SIR PETE.R HALL

CITIE,S

IN

CIVILIZATION

F R O M M I N T E R N A T I O N A L

N E W Y O R K

o

First Fromm International paperback edition 2001

Copyright @ 1998 by Sir Peter Hall

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright

Conventions. First published in hardcover in the United States by Pantheon Books,

a division of Random House, Inc., New York Originally publishedin Great Britain byWeidenfeld &Nicolson, London.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hall, Peter Geoffrey.Cities in civilization / Sir Peter Hall.

P. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-88064-250-5

1. Cities and towns-History. 2. Cities and towns-Growth-History.3. Civilization. 4. City and town life. I. Title.

HT111.H345 t998 307.76'.09--427 98-24007 CIP

Printed in the United States of America

CONTE,NTS

AcknowledgementsList of Illustrations

BOOK ONE: The City as Cultural Crucible

1 Great Cities in their Golden Ages 3

2 The Fountainhead.

{!gr 50G400 sc 243 The Rediscovery of Life

' Flglglc. 1400-1500 69

4 The World as Stage,/London 1,570-1620 114

5 The City as Pleasure Principle. Vienrla 1780-1910 159

6 The Capital of Light€ Paris 1870-1910 201

7 The Invention of the Twentieth Century

r Bfrli+ 19fi-1933 2398 The Key to Creativity 279

BOOK TWO: The City as Innovative Milieu

9 The Innovative Milieu 291

10 The First Industrial Ciry. Manchester 7760-1830 310

17 The Conquest of the Oceans. Glgqow 1n0-n90 348

12 The Pioneer Technopolis* nerfiT 18'10-1930 377

13 The Mass Production of Mobility. Detrqit 189V1975 396

14 The Industrialization of Information. San Francisco/Palo Alto/Berkeley 1950-1990 4?3

Ylt

xi

vl CONTENTS

15 The State as Permanent InnoYator

. Tokyo-Kanasawa I89V1'990' r - +1,6 The Innovat ive Essence

BOOK THREE: The Marriage of Art and

Technology

17 The Invention of Mass Culture

18 The Dream Factoryo k:$des 1910-1945

19 The Soul of the Delta

. Mgphit 7948-7956

20 The Secret of the Marriage

BOOK FOUR: The Establishment of theUrban Order

21, The Challenge to the Urban Order

?2 The Imperial Capital.

P.50 sc-ao100

73 The Utilitarian City

455

483

The City of Perpetual Public'WorksP_aris 1850-1870

The Apotheosis of the ModernNg-lork 1880-19'+0

The City as FreewayLolArgeles 1900-1980

The Social Democratic UtoPiaStockholm 1945-1980

The City of Capitalism RamPantLondon 7979-1993

The Achievement of the Urban Order

503

520

553

603

6tr

627

657

706

746

803

842

888

932

943

990

1051

1135

\/ Lg!&" 782s-7900,_

25,

26o

27t

28

29

BOOK FIVE: The Union of Art, Technology,

and Organization

30 The City of the Coming Golden Age

Nofes

Bibliography

lndex

@

r_*-'*Th"e of each: to understand the precise conjunctqqg o:[.fo4gqjra!

complementary; and then, as a result, to generalize as to the degree ofcommonality these places share, and on the other hand the residual forces that

one of which had its particularage; among lasted for perhaps a century and a half,

the shortest a mere fifteen years. For those brief spans of human history, eachof these cities claimed the global limelight; though none was eyer withourserious competitors, each could fairly claim to be the great creative city of thattime.

I7e start *i(mdDthe Periclean age, the fifth century nc, when the tinyAegean polis diM-nced itself from its competitors through an explosion ofcreativity - in philosophy, science, art, architecture, lyric poetry and drama.Athens at this time was transforming itself from a yery traditional aristocraticoligarchic regime into the world's first and perhaps still most effective democ-racy: originally a democracy of small farmers, but soon in turn transformed bythe growth of trade, which made Athens the wodd's first true global city. Thewealth thus generated remained largely in public hands and was used to generateexceptional state patronage, while the ciry's reputation attracted talents fromeyery corner of a mercantile empire, huge by the standards of the day. And ir

ffinrr#o*nGe. bn"lan,V,u,nltnrt!, Brrl,L

e&*...--. _

are special to

9utTURe

r F ! " !

