Throughout Europe, up they went —

in Glasgow and London, in Paris and Lyon and Marseille,

in Milan and Brussels and Malmo and everywhere else. 

Council housing and what it replaced, Liverpool

Council blocks, Edinburgh

Some went up, some went out, but all were off by themselves.

Council housing, semi-detached, Liverpool

All were built on the European socialist model:

the state would provide, the state would own, the state would subsidized, the state would protect.  The welfare state.  From Le Corbusier on down, architects and urban planners were unanimous: we were going to live in regulated high-rise complexes.

Corbusier’s Unite d’habitation: a unit of habitation

Genetic imprint and the first demographic wave:

The persistence of city structure in post-WW2 America

America reacted differently to the post-WW2 auto boom: with few natural barriers bounding the city, mobility meant expansion (what many Euros sniff as ’sprawl’).  The great post-WW2 demographic wave tripled or quadrupled the aggregate urban footprint, as around every American city there sprang, like an asphalt rainbow seen from above, a ring highway.  Boston’s Route 128, “America’s Technology Highway” as it billed itself, became the visible expression of a different approach to development: thickly settled suburbs, office parks, shopping malls, are all American inventions.  With this expansion, Americans created the bedroom community and from those bedrooms came the baby boom generation (which, Time magazine reminds us this week, just turned sixty). 

Fueled by wide highways, cheap gas, and ample land, American manufacturing moved out of the old city centers, leaving behind … a void. 

As the jobs moved, the cities declined.  As they declined, the urban infrastructure they left behind, chiefly beautiful 1930s multifamily courtyard-style brick apartment blocks, became absentee-owner rentals, to a population that in the 1950 and 1960s became rapidly black (the famous ‘white flight’ to the suburbs). 

All this decay coincided with the two great initiatives, under Roosevelt (1937-40) and Truman (1948-52), to tear down slums and replace them with public housing.  America used the same models as Europe’s, no difference in construction or operating philosophy, but where Europe’s estates were built in greenfield, America’s were sited on land swept clean of legacy by the renewal bulldozer.

With the emphasis on housing, and jobs fleeing (north to south, east to west, inner city to suburb), this massive investment in physical change merely shifted the venue and locus of decay.  New buildings rapidly became old.  Mixed income rapidly concentrated.  Working class became welfare class. 

By 1965, the American cities had hit bottom, and between 1965 and 1968, many of America’s inner cities went up in flames: Watts 1965, Detroit 1967, Chicago 1968. 

Sixties’ architects, urban theorists and science fiction writers could imagine no future for the cities; instead the stories told of depopulated wastelands ringed by security to keep those people inside and us safely behind our gated communities. 

Detroit’s Renaissance Center, built 1972, is today the premier example of the eloi fortress: four shining bronze towers protected by a bi-level concrete bunker into which one may only drive, one could not walk.

If you walked here, you’d be barricaded now

(The 1980 movie Escape from New York — actually filmed in a decayed part of downtown St. Louis — graphically depicted that vision, with the entire island of Manhattan cordoned off by a thirty-foot high concrete wall, where the only sentence was exile into the city.)

The second demographic wave:

The post-industrial European city, new urbanism, and immigration

That same demographic gravity afflicted Europe but in a different locus.  The city centers never fully declined; instead they were besieged by very poor areas just outside the city center.  The city center is thus preserved as a glass menagerie of the past.  All the cultural heritage, all the history, is carefully and expensively restored, a gray-hair’s playground decreasingly frequented by locals and increasingly operated as a historic-preservation theme park.  But the city center is, in many cases, no longer the brain. 

[Even in Paris, much of the business is done in La Defense -- ironic name, isn't it? -- a new-construction complex west of the Paris tourists see.]

La Defense, where the future speaks French

If today the vacationer travels into a European city center, the rule of thumb is, drive to the city walls and park just outside.  Inside one finds restaurants, souvenir shops, museums, corner bodegas … and no working Europeans.  Even making due allowance of the luxury of walking a European city center at eleven on a Tuesday morning, one is struck by the absence of a working-age adult population.  They are all elsewhere — as are their homes, their shopping centers, their offices, and the hum of commerce. 

