The Vision of the European City, from Oswald Spengler to COM (2004) 60 Final

The vision of the European city, from Oswald Spengler to COM (2004) 60 final

Michael Hebbert

Professor of Town Planning, University of Manchester

Keynote Address to VI Suomalaiset Historiapäivät, Finnish History Society Sixth Annual Congress, Lahti, Finland February 18th 2005

Published as

Hebbert, M (2005) 'The vision of the European city' Tiedepolitikka 30, 3, 27-34

Tiedepolitiika is a political quarterly,

Helsinki, ISSN 0782-0674, www.tiedelitto.net

Carl Schorske’s essay on the idea of the city in European thought begins with Voltaire and ends with Spengler (Schorske 1963). Voltaire’s city is a place of possibility and diversity, open to the talents, offering its élites a continuous stimulus to creativity through proximity. Spengler’s is the terminal point of degenerate materialism, destined for brutal bloodletting, economic collapse, and catastrophic abandonment.

Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes) was an intensely bitter and pessimistic book, completed during the First World War by an author whose private income had dried up and whose house in Munich was so cold that he put his writing chair on top of the dining table to escape the draughts (Fischer 1989). But after the war he could afford the heating bills. His book became a surprising international best- seller, with a print run of 90,000. Spengler caught the dystopian, anti-urban mood of intellectual life between the wars. Lewis Mumford described him in 1939 as 'a black crow hoarsely cawing whose prophetic wings cast a gigantic shadow over the whole landscape' (Mumford 1939 217). That shadow streched far down the twentieth century, profoundly influencing Modernist perceptions of the city as an organism sick beyond recovery (Tunnard 1953 43).

However, there is more to Decline of the West than urban pessimism and the cultural premonition of Fascism. The two thinkers to whom Spengler claimed to owe

‘practically everything’ were Neitschze (of course) but also Goethe. His essay drew significantly on Enlightenment ideas of the city as a cradle of culture - on Goethe,

Voltaire, Fichte - as well as on the dialectical historicism of Marx and Engels (Schorske

1963 113). It contains many subtle insights into the relationship between urban culture and the town as artefact,

‘. . this mass of stone and wood set in the landscape, with its stone-

enclosed streets and its stone-paved squares - a domicile, truly, of

strange form and strangely teeming with men ! But the real miracle is

the birth of the soul of a town. A mass soul of a wholly new kind . . a

totality. And the whole lives, breathes, grows and acquires a face and

an inner form and a history. It is above all the expression of the city's

'visage' that has a history. The play of this facial expression indeed is

almost the spiritual history of the culture itself.' (Spengler 1932 90)

Spengler believed that every human culture is rooted in a distinct concept of spatiality, a prime symbol, which for the Greco-Roman world was the sensuous,

Apollonian presence of the body, but in modern Western European civilisation has been the idea of endless space and what he called the ‘Faustian’ impulse to discover and possess this infinity. Its purest expression is in music, but it has also shaped what

Goethe called the frozen music of architecture and urbanism. While oriental architecture turns its back on the world, Western buildings turn their facades, ‘their faces’, towards it (1932 94). The stone physiognomies of urban architecture incorporate the humanness of their citizens. Like their makers, these facades are 'all eye and intellect' (1932 93).

* * * * *

Donatella Calabi’s recent book The Market and the City describes the physical remodelling of the major marketplaces in the cities of early modern Europe. Her study allows us to translate Spengler’s vague but evocative imagery into tangible urban history grounded in legal and iconographic sources (Calabi 2004). From Lübeck and London to Seville and Genoa she finds urban élites altering the street pattern and

3 regularizing the facades and the building line which defines urban spaces:

‘All of Europe seemed to have gone through a process of modernisation that

consisted above all in a more careful articulating-cum-concatenation of its

“empty” spaces (designed for movement and pause) and a clearer definition of

their physical boundaries’ (2004 17)

This activity is partly pragmatic, responding to rising volumes of trade and the need for fire-resistant spaces for storage and dealing. But it also has, in Spengler’s terms, a

Faustian aspect, for the public spaces of these cities expressed their collective identity and purpose at a time when cities were themselves prime movers in European history (Calabi 2004 ch 5).

