Cities of Power. Göran Therborn
into seat of the city government – railway stations, with Paris’s Gare du Nord and London’s Saint Pancras arguably the most remarkable.
Surprisingly few new parliament buildings were constructed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reflecting the deep historical roots of European modernity – London, Budapest and, on a small-state scale, Berne were the only capitals with landmark parliaments. In the Balkans, Berlin, Brussels, Kristiania/Oslo, Stockholm and Vienna they remained subordinated, or at least secondary, to the palaces of the monarchs. In the Hague, Lisbon, Madrid, Paris and Rome, existing buildings were recycled for parliamentary use, and in Athens and Copenhagen the new parliamentarians first moved in as lodgers into the king’s palace. After constructing the first round of buildings for its new national kingdom, with the royal palace larger than the parliament opposite it, Brussels then built a huge Palace of Justice as a national monument.
Urban services – power, water, transport and so on – expanded greatly but unevenly. Particularly great efforts were made on sewage systems, which were heavily challenged by rapid population growth, as dramatized by the Great Stink of the Thames in 1858. Between 1860 and 1878, Paris built almost 400 kilometres of underground sewage networks, on top of 228 pre-existing ones.54 The Parisian achievement is dwarfed, though, by that of Joseph Bazalgette, the chief engineer of the London Metropolitan Board of Works, who built a total of 1,300 miles of sewers.55
The European national capitals were – with few exceptions, Rome being the largest – centres of their nations’ capitalism and of its increasingly prosperous bourgeoisie. This meant whole new residential areas, whole new beaux quartiers in western and north-western Paris or London, along new grands boulevards like Kurfürstendamm in Berlin or Andrássy út in Budapest, of luxurious apartment buildings with separate servants’ entrances, or townhouses in London or Amsterdam. The rise of European nation-states was intimately ‘correlated with’ – bracketing tricky questions of causality – the rise of large-scale industrial and banking capitalism. This meant new kinds of imposing private buildings – besides factories, which were sometimes also built for impression as well as for function, a stock exchange (Budapest built the largest), banking, industrial headquarters and department stores. Industrial capitalism also raised a new issue of urban policy: workers’ housing.
Capitalist economic development moved the de facto urban boundaries and transformed the totality of the urban space, if much less so the historical centres. Real estate speculation became a major economic activity in the nineteenth century. The City of London came to display its character as the hub of world finance and its Docklands gained the buzz of the world’s greatest port. Berlin got its Bankenviertel, in Behrenstrasse near Unter den Linden. The Stock Exchange, or Bourse, became the central buildings of Paris and Brussels. Huge working-class areas were sprouting in the peripheries, often slum-like in character, lacking most amenities and consisting of mainly self-built shacks, much like those of the Third World in the twentieth century.
The architecture of the national capitals remained, by and large, within the inherited European-style repertoire, with varying accents and combinations. Neoclassicism and neo-Gothic dominated the most central public buildings, but there was historicism of the nineteenth century itself, as well as neo-Renaissance and neo-Baroque. Under nationalist auspices, the old styles were given national interpretations, as we have already noticed.
However, European bourgeois nationalism did bring forth or promote some new styles. The most significant was, ironically, an antidote to the emerging standardized, industrial machine age, with curvaceous lines, floral decorations and bright colours. It was rather a family of kindred styles under several different names in different parts of Europe: Art Nouveau in Belgium and France (where it is also known as modern style) modernisme in Catalonia, Secession in the Habsburg area, Jugendstil (Youth Style) in Germany and Scandinavia and Arts and Crafts, Free Style or Art Nouveau in Britain.
Around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this style became distinctively popular among nouveau-riche national bourgeois on the European periphery, most boldly in Barcelona and well represented in Brussels, Prague and Riga, and more limitedly in Glasgow. Mostly it was used for private residences, but it could also be employed for fashionable stores and occasionally for public buildings, such as the Maison du Peuple in Brussels and the Municipal House in Prague. In Finland there developed a National Romanticism in heavy, crude grey granite, mainly for public cultural buildings such as churches and museums. The swelling Hungarian nationalism was sometimes expressed in a Magyar Orientalism.*
The European national capitals, spearheaded by Paris of the early Third Republic, succumbed to a ‘statue mania’. Between 1870 and 1914 Paris erected 150 statues, not counting other kinds of commemorative monuments.56 This was a tradition from ancient Rome, largely forgotten during the medieval era and revived during the Renaissance as a monarchical self-celebration. Now it was devoted to the leaders, heroes and stars of the nation: politicians, generals, scientists and artists working in all genres.
The imperialist nations of Europe flaunted their empires as national exploits. The national museums displayed colonial loot and conquests, most famously the British Museum’s marble statues from the Athenian Parthenon. Many capitals had official colonial museums, among them Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris. The World Exhibitions had special colonial pavilions, and in 1931 Paris staged a large-scale ‘International Colonial Exhibition’.57 Trafalgar Square included two generals commanding British conquests in India (Charles Napier and Henry Havelock). Madrid installed a Plaza de Colón with a statue of Columbus in 1893 along the new south-north axis, Paseo de la Castellana. Murals in the Copenhagen City Hall boast of Danish colonies, from the West Indies to Greenland. In the twentieth century, between the two world wars, the authoritarian government of Portugal commemorated its maritime fifteenth- and sixteenth-century ‘discoveries’ and conquests in a major ensemble by the Tagus (Tejo) River; Mussolini’s Rome celebrated the fascist conquest of Ethiopia and laid out a grand Via dell’Impero. Street names remind us of colonial exploits: in Berlin’s Dahlem, of the German participation in crushing the Chinese Boxer Uprising, for instance. Colonial street naming, mainly geographical but also including some colonial governors and commanders, was particularly widespread, it seems, in the Netherlands. It started in the Hague, a favourite homeland retreat of Dutch colonialists in the 1870s, and later culminated in Amsterdam, which contains sixty-three colonial streets.58
National Foundations: Settler Secessions
Only settlers from Europe built nation-states and national capitals overseas, and their notions of statecraft and urbanism were naturally imported from their motherlands and/or other parts of Europe.* However, the socio-cultural and political parameters of their state and city building were fundamentally different, and so were the outcomes behind the surface similarities. The major conflict line in the Americas was not national versus princely sovereignty, but between local settler sovereignty against overseas imperial rule. In the thirteen colonies of British America, opposition against the latter focused on taxation; in Hispanic America, on trade monopolies and high-office discrimination. In British as well as Hispanic America, settler rebellions started as pro-monarchical,† and Brazil entered the world stage of nation-states as a monarchy.
Settler secession was not like the artistic rebellion against the Vienna Kunstverein, which started the artistic and architectural rebellion known in Austria-Hungary as Secession. It was not the launch of a new culture, although it did contain rejections of Old Europe’s aristocratic manners. It was more like the divorce of a middle-aged couple who had spent quite some time together but who had grown apart, with offspring cared for by the American part.
Metaphors aside, secession meant a different conception of the nation than the European one: no longer based on language, religion, culture, history, but on a territorial club of conquerors and settlers. The nation was a club of members, open to anyone entering the territory with the proper ethnic credentials. Like any club, the club-nation engaged