THE CITY AS CULTURAL CRUCIBLE

emerges that it was rhese outsiders, half inside the culture but half excluded

from it, who were the true progenitors of the Athenian miracle'

The storv contlnuaQ "ft.. "

bieak of almost exactly two thousand years' with-

fiftililil;;'ffi;here the Renaissance suddenlv broke the bonds of

-.it.""r-i".-irH€#ascover the naturalistic arts of the ancient Greeks'

Florence, like Athens, emerges as a great, Mediterranean mercantile centre' a

global city of its day, ;;;;g civic iealth and civic Patronage which provided

collective support for the "t'I, bu' also attracting people -of

talent from all

around the city; "

.oro-on f"",tlr. which helps powerfully to explain the

emergence of both Places- = -'We then move ro .f6"aii)f Elizabeth I and of the

Globe Theatre: a

mere fifty-year span' i;;fs% 61620, where a golden stream of poetry and

;;" pf,rr.d forth fro- Shakespeare and- his contemporaries. Once again, it

.*..*i rfti, *", ,tt.-*o;i;5 gtt"t--erchant city of its day' exploring the

ii-i,r" oi th. world and drawing bounty from it; once again, there was an

eruption of wealth creation arrd o-f conspicuous consumption; once again, talent

was drawn in, from OJota and CamLridge and Midlands grammar schools;

most notably of all, like both Athens .nd Florence, this was an economy and

a society in the throes of transformation, from a traditional aristocratic order

io "

n* system based on merit and enterprise' and the resulting tensions

.ffiUf::ilt#:Tj',ln: "$ffi :,..1';r, was an intriguin grv dirrerent

f f i ; ; ; ; ; , ave rydynamick indo fp lacea t "u l : l - , } . con t ra ry , i t*", tha centre of an .mpi'e and a court that became

more conservative' more

hidebound, as they ".q,rir.d

more territory and more power' In fact' over this

Iong period Vienna ;;.J two golden ages: the first came

.out of royal and

aristocratic p",rorr"g. i. the age "of

,h. .Jigh,.n'n.nt, -and it expressed itself

"l-or, exclusively in music; the second was a reaction of a few

young Viennese

"g"in$ what they saw as an ossified and worthless sociery'

and was artistic'

il;"; "nJ

,.i..rti6c. But they had one thing in common: both the musicians

of the period 17g0 to 1g20, and Jung vien oirsgo to 1910, were quintessential

"riria*r, people of talent m"ki-ng ih.i, o*n way at the fringes

of established

society, compromisinf *iif i, but"also railing against its artistic and intellectual

ii-irrrionr. And finally, in a strange way' this tolerant and rather corrupt

so€jctcsave them their heads'

fT;Jb);en 1870 and 19L0 ran parallel to the second of these Viennese

\ffi"a-y., J*oi"t"a ,o*. of th. r"-. features as the 6rst of them' Here the

outsiders were artists, ""a

^r in vienna they were drawn in from all over the

;;;;;t and indeed irom all over Europe; iust as with music' there were no

real linguistic barriers. They came bec-"use Paris was the city of painters' -the-

city where there was "., ..rtr-oos official establishment of education and of

p^, ,on^g, ,but then, iustbecausetheywerethemost ta lentedof thei rgenerat ion,they found ir,.o-p..h..rsion and even ridicule' So they had

to create their own

anti-establishment world of crit ics and dealers; but they could succeed because

the parisian bourgeoisie, or part of it, was rich enough and sophisticated enough

to appreciate their qualities and pay for their products'

T'he sixth city is i., -"ny *"yrih. mosr extraordinary of all, for its f lowerinl

/ i rV/

Great Cities in their Golden Ages zJ

as the paradigm, onewas so short and its end so tragic

might say the parody, of the creative-irp ofa sudden, all constraints

were shaken off in a frenzy of experimentation across the spectrum of the arts.

