Flammable Cities: Urban Conflagration and the Making of The

F C Flammable Cities Urban Conflagration and the Making of the Modern World Edited by G B U L¨ J S T U W P Publication of this volume has been made possible, in part, through support from the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at LMU Munich, Germany. The University of Wisconsin Press 1930 Monroe Street, 3rd Floor Madison, Wisconsin 53711–2059 uwpress.wisc.edu 3 Henrietta Street London WC2E 8LU, England eurospanbookstore.com Copyright © 2012 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any format or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews. Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Flammable cities: Urban conflagration and the making of the modern world / edited by Greg Bankoff, Uwe Lübken, and Jordan Sand. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-299-28384-1 (pbk.: alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-299-28383-4 (e-book) 1. Fires. 2. Fires—History. I. Bankoff, Greg. II. Lübken, Uwe. III. Sand, Jordan. TH9448.F59 2012 363.3709—dc22 2011011572 C Acknowledgments vii Introduction 3 P : C F R 1 Jan van der Heyden and the Origins of Modern Firefighting: Art and Technology in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam 23 S D K 2 Governance, Arson, and Firefighting in Edo, 1600–1868 44 J S and S W 3 Taming Fire in Valparaíso, Chile, 1840s–1870s 63 S J. M 4 The Burning of a Modern City? Istanbul as Perceived by the Agents of the Sun Fire Office, 1865–1870 82 C Z 5 Imperial Russia’s Urban Fire Regimes, 1700–1905 103 C A. F 6Fighting Fires (or Not) in Porfirian Mexico 126 A S. G P : F R C C 7 The Great Fire of Lisbon, 1755 147 M M 8A Tale of Two Cities: The Pyro-Seismic Morphology of Nineteenth-Century Manila 170 G B v vi Contents 9 Fire and Urban Morphogenesis: Patterns of Destruction and Reconstruction in Nineteenth-Century Montreal 190 J G 10 The Great Fire of Hamburg, 1842: From Catastrophe to Reform 212 D S 11 Did the Fire Insurance Industry Help Reduce Urban Fires in the United States in the Nineteenth Century? 235 S E. W 12 Inflaming the Fears of Theatergoers: How Fires Shaped the Public Sphere in Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1880–1910 254 K MC 13 Points of Origin: The Social Impact of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire 273 A R D P : T P F 14 The Politics of Singapore’s Fire Narrative 295 N H. K 15 The Beirut Central District on Fire: Firefighting in a Divided City with Shifting Front Lines, 1975–1976 314 S T S 16 Who Burned Cleveland, Ohio? The Forgotten Fires of the 1970s 332 D K 17 “There Is More to This Fire Than Meets the Eye”: Anatomy of Fire Outbreaks in Lagos, Nigeria, 1980–2008 353 A O 18 Fires, Urban Environments, and Politics in Contemporary Jakarta 372 Jˆ T Afterword: Fire on the Fringe 390 S J. P Contributors 397 Index 401 A The editors would like to thank several people and institutions whose help and support was crucial for this project. The German Historical Institute (GHI) in Washington, DC, sponsored and hosted the conference out of which this volume ultimately grew. Christof Mauch, director of the GHI at the time of the conference, supported this project from the first moment he heard about it and encouraged us to move forward. This support was continued by the GHI’s current director, Hartmut Berghoff, and its senior editor, David Lazar. Without the help of Christa Brown and Bärbel Thomas we would not have been able to overcome the logistical challenges that the organization of such an international conference poses. To all of these people we are truly grateful. During the conference, John McNeill, Georgetown University, not only offered valuable critical comments from which all participants benefited but also managed to combine participation in the conference with his duties as a basketball coach. We are indebted and grateful, of course, to all the participants of the conference for two days of lively discussion in a stimulating atmosphere. Finally, we would like to thank the anonymous reviewers who recommended the publication of this book, and especially to express our appreciation to Gwen Walker and all the editorial staff at the University of Wisconsin Press who have made this collection a much better book, the publication of which has been generously supported by the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich. vii F C Introduction n most cities of the wealthy countries today, fires have been reduced to an I occasional and isolated threat or a minor news item. Ordinary citizens entrust their suppression to professional fire departments. However, conflagration was once far more central a fact of urban life. Preindustrial cities burned fre- quently, and on a scale rarely seen today. Uncontrolled fires affected every aspect of society in these flammable cities, including the shape of the city itself. Yet many of them prospered, and some grew to populations of over a million inhabi- tants. New building and extinguishing technologies and the rise of fire insurance have fundamentally altered the relationship between cities and fire since the seventeenth century. As the world population in the same four centuries went from an overwhelmingly agrarian one to more than 50 percent urban, the history of urban fire and the changing ways that people have sought to prevent it, fight it, recover from it—and in some cases manipulate it—is also the history of how the modern world was made. Although it has been common to conceive of the city as an artificial creation set in opposition to nature, like the agricultural landscape, cities too are human interventions in the natural environment.1 They remain greatly affected by the forces of climate and require constant labor to sustain them against the elements. 3 4 The ways that different societies have adapted themselves to and remolded the natural environment for concentrated human settlement are vividly exposed by the history of conflagrations. At the same time, the majority of urban fires have been anthropogenic. Their history therefore reveals patterns of social and economic causes, tied closely not only to the destructive effects of crime, riots, and war, but also to the constructive processes of politics, innovation, and capital investment. The essays in this volume examine the ramifications of urban conflagration in eighteen cities and regions around the world from the seventeenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first. Each probes in depth the historical conditions and events of a particular place. The juxtaposition of these histories brings to light a wealth of points of comparison, laying the foundation of a general typology of urban fire. It also shows the degree to which firefighting and prevention knowledge, as well as stories of great fires, have traveled, connecting urban practices and ideas in disparate places. At the same time, when viewed in global perspective, the problem of urban conflagration, far from being a matter of only historical concern, emerges as an ongoing one. Cities around the world continued to be built of wood and other flammable materials well into the twentieth century. Some still are. Particularly where large migrant populations self-build in flammable materials on small lots, conflagration continues to be endemic. And the influence of fire remains omnipresent in the wealthy cities of the developed world as well in the form of the many different strategies and institutions of prevention, from illuminated exit door signs and sprinkler systems to fire insurance.2 Our aim in assembling studies of these cities and regions is to gain new perspective on the phenomenon of the flammable city through multiple approaches, and most of all, through treatment of a global geographical range. Rather than focusing on the largest and most famous fires or only the largest cities, we have sought to bring together sites and issues that, when viewed together, might provide the beginnings of a global map of the conditions and the historical issues of flammable cities. We have grouped them here into three broad thematic sections, which also follow a loose chronology. The first treats what we call the “urban fire regimes” developed in early modern cities: the systems of building and managing cities that developed in relation to specific patterns of fire engen- dered by local environmental and social conditions. The second group of essays treats conflagration or the threat of conflagration both as a specific form of risk and as a catalyst for social and structural change. Examples extend from the mid-eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. The third group of essays, treating the politics of fire, brings the reader into the late Introduction 5 twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries, and returns to central questions concerning the political meanings of urban conflagration, particularly in the context of the squatter-built cities and conditions of urban administrative collapse that have become part of the landscape of global modernity. Although the salient questions differ in different times and places, taken together these studies show that the process of limiting the effects of uncontrolled fire or its threat has been a central—if often overlooked—feature in the planning and building of modern cities, and more importantly, that the efforts to master and marginalize conflagration have never been based on simple economic calculation, but have involved a complex social and political calculus.

Load more