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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 1 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- 2 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. * * * * * 4 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: 6 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.
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