It was a special case, and of course there were special reasons: the collapse of

an old imperial order on the battlefields of Europe, a failed attemPt at revolution,

a hyperinflation that ruined the middle class; and, coupled with this, perhaps

the strongest left-wing intelligentsia in the whole of Europe, cultivating strong

links with their counterparts in Moscow, the other great centre of artistic

creatiyity at that time. And, final irony, both movements were crushed by

totalitarian dictatorships, one nominally of the right, one of the left. Berlin's is

oLe of the easiest stories to tell, but finally one of the hardest to interpret.

61,]]ffi;rfi)spanning two a.,d a half millennia of human history, are all

*ffi-ffiilil belonging to the same rich cultural stream that was born in

Athens and reborn in Florence. Doubtless, there are entire other stories that

could be told of other culture streams: of the Mohammedan world from the

seventh century to the fifteenth, of the Indian subcontinent of the post-Gupta

period, above all perhaps of the five thousand years of Chinese cultural history.

Thor. tales should and doubtless will get told too' in their turn; but these will

haye to suffice for the purpose of one book, which for good or ill is the story

of Spengler's Abendland, the supposedly declining western culture.

Sipposedly declining: Spengler was wrong, for after the sunset comes the

dawn; unlike Spengler (and unlike Mumford), this is no tale of decline or

disintegration. At the end of the twentieth century - eighty years after Spengler

foretolJ the decline of the West, sixty years after Mumford saw the modern

ciry proceeding inexorably to Necropolis - neither western civilization, nor the

wesrirn ciry, shows any sign of decay. On the contrary: this book will be a

celebration of the continued vitality, the continual rebirth of creativiry in the

world's great cities; as the light wanes in one, it waxes in another; the whole

process, it seems, has no end that we know of, or can foresee. T-S-c."!dquestion, now, is Precisely how a

fraTurilfthe creative spark that rekindles the urban 6res.

ltJ

The Innovative Milieu

groWth: xllo now qtl trrcv uuurv rv -- ' "t"v

6n w. develop a theory that helps to explaiI . r - - - - L : - ^ : -

he first icertaln t

iround Gla

\ \

("

of the first iron stea

above all inTwo to

creativiryJ Does

ln

itself so st

ral crucibles, and if so whY?

y, relating

Gcation- is hard, for.a reason quite

"pp"tii" io that which pi"gy-ed us earlier: now' there is n9 l1c!

tf,tlt:I']:il

Uuitai"g blocks; there are "ll .oo many, but they do not iell. So this chapter

will be a ,ath.i long, hard technical haul: up through the academic foothills,

*ith orrly oc.asion"-i sights of the gleaming peaks. The core problem is this:

we have to visit location theory, a rather obscure sub-science, existing at the

bordedine of human geography and economics. Like many such academic

niches, it represents a t ind of iangled undergrowth, in which waves of academics

have done battle over half a century'

t

Ffihe focus now shifts to the upstart urban places, and the central

I qu.rtions are about economic development: how and why do innovative

I technologies, innovative ways of inaustrial managem

"na in *1t-9-95-

rocess otforces: the

A Tentative Conclusron

he end of this trail through the thickets of theory, we can wholeheartedlyagree with Dosi that 'there is a significant gap between the wealth of findingsby economic historians, students of technology, applied industrial economists,on the one hand, and the (more limited) conceptualization of these findings ineconomic theory, on the other'.s But we can also believe that the concept ofthe innovative milieu has powerfully helped 6ll that gap.