Self-governing cities were not laid out with the axial geometries and regimented perspective lines of the Age of Absolutism, but irregularly, humanely, accommodating to the variety of circumstances and plot boundaries. They expressed the social pact - as Spengler saw - through an individualist architecture of street frontages. In later years, as old streets were widened or demolished for modern municipal engineering projects and sanitary improvements, many mourned the destruction of physiognomy and character - Camillo Sitte in Vienna, Marcel Poëte in Paris, Charles Buls in Brussels.

Buls, himself a modernising, reformist Burgomaster, set up group in 1903 to document the disappearing ‘Old Brussels’. They ignored great monuments and landmarks, but focussed minutely on the doorways and entrances of street facades, their windows, balconies, pignons (gable ends) and metallwork grilles (Buls 1907). All eye and intellect, these facades were the soul of the city.

* * * * *

Urban élites, for Fernand Braudel, were the hares of the early modern period, who raced ahead with spirit but were outdone by the tortoise of the nation-state with its standing armies, lawyers, tax-collectors and monarchic patronage (1991 37). In a famous essay on the ‘Associational and Status Peculiarities of the Occidental City’, written at the same time as Decline of the West, the sociologist Max Weber celebrated the uniqueness of Europe’s urban communities of free burghers, who lived within their own walls, made their own laws and regulated their own trade and manufactures. But his ‘autocephalic’ vision of European urbanism (each city literally its own capital) was written in the past tense, elegaically describing an autonomy that had been curtailed first by the state and then, from the nineteenth century, by the rise of industrial capitalism. Don Martindale’s preface to the English translation of

The City by Max Weber ended with the observation that the modern city is everywhere bypassed by the state and its internal structures are in decay:

‘the age of the city seems to be at an end’ (Weber 1958 188-90).

That was the verdict in 1958. But would those words be written today ? I think not.

Fifty years on, the history of urban élites seems to have opened a new chapter. In the boundless mobility of digital technology the face-to-face community has recovered some of its historic advantage. In an integrating European Union, sovereignty has dispersed between multiple levels of government, allowing municipalities to pursue actions that the tortoise state would have quashed. Late 20C globalisation has, paradoxically, created spaces for action that did not exist in the state-bounded world of high modernism. Open world markets challenge cities to define and build themselves a competitive niche (Savitch and Kantor 2002). Trapped between the corporate might of the USA and the immense industrial productivity of

Asia, the old continent has begun to recognise that its only economic future lies in the

5 creativity of knowledge workers, whose best milieu is urban : Munich, Cambridge,

Helsinki, Manchester (CEC 2004a).

Reviewing these trends, Patrick Le Galès and Arnaldo Bagnasco (2000) return to Max

Weber’s essay of 1921 in order to rewrite its pessimistic conclusion. The European city is far from obsolete. Its urban élites, they argue, have an opportunity today that echoes the freedoms of Weber’s golden age, between the fall of feudalism and the rise of the nation state. For Bagnasco and Le Galès, the early 21C is another of the rare historical interludes when a wider disintegration creates scope for local collective action. The tortoise has lost some of its grip, the hares can run again.

The Le Galès thesis opens up a rich vein for contemporary research into urban élite networks (e.g. the European Science Foundation’s programme on cities as intenational and transnational actors, CITTÀ: www.dieselonline.it/citta-esf/).

However, neither the ESF programme nor Le Galès and Bagnasco discuss the European city as a physical artifact - that strange domicile of wood and stone, set in the landscape, with its Faustian facades. In the next two sections I want to consider the vision of the European city as architectural setting and environmental system, in each case taking the lurid prophecies of Spengler as the point of departure.

* * * * *

Oswald Spengler, looking down from one of the old towers of Munich onto the first waves of modern suburbanisation, thought he was witnessing the physical disintegration of the organic European city. He prophesied a future of sprawling ‘soul- deserts’ of suburbia in unbounded, inorganic metropolitan regions:

I see, long after AD 2000, cities laid out for ten to twenty million inhabitants,

spread over enormous areas of countryside, with buildings that will dwarf the

biggest of today’s, and notions of traffic and communication that we should

regards as fantastic to the point of madness (Spengler 1932 100).

Spengler’s nihilistic vision had many admirers in the architectural and town planning professions (Hebbert 2005). Regarding the old city of streets as moribund, they saw it as their role to bring on a transformation that would bring the facades tumbling down so that light, air and natural greenery could pour through the city. Mid 20C urban

élites enjoying their new privilege of motorised mobility, were captivated by the modernist promise of uninterrupted door-to-door motoring. It was a case of trahison des clercs. All over Europe, Spengler’s nightmare became the town planner’s dream.

