to transformation” (p. 211). She recognizes that in the 1930s such expectations were belied by the overcrowding that accompanied migration to the capital by men and women who sought employment in industry. On balance, however, she emphasizes the culture of confidence rather than social problems. The war that broke out in Europe in the late summer of 1939 had a much more far-reaching impact on European cities than did the armed conflict that had begun twenty-five years earlier. Adumbrated by the civil war in Spain that had led to numerous deaths in Barcelona and other cities a few years earlier as a result of bombing by Italian airmen, the Second World War had devastating effects on European cityscapes. Wakeman points to Warsaw and Leningrad as places that experienced particularly horrific destruction. London also suffered from German air attacks during the Battle of Britain. Meanwhile, Dutch Rotterdam had been nearly leveled. German cities—Cologne, Hamburg, and Dresden, for example—were also badly damaged. Countless other cities in large parts of Europe were ravaged. At the same time, numerous city dwellers were either killed or rendered homeless. Wakeman emphasizes the speed and the energy with which Europeans set about the task of rebuilding what the war had destroyed. “The reconstruction of Europe’s cities,” she writes, “was nothing short of a miracle” (p. 256). Much of this work entailed an effort to recapture the past. Traditionalism as well as innovation was evident in Warsaw. Rotterdam, in contrast, was rebuilt largely in a modernist style. Overall, she shows that reconstruction embodied multiple efforts to balance the old and the new. Discussion of the Second World War and recovery from it into the 1950s is followed by treatment of a number of developments that were related both to urban growth and to increasing economic prosperity. By the end of the twentieth century, over half of the European population lived in cities and towns, many city dwellers having migrated there from areas outside Europe in connection with the end of the overseas empires. Urban areas were becoming increasingly multicultural. Also, a vibrant cosmopolitan youth culture arose in the 1960s as an alternative to traditional culture. Up until the oil crisis of 1973, western Europe experienced nearly three decades of unprecedented economic expansion, which was a precondition for great enhancement of the “welfare state.” Prosperity was much less widespread in Eastern, socialist countries, where consumer goods were not as available as in the West. Nonetheless, as Wakeman points out, workers’ wages in all of these countries rose and families benefited from dramatic improvement of living standards. Other changes pointed away from the industrial city that had arisen in the nineteenth century and toward the rising importance of both financial and commercial functions, as practiced most notably in London, Frankfurt, and Amsterdam. Urban economies also benefited from the presence of numerous tourists who visited cities precisely because of the rich and attractive traditions they embodied. This was not simply a matter of visits to London, Paris, or Rome. Wakeman emphasizes in addition the example of Tallinn, a medieval city that was the capital of Estonia. Many other cities stood out as venues for entertainment of a more modern sort, whether in the form of concerts or in the form of athletic events. Being selected as the site for either the summer or the winter Olympic Games signified that a city had arrived as a player on the international/urban scene. Meanwhile, increased private ownership of automobiles (up in the Netherlands between 1950 and 1970 from 139,000 to 2 million!) fostered movement away from city centers and toward growing suburbs, although suburbanization was nowhere near as widespread in Europe as it was in the United States. Brian Ladd, who has made major contributions to the urban history of Germany,2 displays in his latest book a perspective that foregrounds developments in four major capitals: London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna. While emphasizing the nineteenth century, Ladd frequently reaches back in time, also citing examples that are drawn from the early modern period. He does so with a view to elucidating a heretofore largely overlooked theme in the history of European cities: namely, a transition from streets as places that fostered and contained a wide range of urban activities to streets as places that served to promote both circulation and motion from one location to another. Bringing to bear “the insights of architectural historians and urban geographers . . . on the work of social historians who have studied the street” (p. 7), Ladd also pays close attention to a wide range of contemporary witnesses, among them “police and judges; municipal and state officials; social, medical, and moral reformers; journalists and essayists; novelists and poets; painters, cartoonists, and photographers” (p. 9). Focusing on men and women who in one way or another explicitly recorded their impressions of a key segment of the changing urban scene, Ladd has produced a rich and highly readable work in the area of urban history. In an early chapter on “Wheeling and Dealing” (pp. 42-97), Ladd points to a wide range of mainly economic activities that took place out of doors. Much of what occurred involved the sale of goods by street vendors, who often moved from place to place in search of customers. As late as the 1850s, the English journalist Henry Mayhew cataloged a multitude of men and women—according to his estimate, 50,000 of them—who sold a great variety of goods. Many “hawked” a plethora of foodstuffs on display in street carts and wagons. Would-be consumers could inspect and purchase from these vendors not only fruit, vegetables, and fish, but also poultry, meat, and cheese. Then too there were those who sold pieces of literature, stationery, clothing, and other manufactured items, whether produced by them or by others. Streets served as venues for additional sorts of remunerative activity as well. Mayhew pointed to a rich array of street performers, who offered an assortment of entertainments. He mentioned in this regard showmen, artists, dancers, musicians, singers, and purveyors of games. Ladd points in addition to juggling, acrobatics, dancing, and performance of instrumental music. City streets served too as locations for men and women who were engaged in less savory occupations. Beggars, thieves, and prostitutes all plied their trades on city streets, much to the dismay of more “respectable” members of society. Tensions between the need for legitimate services provided by men and women who worked on city streets and urban drawbacks that resulted not