The tentative conclusion, to be tested in Book Two, is that the innoyativemilieu has been an all-pervasive principle throughout the history of capitalistdevelopment, since the first industrial revolution in England; but that it haschanged its nature. In the first, heroic era of capitalism, as Schumperer longago emphasized, innovation was a spontaneous process in which technical andorganizational challenges were met with a series of brilliant intuitions andadaptations. Organized science played a very shadowy and indirect role;rnnovauon came tcontacts between ual engineer-craftsmen played a critical part. It wassmall wonder, in this period, that the Marshallian industrial district providedthe all-important matrix within which ideas circulated and norions were

stage'C-a

fine-tuned and improved.

century Gla indeed also Berlin

The Innouatiue Milieu

Atlantic

nturv Lancashire and earl

above

them. It was driven into

nlngs,

corporate era caDrtal lst deveermanY and the Uni s

I scient c advance and alsointo corporate research laboratories with clear

rates the transrtron

weaPonry n companies whose raison d'€tre

w

i88os a

n

ever morenal l

during, ,ar

lnnovatlon

vances rnsclen

6iifrns ot the way thE principle

of flexible specialization, as abundant examples like Silicon Valley and the

Third Italy or the Japanese kanban (just-in-time) system amply demonstrate.

But the three stages of evolution are nonetheless a crucial conceptual organizing'prinfiple, afowing us r t o a

mllleu. r ne Para ment the great Tokyo'ffi;6ti.t complex which was precluded from defence work, illustrate this

he first, is the quintessential cify first ustrialThat revolution, it

and a new systemately; at

new mac liinsformed an existing domestic system of production, which

,. had grown up oyer two or more centuries and had achieved an amazing levely of sophistication. Key individuals within this system, and on its fringes,

transformed it; they were powerfully assisted by some unique features of this

city and of its region, including a strong tradition of precision engllg4lgjl4

^" Nonconformis;ultu d

ln rurn tffese generated the first true innovative milieu in economic history, amilieu that in its internal structure and dynamics uncannily resembles Silicon

,etween 1820 and 1890, resembles Manchester

Va: thelcon

t 1 - . r - - -idly surpnsrng. Here too there were_latlve

ine. andrhe irott lljg but they could havewere: q€sity

because ilocal narrow seas. then

@causeof theco l lapseof i t so ld t rad ingbaseaf te r theAmerican revolution, and also b.."lttt

" g.qup of lo."l

engineers formed in effect an innovative milieu of their own, breaking away

@

ase of the warfare stateessentially stemming from the Cold War in the 1950s,

eYef moreuniversities and in

ETHE CITY AS INNOVATIVE MILIEU

froni their parents on a model that - again - presaged the rwentieth-century

innovative milieu.The third story' partly similar but also

diff?rent:here is the scene for the 6rst

neteenth century was-:-_ralher Inslgnlncant

state, its -War

rtmentthus creat one of Eurown rs to set up in business

the deveand for war

r6fr-

andh for economic d

T?ilmphantly al pioneer; thus

-t the 1890s Berlin was t of its day. Of an kind, to be sure:sg-;a-l tlr-ough these began to spawn

308

in one important resPect

time. Berlin in the early

\$-0

, \?XYT

[66Giifo..tian experience half a century later -

nonetheless the Berlin experience resemblesthll4! rival in tiq&flSitjes. for the

lt was oomr

e

but there Ford invented its mass

because one entrepreneur' rn Pa

ere was a

one of the most likely.

evew

if an coust ts to set

ital, from nouveaux-riches bucc4neer

have

here, who after'{qdd-g's first Science

3n

byawa rom

i lon-

\2 l

ffiovation was internJllzed in the ized research

t o a s r world, of the

is that it represented

fii-in American economic historY: invent the motor car

ancl m()rctical pointrit did not-rction for

cn

?6iss market. Thati : - .