Take the case of Brussels. Having escaped the Second World War undamaged, the city was laid out for deep surgery in the 1960s and 1970s. Place des Martyres, symbolic birthplace of the Belgian nation, was excavated for an underground carpark. To its north the Plan Manhattan destroyed the homes of 13,000 residents and 3,000 workplaces to create a 52-hectare site for 55 office towers. In 1969 bulldozers started to erase a second renewal district in the flea-market neighbourhood of La Marolle.

Then something turned. Students and community activists took to the streets of

Brussels. The soul of the city which Spengler had pronounced dead, proved itself alive, asserting its vitality through street protest and the ballot box. Public engagement slowed, though it could not stop, the destruction of old Brussels.

Parallel events occured in Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, London, Copenhagen, Barcelona.

The protection of streets as a common element in urban structure was a pedestrians’ revolt against the motorcar. It affirmed the human scale of the public realm and the

7 continuing connection between a city’s visage and its collective memory.

* * * * *

The darkest strand in Spengler’s narrative of the Decline of the West is the ultra- conservative and very Germanic doctrine of the nexus between the folk and the land

(Schama 1996). City-based civilization breaks the nexus, contradicts nature and divorces habitat from landscape. Enervated and impotent, its élites inhabit an artificial world that is ‘too good to be true’. As the wheel of destiny revolves, they must succumb to the vital but brutal primitive type: blood flows, civilization collapses, and ‘man becomes a plant again, adhering to the soil, dumb and enduring’

(1932 435).

Spengler framed that narrative of nature and the city in his usual language of cultural pessimism. In 2005 we have even better cause than he did to be be alarmed about

Western civilization’s rapacity and denial of nature. Science is now producing global warming scenarios just as grim as Spengler’s culturalist nightmare. But in today’s scenario the dense and artificial agglomeration is no longer the root evil: in fact, within strategies of sustainable development, it appears less as problem than as solution. In this final section of my paper, I want to discuss the vision of the

European city from an environmental perspective. And since environmental law and policy is mostly a competence of the EU, this brings us neatly to the question whether

Europe itself has a collective vision for the city.

For many years the answer was no. The bias of European political integration was always anti-urban. Three quarters of EU spending is rural though four out of five

European citizens live in towns and cities. Unlike farmland and forestry, built-up areas do not have a Commissioner, directorate and budget allocation to look after their interests. DG Regio seeks its institutional partners among regional governments rather than municipalities. In the Council of Ministers, member states have resisted intrusions into town business, for that they regard as a domestic policy preserve.

Nevertheless, events over the two decades have forced the Community to begin to articulate a collective vision of the European City.

From 1987-92 the Environment portfolio in the European Commission was held by the

Italian politician Carlos Ripa de Meana. Di Meana, a Roman, believed passionately that the Community should not be silent and passive about the condition of towns and cities. A critical report from the European Parliament gave him the opportunity to commission a Green Paper on the Urban Environment. To draft this paper he set up a small unit consisting of a functionary from DGXI and a national expert from a member state. The civil servant was an English biologist and town planner, Nicholas Hanley, who had joined the Commission through a secondment from the Countryside

Commission. The expert, nominated through the provincial government of Wallonia, was a Belgian sociologist called René Schoonbrodt.

Schoonbrodt, one of the leading protestors in the campaign against offices and motorways in Brussels, was the activist-founder of the federation of French-speaking nighbourhood groups, the Atelier de Recherche et d’Action Urbaines (ARAU). He was also a passionate and prolific exponent of the old European axiom that ‘city air makes you free’:

To build the town is matter of conviction : the town is a moral and political project in which two ideas come together - first the idea of liberty as the

basis of humanity, and second the idea of the town as the basis of liberty, the place of contact with otherness (other people, other cultures), the physical framework for human coexistence (ARAU 1999). In 1989, he had published (with Pierre Ansay) Penser la Ville, a collection of philosophical writings from Plato to Jurgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt and Henri

Lefebvre, prefaced by a substantial essay affirming the continuing philosophical significance of the compact European city, where social and cultural difference coexist in shared space.

