One of my favorite topics to teach is urban history, particularly the interwoven tale of American and European cities in the modern era, from the Industrial Revolution to the present day. It’s a complex story involving racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, fascism, communism, capitalism and criminality as well as more noble ideas of democratic freedom, historic preservation and the pursuit of beauty. All these high aspirations and dark residues are inscribed in cities if we care to look closely enough.
Urban character and beauty, for instance, is often bought at the price of human misery. For example, the grand boulevards of Paris that provide a model for so many other cities were created by Emperor Louis Napoleon III and his planner-cum-financier Baron Georges Eugene Haussmann in the 1860s by evicting tens of thousands of poor Parisians and demolishing their rented hovels, causing untold misery for families cast out on the streets. In place of the rabbit warren of slums, great avenues of apartments, shops and offices were erected all to similar designs and financed by Haussmann and the French government in a way that ensured developers followed the plan. Builders received cheap loans if they built according to Haussmann’s dictates. They were barred access to the loan pool if they didn’t.
Of course, the beneficiaries of all this redevelopment were the middle and upper classes who moved into the new apartments and strolled the boulevards like Baudelaire’s famous flâneur, consuming and creating the culture of the modern city. The Impressionist painter and patron Gustave Cailleboite (he’s the young man astride a chair in Renoir’s famous painting “The Luncheon of the Boating Party”) caught this urban character perfectly in his own paintings of Paris dating from around 1880.
The great avenues also had another purpose. They allowed the government to control the population of Paris more easily, and to limit the opportunities for insurrection by angry mobs of disaffected workers and the unemployed. The wide, straight streets provided ample opportunity for sweeping cavalry charges with sabers drawn, or easy cannon fire to cut a rebellious crowd to pieces. The old crowded, crooked slums, with narrow streets and winding alleys, were ideal for urban ambush, but the new bourgeois center of Paris was crisp and clean and devoid of places for revolutionaries and anarchists to hide.
I can’t help feeling a twinge of guilt when I sit at a Paris cafe, sipping an aperitif and soaking up the visual beauty of the city and its bustling life. I’m enjoying an urban spectacle that was produced at great human cost, and with less than pure motivations.
We discuss the issue in class. Is this guilt valid? Does the political history of a place affect how we feel about it today? Or is it merely the hypersensitivity of an historian? Does the end ever justify the means? The debate in class continues, and I turn the focus to Charlotte. It’s one thing to discuss a fancy foreign city thousands of miles away; it’s somewhat different to dissect your own metropolis.
Several of my students know the story of Second Ward, where the old Brooklyn neighborhood housed a tight-knit African-American community before its destruction in the 1960s under the auspices of Federal urban renewal legislation. My wife, Linda Brown, and I recount the tale of Brooklyn for a British audience in a book drawing on the knowledge of Charlotte historians John Rogers and Tom Hanchett.
Urban renewal legislation was originally intended to clear away slums and build better, affordable housing, but cities and developers across America lobbied Congress to loosen the guidelines so they could demolish old housing and re-develop the newly vacant land for almost any use that was deemed “better” by city governments. Accordingly, Charlotte’s business and political leadership sent a fleet of bulldozers into the Brooklyn neighborhood, and razed almost every structure to the ground.
Not a single new house went up to replace the 1,480 structures that were demolished. Over 1,000 families were displaced, their homes and places of business destroyed, and the social fabric of the community dismantled. Churches, social clubs, the one black high school in Charlotte, the city’s only black public library were all pounded into rubble. A self-sustaining community was effectively wiped out and replaced with wider roads for white commuters through a dismal government district.
This is an old story in Charlotte, and one many would like to put behind them, the same way one might argue that it doesn’t matter today how the Parisian boulevards were developed; let’s just enjoy their beauty. Would we feel any better about the blatantly racist demolition of Brooklyn if the city had built back a great urban showpiece?
These are moral and ethical questions young architects and planners need to ponder. What did their predecessors value? What did they think they were doing? When we make our cities, whom do we make them for?
This article appears in Mar 24-30, 2004.