an obsesslon that tnev

,r..i e*isted and was determined to fill it. But here the conditions were

peculiarly propitious, as it turned out: tlere were strong t

portation eneineqdns, which tutored For? and many others who assisted him;

ffiara Valley at the southern

Bay, then still virtually undeveloped orchard land'

and therefore geographically the least likely of any of these six places- Here,

palo Alto *", ih. home of itanford University, a relatively new and innovative

^ T;rT. F;; those, in the unique conditions of the Cold 'War,

de-&ii-aordinary

cascade of innovation in solid-state electronics,

a plocess of swarming of new hrms as talented lnolv

t coll

needs of the farmerq

a model of i

-tnZI

The Innouatiue Milieu

of new hardware and software

r t- n A€tt6ouiln g- Ka n agawa prefectu re, f o rm the app ropri a te

deliberatelY veloped at that point by the

ilf,in " f.a rt, ounng worlcl war lI,

iElThe practice of sub-

.ontr".ti.tg parts and processes to smaller local 6rms, which were deliberately

,..ou."g.d to improve their technical proficiency and innovative capacfy by

the larger firm. It celg13ledg rxqeordi

as rhese firms pffissed up the learning curve, from the sin-rplest -eleqtricalifr fiotndtelevision-,toextreme!1_qqphisl! j

Sn and cameras and caquestlon, is sv-system is yet truly

t

in the Americannetworki, one

because on them the fate of cities, regions, and entires. And the answer is not yet certain; the iury is st

of Manchester and Glasgow show,

cities that falter in the innovative rocess soon stu

ies. Leaders m ofre generatlon soon De na new competltors,

ffiA from behind; and unless t either develop new ways of

I6

,k6-and disappear into industrial oblivion' Continued on to

nearly all these stories end that unhappy way: Manchestet

-9!asgo$+F9if are shadows of their torr-ner industrial selves, thoul-two h"ve-found new livet as centres of advanced services and touri

lost its industrial Dre-eminence at the End of World War I

rst now tof close on iEnrury, the second fol tgt t 7Ior that reason arone,Teh stories are exc-pdonally worth telling and theirlessons worth distilling, which will form a main theme for Chapter 16, summingup at the end of Book Two.

@

Two American Cities: Hollywood and Memphis

The unique character of the American achievement - th1 ::ti:'t"

of mass

culture through p'iu"" tnttrprise - is extremely important in understanding

the two stories tota in g;k Th"t' rt i' no "ttideni

that innovation in both

cases came no, onty'oi, ,i ,rr. united States, but also out of the

private

sector, located i^ n-.ri."n cities. Here, new entrePreneurs

- quintessential

schumpeterian New ;;;:-*;r" forced jn effect to find ways to create

a new

industry. In both t""" 't"'' *ttt totplt" t"itiattt' The -en'lelreneurs

who

created Hollywood ;;;-l-.rt without. exception I..:n,.

t-itglllt:^T-1

nearly all were J.*iril',,"*l,'no "..1a.", that they made their way into movres

from tradition.t Jt*i'n''inJu't'it' tf'"' t"""i for whims of fashion'

such' as

clothing. For there, ;;;;tt;;duction had to be allied to constant creatrvrty'

The parallel itat"'y"tr'"J'ily t"""a *"1 ii" Pan Allev' the new

popular

*tztqmhrstc \(mAis Mudia')

r r t l THE MARRIAGE OF ART AND TECHNOLOGY ' . "

m r r c i e i . i " " r . . , t L , ^ . A - . , ^ t ^ - ^ ) t - - r r 1music indusrry rhar developed for the sare of sheer music in the rggOs, uu, h::?-iTl1l-moved

inro recorded.music. And there, too, both th. produ... r ! y r v u u l c l Sand rhe arrists were overwhelmingly Jewish.

].n:-",*n rh:.n.y enrerrainment corforations grew at dizzy speed to command

semi-monopolies (oligopolies, in the economists' jargon) both within the UnitedStates and worldwide, the odd fact was th"t t l,. i ..;";; i '"..h.typ"r n.*firms: owned and controlred by rhe men who had'foundeJri.-, *rri-sicalyand often inefficientlv run, owing rittre to the emergin; ;;.;;;; of Americanmanagement science. There were few Alfred Sloans in Hlily*t"d. And, facedwith the challenge of television in the 1950s, the srudios air"pp."*a from theAmerican scene almost as quickly as rhey h"d "pp."r.;.- i;#;"-es surviveon the credirs, but the organizarion of the indusrii i t

""* ".rf irff.r.n,.