The modern economic European city is divided, an upper-income enclave suburb at some point on the clock, the housing estates at another point, usually with the industrial estates buffering in between.

Where, then, does immigrant demand migrate?  The city center is too expensive to live, and offers few jobs.  [The only walled city that I can remember as having any poor quarter is Avila, and I remember it clearly because I was so dumbstruck by the oddity of seeing what was obviously government public housing in such a setting.]  The ring, the compound abutting the industrial estate, becomes the magnet. 

And so:

• Paris has Saint Denis and Clichy-sous-Bois, northeast at two o’clock on the city center dial

• London has Southwark, southeast at five o’clock on the dial.
• Birmingham has Wolverhampton, just north and west.
• Glasgow has its vast estates, prominently featured in Bill Forsyth’s Gregory’s Girl and Comfort and Joy.

Glasgow council housing, 2002

Tourists, their heads down in the Michelin Green, seldom see these places, because to wander into them requires an act of will and a dedicated navigation.  That too tells one something: for the ordinary European, these slums inside are truly out of sight, out of mind … unless you happen to be perched at a panoramic view.

The isolation-warehouse model never works.  We saw that in Watts 1965.  We are seeing it in Capetown 2005 and Paris 2005.  That is where the anger brews, where the violence has erupted.  That is the terrain.  Those are the physical places to be fixed.  But their fixing, though it involves housing as a core intervention, requires much more than just a box inside which to sleep. 

As Jim Hoagland writes in the Washington Post:

Hurricane Katrina helped Americans understand in sickening detail the failures of local and federal emergency-response bureaucracies.  France’s riots should illustrate to the French the dead-end nature of the physical and social architecture of building a tall fence around the country’s 5 million to 10 million Muslim immigrants and their offspring, and then pretending they are essentially not there.

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– Sun Tzu, The Art of War

As Paris burns and other European cities tremble, Americans may wonder, why the suburbs? Why are they the ghettos, not the inner city?

Evreux, France

The answer takes us back several centuries.

As France’s government awakens to a complex problem that will take months, years, possibly even decades to address, we have to begin our exploration of the solution by gaining knowledge of the ground. Appreciating the physical configuration of European cities, and the isolated suburbs that ring them, is fundamental to any proposed solution.

What defines a city: essential functions

Not only are buildings exoskeletal, cities can be either exoskeletal or endskeletal. A city’s skeleton is its network of roads and major structures; its nervous system is its transportation lines. Thus the modern city is physically defined by its streetscapes and its people flows among the five essential urban uses: home, school, work, shopping, and recreation. In a healthy city, all these are readily available, preferably on foot, with security and the perception of security.

That perception is as critical as the reality — both citizens and would-be perpetrators must believe the law is just around the corner, invisible but ever-vigilant. When it breaks down, we have looting in New Orleans, torched cars in Paris.

Toulouse, France

Housing is a city’s anchor, for it is where jobs go at night. If the jobs leave at night, so does money (for jobs are wealth creation made manifest), and money demands safety. Poverty cares less about safety because there is nothing to steal and thus the crimes are smaller, more personal, and more chronic: extortion and protection replace robbery.

Genetic code of the European city

In Europe, what we recognize as a city — as opposed to a village, encampment, or military garrison (for definitions, see box) — is an outgrowth of the early Renaissance, a time when Western civilization moved beyond autonomous agriculture and into structured distant trade. (Both the Greeks and the Romans established cities as we define them, but as all those cities fell into dissolution, the city re-emerged as a new creation.)

Types of communities

· Village. A cluster of homes at the nucleus of an agrarian self-sufficient community, undefended and bounded by farms.

· Encampment. A temporary resting place for a nomadic populace, characterized by minimal permanence (e.g. a well or oasis) and predominantly portable accommodations.

· Garrison. An imposed outpost with the purpose of protecting a larger surround and housing a military force. A fort writ large.

· City. A permanent market with a distinct identity and an independent polity. (Cities include towns, which differ in scale but not in interpersonal congress.) By definition, a port is a city. By definition, a city never sleeps.

A slum is thus redefined as an economically rational, socially and physically dysfunctional neighborhood within a city.

Such cities were independent polities because there was no superior political organization, and as independent polities, they now and then had to be defended from roving armies. These cities thus grew hard shells, circular walls broken only by heavily fortified guard towers.