Carlos di Meana insisted that the Green Paper had to meet a publication deadline of

June 6th 1990, World Environment Day. Written in only six months, it missed all the customary iterations, redraftings and policy compromises. In a twelve hour cabinet debate some text-cuts were imposed, for example to a passage which daringly suggested that traffic congestion might have some merit as a means of regulating demand. But the Green Paper as approved for publication retained an uncommon radicalism, freshness and vitality of vision (CEC 1990). It went far beyond the conventional environmental agenda of air and water pollution and waste disposal. It took a long historical perspective on the causes of urban decline, highlighting the contributions of planning regulation, single-use zoning, out-of-town retail and the general Americanisation of land use. It attacked low density suburbanisation, challenging the environmental credentials of the cult of the individual family home and private car. And, in passages which most clearly showed the hand of

Schoonbrodt, it affirmed the idea that urban diversity, proximity and compactness were values at the very heart of the European project.

The Green Paper was a seminal work, widely read and cited, and its conceptualisation of the compact city remains the most significant reference point in contemporary

10 discussion about European urbanism (Lloyd-Jones 2004). At first, Member states opposed its implication that the European city is a topic of European interest. In the

Commission, the powerful directorates for environment, regional policy and transport vetoed any reallocation of functions or funds to a new urban portfolio. The

Commission’s initial response, delayed until 1988, was limited to a handful of points on information, liaison, and targeted expenditure. But gradually the ideas of the

Green Paper penetrated. The EU’s current Environmental Action Programme (2002) incorporates a draft Thematic Strategy on the Urban Environment - the document

COM (2004)60 of my title (CEC 2004b), which is likely to be adopted as Community policy in the summer of 2005.

The strategy will bring the European Union, for the first time, into the arena of municipal policy-making. Controversially it requires all towns of more than 100,000 population to make an urban environment management plan, a procedural device dressed up with a typical bureaucratic panoply of regulatory instruments, audit mechanisms, stakeholder systems and methodological ‘toolkits’. More interestingly, however, the thematic strategy retains the Green Paper’s substantive vision of the

European city as a high density, mixed-use settlement, which controls its growth, restricts suburban sprawl, and steers development demand towards the re-use of brownfield land and empty property (2004b 25).

This strategy of nucleated, walkable urbanism is not advanced for cultural reasons or because of its historical resonance, but as a means of decoupling economic growth from transport growth, limiting greenhouse gas emissions, enhancing biodiversity, and promoting human health. The strategy applies as forcibly to new areas of development as to old. The vision responds to Kyoto commitments and the pressing

11 evidence of environmental degradation. It looks forward, not back.

* * * * *

The poem Dark Music of the Rue du Cherche-Midi by Muriel Spark, a Scot who for decades has lived in Rome, opens with the question

If you should ask me, is there a street of Europe,

and where, and what, is that ultimate street ?

She finds her answer in a Roman road the Rue du Cherche-Midi in Paris. The street is cast in continuous shadow by its tall, ancient facades with their brooding memories.

But at pavement level are junk shops, jewellers, chocolate-makers and boutiques:

Beads and jewels of long ago look out

from their dark shopwindows

like blackberries in a wayside bramble bush

holding out their arms:

Take me, pick me, I am dark and sweet,

ripe and moist with life.

The streets of the European city are places both of memory and of promise. The great shifts of 21C globalisation have created chances for the city to become once again, the collective actor that it historically was. Urban elites are aware that opportunity.

At the same time, the calamity of global warming has revalorised the typical historical forms of European urbanism, ‘the most congenial living environment ever designed by man’ (Burtenshaw et al 1991 304), with its public realm of streets and squares, enclosed by the watching facades of buildings, and its encompassing boundaries, marking a separation of town and country (Waterhouse 1993). If there is

12 to be a future city it will have density and pemeability, streets that can be walked, building facades that cast their shadows on a shared public realm.

This vision is not nostalgic or introspective. Unlike the American Congress for New

Urbanism, the European vision of sustainable urbanism is not wedded to neotraditional pastiche (Hebbert 2003). In its 2004 report, the European Expert Group on Urban Design for Sustainability praised the quality of contemporary municipal schemes under Finland’s Land Use and Building Act of 1999. They singled out Pikku

Huopalahti in Helsinki, a modern neighbourhood of greenspace and water which seeks

to demonstrate the strength of the traditional urbanism of European towns, with

ordinary streets and squares, and small shops and restaurants on the ground floor

of buildings (Lloyd-Jones 2004 31-2)

In the bright, contemporary, experimental streets of this ‘urban village by the bay’, a

Faustian vision of the European city is alive and well.

* * * * *

The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Royal Commission for the

Exhibition of 1851.

* * * * *

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