The second- story is even more striking. For it ieils ,t. ,rori or ,n. birth ofmodern popular music in the 1950s, "n-.u.n,

at reast as momentous as thebirth of Hollywood. And it emerged out of ,*o -ori ;,k;i; sources: twostrains of pure folk music, coming out of deep curturat ,ooir,- '.".n cherishedand developed by a poor and unrerrered ethnic group, in one of th. .no* remoreand poverty-stricken regions of the united st"t.r,' *hi.h finaliy fused in apopular enterrainment industry. And the srrikingli

"no-"to*-'point is thateach of these strains exisred, for at reast harf ; ;.;r;;;;;ry recognized

and barely tolerated, as minoriry cultures far outside ,t. a-.ri."n culturalmainsrream. Their fusior was accomplished by a few ^"u..i.k ,ntrepreneurs,most of them native sons of the region, some others from New york, who ineffecr took on the mainsrream e,it.rtainment establishment - and, after aferoc ious batr le , vanquished i r .

Because borh indusrries rvere new ones, created by new people bottom-up, itwas perhaps no wonder that they deveroped in new ir"..r. Ti;; *.r. of courseurban places; it was to cit ies that artistic talent f lowed, as it hi arways fowed;and, given that the revolution in each case was partly technical, only a citywould have the wherewithar. Bur, iust rike most oith. uprr"r;;;., consideredin Book Two, these were borderrand cities, out of the ma'instream of their time.Indeed, in both cases the industry was origina[y establish.J ir, ,r,. urtimateAmerican merropolis, Ney york City; but in the first case it moved out, andin the second was vanquished by th. new competit ion.

of the two srories, the first is the odder. Lts Angeres in 1910, I ike alr thetechnologically innovative cit ies of Book Two, was"a borderland prace; buteven more so than they had been. The others ail had some sort of ievelopedindustrial or ar least proto-industriar tradition; Los Angeres did not realry haveany. And it was a very long way from the th.n J.nt.. "r

,r,. Americanproductive system. It was relativery undeveloped in .o-prri*n with sanFrancisco' 400 miles to the north, which had "

head ,r"., on i i through theaccidents of the gold rush and the firsr transcontinentar rairroad. It did nothave anything obvious going for it at ail, save for "

u.nig,,. i l ."r. "na

prentyof land. And it was certainly not unique in those. As we shalr see, ir was noteven the place where the fledgring industry began. So one could say that there*1.."n elemenr of pure serendipity, pur. iu.k.-nut nor quit..- - -

The other case was more rogicar. Memphis in Tennessee was the prace where

The Inuention of Mass Culture

rwo great folk-cultural traditions came together: the Afro-American blues of

the Mississippi Delta region to the south, and the white country music of the

Appalachian hill country to the east. Each of these traditions flourished also in

other places: the blues in Kansas City and, above all, in Chicago; country music

in Nashvil le and a score of smaller places. But in no other place was it so

staristically likely that the two streams would meld to produce something

different. Further, Memphis from its earliest days had the reputation of a wild

city, a place where almost anything could be allowed to happen. It was perhaps

the one place in the old American South, even before the civil liberties movement

transformed the region, where black and white cultures could cross-fertilize in

this waY.So, finally, there is an intriguing paradox: the real powerhouse, where the

mass-media culture of the twentieth century was born, was New York City;yet two of its greatest manifestations, the movie-television complex and the

creation of popular music, happened in far-distant cities. The reasons are very

different in the two cases: in the 6rst they are obscure, and the Hollywood

complex remained closely tied financially to its original New York base; in the

second, upstart provincial entrepreneurs in effect vanquished a New York

industry that had become tired, conservative and smugly complacent. The two

stories tell us a great deal about the nature of the marriage of art and technology

in the twentieth century, and they contain powerful suggestions for the way itwill happen in the twenty-first.

