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Seduction of Place: The City in the Twenty-First Century - Hardcover

Rykwert, Joseph

 
9780375400483: Seduction of Place: The City in the Twenty-First Century
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0375400486 ISBN 13: 9780375400483
Verlag: Fantagraphics, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

Examines urban centers from Mexico City to Berlin to New Delhi, discussing the successes and failures of architecture and infrastructure in making a city visually appealing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Joseph Rykwert is Paul Philippe Cret Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of ten previous books, including The Idea of a Town. He lives in London and New York.

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Chapter 1.

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, São 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 WÃ?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 Hanoverian Georges-who took over England in 1715 but had rather grander quarters in Hannover which they retained-was too skimped and mean to have any political or cultural hold over status-seeking British magnates, who were themselves riled by a newly rich banking class that was aggressively buying titles and climbing through intermarriage. Landowners were therefore thrown back on the resources of their mismanaged estates, where they were irked by their dwindling incomes, which they attempted to bolster-usually unsuccessfully and sometimes disastrously-in various financial speculations of which the South Sea Bubble of 1720-21 was merely the most notorious. The more intelligent among them realized that the husbanding of their neglected estates might throw off a much better income. In increasing numbers they became enthusiastic farmers, and much ingenuity and capital were applied to improvement. Two noblemen were leading reformers: Charles Townshend and Thomas Coke (great-nephew of his namesake, the builder of Holkham). Lord Townshend (1674-1738), who had been ambassador to Holland, is associated with the refinement of crop rotation, a skill he first learned from the Dutch. On withdrawing from administration, he devoted himself to the cultivating of his extensive but rather neglected lands by developing root crops-swedes (rutabagas), beets, turnips (he was even nicknamed Turnip Townshend)-and promoting the selective breeding of cattle.

Improved breeding of farm animals had already been practiced in Holland-which, being land hungry, had the most advanced agriculture in Europe-and in Germany, though it would not become systematic until Gregor Mendel published the results of his genetic experiments in 1865. Yet the new supply of root crops in Britain provided excellent cattle fodder in the winter, as did clover (which Townshend also grew as part of his crop rotation), and thus prevented the usual large-scale slaughtering of farm animals in the autumn. Two generations later, Thomas Coke vastly improved cattle, sheep, and pig breeds; he also managed to fertilize the light and sandy soil of his unpromising Norfolk estate to produce wheat instead of the rye that had been grown there previously.

Jethro Tull, a Berkshire gentleman-farmer, introduced even more radical reforms: he devised the first semi-mechanical, horse-driven sowing drill and an analogous hoe. Accepted slowly, his inventions were soon well known in Europe and improved. Voltaire had used them on his farm at Ferney on the Swiss border. Independently, a new form of plow seems to have been developed by a number of manufacturers in western Europe: a Dutch form, adapted in Yorkshire, became the most advanced type until the revolutionary development of steel plows at the beginning of the nineteenth century; it required only a horse or two to draw it, instead of the several oxen that were used to draw the old square ones.

The changes in tillage revolutionized animal husbandry: cattle were no longer bred to be brawny for drawing power, but smaller-boned and smaller-headed for meat; sheep were also bred more for meat than for wool. Imported fibers took over from homegrown, especially Australian wool, but above all cotton-imported first from Egypt and India, and later from the United States. Export trade was irreversibly transformed as cotton, the primary raw material of the textile industry, replaced wool which had, since the Middle Ages, been the most important British

product.

Other factors led to changes in the scale of agriculture, especially in Britain. Until then most land in Europe had been under strip cultivation, each owner farming a number of (sometimes widely separated) strips. Commons were shared by several owners or tenants, which furnished pasturage as well as fuel and hunting rights.

"There was nothing particularly English about this: a traveller met with it from Andalusia to Siberia . . . on the Loire and on the plains

of Moscow," wrote a Scots agricultural expert and landholder soon

after 1800.3 Enclosure gradually "privatized" open lands-waste and heath-first in Britain, but increasingly all over Europe. Such measures deprived...

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Verlag
Fantagraphics
Erscheinungsdatum
2000
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375400486
ISBN 13 
9780375400483
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
283
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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Verantwortliche Person
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