Lucca, Italy, whose city walls are fully intact

Avila, Spain

The early-Renaissance European city of first Italy (Ubrino, Orvieto, Todi, Lucca, Siena), then the continent, is thus like a coral: in times of tranquility open and expanded around the countryside, contracting into an impenetrable hard shell in times of violence. The walls define its footprint.

Chester, United Kingdom

Chester, 1571

Inside that small protected space are all the essential elements: town green, market square, cathedral, city hall, and every form of specialist craft that serves a large population, plus accompanying residential housing, starting from the apex — palaces, mansions, rectories — and right down to worker’s quarters.

[The physical hard shell also is symbolic of a political shell. European nations with the strongest city-states, particularly Italy, were among the Western world's last places to become nations, achieving this status only late in the nineteenth century.]

Space is at a premium, so houses are small, as are roads. Old-world city centers are vehicle hostile: they were never designed to accommodate wheeled transport, and they do not.

[Imagine the gauche automotive terror my mother-in-law once faced when she found herself, by confusion of map-reading, driving atop Lucca's city walls!]

They were also manufacturing-hostile. European city centers might accommodate artisans and craftsmen, but not foundries — those were sited out of town. Josiah Wedgwood built his own manufactory on his own river (the Trent and Mersey Canal) in the Midlands.

Wedgwood’s Etruria factory, directly in the path of the Trent and Mersey canal

Genetic code of the American (more generally, New World) city

Typical American cities were settled by pioneers who rolled their wagons into what they saw as virgin territory and set to work laying out neat grid configurations. Those cities, laid afresh on the plains by homesteaders hauling Conestoga wagons and toting hunting rifles, were founded without walls, paid afresh on the plains with broad, vehicle-friendly streets. Where the European city ended in a wall, an American city ends with a right angled turn onto a sign-posted dirt road.

It is no surprise, in an American motel, for the front window to face a parking lot, the rear window to overlook a cornfield.

[The same orthogonal grid dominated throughout the English colonies, so Americans are instantly at home navigating downtown Melbourne, Winnipeg, Darwin, and even Pretoria.]

Melbourne, Australia

Pretoria, South Africa

Darwin, Australia

Winnipeg, Canada

Sacramento, California

In the American city, manufacturing and commerce and homes all coexisted, block by block, as the city grew and grew outward from its initial seed. Even as urban an environment as Manhattan always had — and today still has — the Garment District.

I grew up in Marblehead, Massachusetts, which today a visitor would see as a picture-postcard tourist ‘old town’ stapled to a classical American suburb. But in the Civil War the town manufactured bullets, and I can still dimly remember working shoe factories in downtown Marblehead, housed in large warehouse-style buildings with red asphalt shingling.

Genetic imprint and the first demographic wave:

The persistence of city structure in post-WW2 Europe

Where an American city is thus a tabula rasa, a European city is a palimpsest that is permanently imprinted with an anachronistic pattern. (There’s one exception: for a few cities such as Rotterdam, World War II bombing destroyed the downtown core so thoroughly the rebuilding could lay down a new grid, but by military expedience very few cities suffered such a fate.) That fourteenth-century configuration remained even as the second half of the twentieth century saw unprecedented urbanization and the remaking of European society to accommodate, if not tolerate, the automobile.

With the city center both cherished and inflexible, where could the new people, and the industry, and the manufacturing, and the cars, go?

In Europe, as in America, they had to go out — out beyond the ring road, out into the formerly agricultural spaces. But where in America this was a continuous growth — just grid a few more streets, lay out some new signs, string some new poles and wire, and annex the result — in Europe was forced to leap into the unknown. European post-war jobs were thus zoned into Industrial Estates, as they became known, disconnected from the city center. Out there – out among the Industrial Estates — there arose a need for new workers’ housing.

[One might have thought that Europe after WW2 would embrace the new town, but here we encounter cultural conservatism and historic snobbery. The UK has built new towns in Milton Keynes, Swindon, and Corby -- all of them perfectly pleasant places, accommodating and well designed -- but to this day the names are used as talismans of crass commercialism.]

Enter the housing estates, the subject for Part 2, coming tomorrow.

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