5 r 9

@

J modern tales, because after 1800 did cities becomen

was one consprcuous exceptlon centunesro, the subject of Chapter 22. lt was city to reach approximately onemillion people, and it did so on the basis of exceedingly simple technology: inparticular, the Romans made no maior advance in transportation technology,

which would have allowed their citizens to spread out more comfortably, sothat their capital was quite extraordinarily compressed and overcrowded.

Nevertheless, achieved triumphs in water supply and to some extent in, quite extraordinary in this one.w

which 6rst equalled and then greatlya whole range of novel problems,

some physical, some social. The chapter deals with four: policing, crinle, water

and servers, an{ housing. What was remarkable about London was not merely

thiili developed answers, however belated and however inappropriate; it was

that they were animated by a philosophy quite different from the public works

tradition that underpinned ancient Romc or contemPorary Paris, one which

was direcdy derived from philosophical utilitarianism. Calculation and economy

and the minimalist state were the order of the day, as by an odd twist of history

they have again become in Britain. And in the course of applying the principles,

nineteenth-century London camc up with solutions that sometimes seem strik-

ingl@risons or workfare.nd Haussmann represents a sharp reversion to thelic works, which again can be seen to echo in

different case again. It was the

Jackson has called it: it was also

IIt

French public life to this day. Haussmann not only rebuilt Paris, as everyone '

knows; he also sewered it and-ryatered it and doubl.!-t$-:&gJhereby allowing I

it to ".co-mila

rry ,G oflrowth ifi;[d;fr;;hytical collapse thathad seemed to threaten it. But he did so by an extraordinary system of publiqfinancing, in efiect repres.ntiTf,eJ6curiry of future rises in land values, which eventually must prove untenable.So it proved: though the city survived the crisis after his deparnrre, it broughtnearly a century of local government paralysis, from which only de Gaulle was

growing at extraordinary speed as a result of the migration of almost destitute

feopl.'frorn."r,.rn "nd

ro,rthern Europe, which ailied with the city's islandg/

geography to create a housing problem of the first order' The answer ro New

York's problem, as to that of London and Paris and Berlin,.was effective urban

h would allow people to seek new homes at the metropolitan

was the first city in the world to begin to adapt to the automobile age, but in

doing so it engaged in a fuirdamental debate about its future which would have

as a new city on the far side of the continent,gt@f urban self-promotion or boosterism, whichconfronted the question of its own development through an equally momentouspublic debate, and answered it decisively in a radical way: it would not seek to

,, I @,/

6zo THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE URBAN ORDER

emulate traditional cities like New York byits system of public

transPortation, but on th.e

Iwas a small northern European capital of ain the 1950s and ---tt.i""tfy,

that it would seelcto follow a path

of socio-economic uite differenta le wa

ffieticians, it was based on

nclngenha

capitalism would be encouraged to become

:;T:#T"fiffi ;}nil;;lii.;:;"purationweretobeprote":1:l'-::*ffi il:;i:ffi ffi ;;;;;ilit'-ddJ,'*"{1:1P'.11:',:f ::i::?,T:;:'J;;:;.*;;F;-;ii;""10::t'll'-ll:*IlLl"'?:T:'":'"*:rilffi"ffi;";il;rril the principles of zustain"bte urban 9:::t-"1,1.:::ffi; ffi ffi ,l" ;fi

';;,ie *.Y \ lo *:: n:"'d'11' ":,T, ::'": ::*:;;ft:TJil;"' il;;ili;J, "'a n'i'!':' dld th; c'".T '::'1r^:"f'^:'-T.':::jffi;;;;;;;;.;ieiess, in_the 1ee0s Swedes still

cline to their unique .

system, which most oTlf,Efiltill believe is supertor';;'Jffi-uTd-tItn with the London of the 1980s'

fffiffi'il;; il d;;r"' 28. Thatcher came into office with a /ffi;*il;;;theirSwedish-sryleuai.ii"thewelfarestate,V'jf,T:'il:r][.;;;

but one result was a collapse of the urban order on the

;;.;; of Brit"ir,, of " lind never seen in the twentieth cenrury. Her environmert

on socla

rema

minister Michael H*.ii,n* " remarkable politician whose ideology was quite

different from hers, seized the moment to tondutt a-tt-"g-ggg1.1n+lltqurbeq*,.g.n

"E tait;g*, "f

which was in

T;Aork D"AFas next to the Crty 9f Lond6n. -lilonsisted-

tGnilallY in ,.'de'e'ttd' into a temPle of

t/

6nance capitalism th"i *orrtd rival the city itself; but the.attempt led^to the

bankruptcy or rr,. ..nol a.u.iop.. and to a severe loss of public confidence.