only from deviant behavior but also from traffic congestion and noise gave rise to repeated complaints. Such grumbling led not only to intensified policing but also to the establishment of indoor market halls, the most famous of which was Les Halles, constructed in Paris in the 1850s. Elsewhere too, more and more of the buying and selling that had formerly taken place outdoors, on city streets, was migrating to enclosed areas adjacent to streets: shops with rooves, walls, and large glass windows, behind which pedestrians could see goods that were on display. In this regard, sellers of printed pictures were particularly notable. In an artfully titled chapter on “Strolling, Mingling, and Lingering” (pp. 99-139), Ladd offers fascinating observations concerning parades and promenades. Streets, he points out, had long served as venues for parades and processions. These events were often staged by municipal officials in order to welcome rulers from without or to assert their own authority in the areas where they governed. Parades also served as a means of buttressing Christianity, particularly via celebrations of the lives of saints. Many of these parades were sponsored by local guilds, each of which had its own patron saint. Increasingly, however, ceremonies that had taken place outdoors moved indoors. Ladd also discusses the importance of promenades, mainly in parks and squares, by means of which members of the upper classes displayed their elite status, getting dressed up in fancy clothing being an essential part of making a good public impression. But he also shows that already by the end of the eighteenth century grand boulevards were more and more populated both by bourgeois and by working-class elements. The promenade was no longer a primarily aristocratic pastime. Most of the rest of Ladd’s book deals with efforts to make streets more salubrious, more conducive to the flow of traffic, and in general more orderly. In “Out of the Muck: The Sanitary City” (pp. 141-89), we learn a lot about how cities overall and city streets in particular became cleaner and healthier. The chapter is summarized as follows: The late nineteenth century marked the triumph of the sanitary city across much of Europe. The accomplishments of the age were impressive: waterworks, sewer systems, municipal street cleaning and refuse collection, better paving, and the thoroughgoing removal of unpleasant sights and smells. All these projects were carried out, and celebrated, in the name of public health, and with good reason. The incidence of many infectious diseases plunged, as did urban death rates. (p. 179) There can be no doubt, in Ladd’s view, that the enhanced cleansing of city streets made cities more pleasant places in which to live. At the same time, there were losses as well as gains, The process of making streets antiseptic and deodorized places often entailed not only eradicating germs and smells but also removing the people and activities blamed for the contamination . . . Across most streets and most cities, the crowds eventually dispersed, as the charm and excitement of city streets, including hawkers and street markets, was largely banished in the name of sanitation (p. 180). In his chapter on transportation, Ladd emphasizes “acceleration,” by which he means the increasing speed of moving from one part of a city to another. The nineteenth century, he writes, “enshrined rapid transportation . . . as the street’s main purpose, meaning that the fastest vehicles were granted priority over people working, playing, or walking. Those others were pushed aside. The street was no place to linger” (p. 181). Whereas early in the period the well-to-do avoided making their way through mud and excrement either in sedan chairs or in private carriages, the nineteenth century witnessed the proliferation of public transport, first in the form of horse-drawn omnibuses, then in the form of horse-drawn railway cars, and eventually in the form of electrified trams. Toward the end of the period, bicycles began to enhance the speed at which individuals could travel. A few years later, automobiles also began to appear on city streets, making them less and less hospitable to pedestrians. The book’s final chapter, on “Public Order and Public Space” (pp. 213-39), deals first with efforts to control urban street crime. For centuries, to deter it, draconian punishments had been imposed on those deemed guilty (mainly young men). Frequently, executions were administered outdoors, where they provided a kind of entertainment for thousands of onlookers. In the course of time, however, concerns that had to do in part with the traffic congestion that resulted from crowds of onlookers led to moving executions to spaces inside prisons. Concurrently, there was a pronounced movement toward more effective policing, most notably via the creation of the London Metropolitan Police in 1829. Another facet of the effort to submit city streets to rational control took shape in moves to make sure that all streets had names and that buildings along them were numbered. Names and numbers, however, were quite insufficient for the purpose of rationalization. This dictated widespread reconstruction of the streets themselves. City planners—George-Eugène Haussmann in the lead in Paris in the 1850s—thus moved in the direction of wide, straight boulevards. These thoroughfares fostered not only rational intelligibility but also other changes, which did not necessarily benefit all city dwellers. Ladd writes that “the broad, arrow-straight boulevards of Napoleon III’s Paris proved well suited to marching soldiers and to cannon fire directed at insurrectionary workers.” In addition, “wide and straight streets promised to solve problems of sanitation, crowd control, transportation, and aesthetic order” (pp. 228-29). In conclusion, Ladd expresses considerable ambivalence about the transformations he has documented and about further changes that were to take place after the period on which he concentrates. Gains in the area of sanitation and public health were undeniable, and few if any city dwellers would wish to go back to a situation in which pedestrians had to contend with lots of mud and excrement when crossing streets. Urban improvements, however, came at a price. “The paradox of twentieth-century cities,” Ladd writes regretfully, “is that they increasingly boasted streets that were clean, safe—and empty. Shopping, socializing, and politics moved elsewhere and, most conspicuously, the automobile arrived to carry people away” (p. 241). In delineating this paradox as it had already emerged in the nineteenth century, Ladd has once again written a book that is in equal measure informative and thoughtful. It is a must read for any urban historian.