The questio" 6""U;;;i;.a uy ,t. l-ondon saga is whether regenerarion through

property d.u.top*.ni l"n .u., bc adequatef bor "lro, disrurbingly, whether it

i, ttt, ,it. only lind of regeneration there is'

so there are.recurrenr,-h.-., running through these stories, and it comes as

something of a shock to see that victorian governments sought to privatize

provision but did ;;;;*.f f11,. or that pub:lic-priuate partnership was alive

and well in the p";;;i the'1850s "r,d th. New York of the 1900s, or that

California forsook its conservarive financial principles whenever it saw that

;;li; ;;".y could aid profitable private development. ?erhaps there is nothing

new under the sun. But technology evolves, increasing the limits of the possible;

however,socia lcomplexi ryalsoi" t t t " " "andwi th i t theproblemsofresolv ingsocial tensior. Gr;; ;;in"..ing solutions are all

very well, and none better

illustrates them rhan several of these ,rori"r, but ^ soci.ty that builds splendid

aqueducts "nd

,.*.,,, and then leaves its 1.,, fo.tun"te citizens to a diet of

bread and circuses, is a sociery doomed io .u.n,urt bloody destrucrion. .kff)er

Great Cities in their Golden Ages z1

as rhe paradigm, onewas so short and its end so tragic

might say the parody, of the creativiE a sudden, all constrainrswere shaken off in a frenzy of experimenlation across the spectrum of the arts.It was a special case, and of course there were special reasons: the collapse ofan old imperial order on the battlefields of Europe, a failed attemPt at revolution,a hyperinflation thar ruined the middle class; and, coupled with this, perhaps

thc strongest left-wing intelligentsia in the whole of Europe, cultivating stronglinks with their counterparts in Moscow, the other great centre of artisticcreativit)' at that dme. And, final irony, both movements were crushed by

totalitarian dictatorships, onc nominally of the right, one of the left' Berlin's is

one of the easiest stories to tell, but finally one of the hardest to interPret.|-(ft

"". ;l* citr spanning two and a half millennia of human history, are all

wffiffiii-belongini ro rhe same rich cultural strcam that was born in

Athens and reborn in Florence. Doubtlcss, there are entire other stories that

could be told of other culture sreams: of the Mohammedan world from the

ssvenlh celltury to the fifteenth, of the Indian subcontinent of the post-GuPta

period, above all perhaps of the five thousand years of Chinese cultural history.

Thor" tales should and doubtless will get told too' in their turn; but these will

have to suffice for the purpose of one book, which for good or ill is the story

of Spengler's Abendland, thc supposedly decliqing western culture'

Sipposedty declining: Spengler was wrong, for after the sunset comes the

dawn; unlike Spengler (and unlike Mumford), this is no tale of declinc or

disintegration. At the end of the twentieth century - eighty years after Spengler

foretold the decline of the West, sixty years after Mumford saw the modern

city procceding inexorably to Necropolis - neither westcrn civilization, nor the

wes;rn city, shows any sign of decay. On thc conrrary: this book will be a

celebration of the continued vitality, the continual rebirth of creativity in the

world's great cities; as the light wanes in one, it waxes in another; the whole| . r - t - , , - t - . , - - - f ^ - - - ^ ' r ' L ^ ^ - - t - ^ l

process, it seems, has no end that we know of, or can forescc. Ther , . . , , r r ' f

question, nowthe creative spa that rekindles the urban fires.