The Transformation of the World (68 page)

Streetcar, Subway, Automobile

Many problems of city transportation were eventually solved with the introduction of the electric streetcar: 1888 in the United States, 1891 in Leeds and Prague, 1896 as a Tsarist prestige project in Nizhni Novgorod, 1901 in London, 1903 in the small German town Freiburg im Breisgau (where I live). Technically, it involved the conversion of energy from an electrical drive into rolling movement. The streetcar brought a real revolution to the modern city: it was twice as fast and only half as expensive as a horse-drawn tram and finally made it possible for ordinary workers to commute to work. Tumbling fares had the same consequences as in the case of transatlantic steamships decades earlier. In Britain the number of trips per capita via public transportation soared from a mere eight in 1870 to 130 in 1906. On the eve of the First World War, nearly all large European cities had a streetcar network; the end of horse traction there was truly imminent. New York withdrew all its horse-drawn buses in 1897, and by 1913 there were none left in Paris either.
²⁴⁰
For the very poor, however, the streetcar was still prohibitively expensive. It was a boon mainly for workers with regular employment.

In Asia it was not horses but men who supplied the energy to carry people to the railroad. The Japanese rickshaw (also called
kuruma
), a kind of sedan chair on two wheels, was invented in 1870 and soon entered mass production; by the 1880s it was being exported to China, Korea, and Southeast Asia.
²⁴¹
Large firms moved quickly to organize the rickshaw trade in Japan's big cities, engaging in sharp price wars with one another. In 1898 more than 500 rickshaws waited for
customers outside the Osaka train station. In 1900 Tokyo had a force of 50,000 pullers. To ride in a human-powered single-axis vehicle was at first a luxury; it later became a necessity for many, before the spread of streetcars toward the end of the Meiji made it once more a service with a high-class profile.
²⁴²
In Japan too, horse traction was displaced by the electric streetcar soon after the turn of the century.

At the end of our era, the age of the automobile had not yet begun. This technological innovation enabled the real explosion of cities, first in the United States, then after the Second World War in Europe too. In 1914 there were 2.5 million personal motor vehicles in the world. By 1930 there would be 35 million. Around the turn of the century in continental Europe, it was still a sensational experience for many to come face to face with one. Those who did not own such a rare and costly machine might perhaps have the chance to ride in a motor cab: the number of horse-drawn hackney carriages in Berlin fell dramatically after 1907, and the fleet of motorized “taxis” (including some with an electric motor) had drawn almost level by 1914. In 1913 there was one passenger car per 1,567 inhabitants in Germany, one per 437 in France, and already one per 81 in the United States; in southern and eastern Europe there were scarcely any at all in private ownership. Outside the large cities, the automobile was not part of everyday life before the First World War. The United States, where the technically best were produced, was the only country on earth to which that statement did not apply. From the point of view of transportation technology, the twentieth century began in the United States. It was only there that the car was, by 1920, more than a curiosity but the technical basis for new kinds of mass transportation system.
²⁴³

The largest pioneering enterprise in urban public transport was the London Underground, the first in the world, which combined a railroad system with tunneling techniques tested in the construction of sewers. It was a private initiative, originating not in farsighted urban planning but in the vision of one man, Charles Pearson. Throughout the nineteenth century it remained a profitoriented project in the spirit of capitalist entrepreneurship. Work on the Underground began in 1860. Three years later, the first six-kilometer stretch of the Metropolitan Line (“Metro” would become a standard name all over the world) went into operation. The train lines were fifteen to thirty-five meters below ground, but it was possible to speak of a real “Tube” only when new techniques in the 1890s allowed the tunneling to go deeper still. Electrification work began straightaway. Until then the (originally windowless) carriages had been drawn by steam trains—which presented special problems in a closed tunnel—and dimly lit by oil or gas lamps. Locomotives had difficulty climbing underground slopes; they would often grind to a halt and roll backward.

Many property owners did not allow construction work to take place on or under their land—which explains the frequent bends and the generally awkward layout of the line. But since the resistance to overground rail lines was even
greater, the Underground in effect owes its existence to being considered the lesser of two evils. At first, like the railroad, it had to convince numerous skeptics. In 1863 Lord Palmerston, the seventy-nine-year-old prime minister, refused to take part in the opening celebrations: at his age one should be happy to remain above ground as long as possible. The public, however, had no such reservations. On its very first day of business, January 10, 1863, the new line carried 30,000 passengers. Uncomfortable and dirty though it was—a retired colonial official from the Sudan later compared the noise to the breathing of a crocodile—it proved itself to be a relatively fast and accident-free means of transport. The gradual enlargement of the network crucially assisted the integration of the metropolis with the newly developing suburbs. It was both affordable for a wide circle of users and profitable for the business that ran it. The other underground systems that followed the London model were: Budapest (1896), Glasgow (1896), Boston (1897), Paris (1900), New York (1904), and Buenos Aires (1913). In Asia the first metro launched in 1927, in Tokyo.
²⁴⁴
The old brainchildof British engineers is today a reality all over the world. Never have so many subways been built as in the period since 1970.

Slums and Suburbs

In the pedestrian city, the best private addresses were also the most central. From premodern Paris to Edo, localities outside the city walls were regarded as distinctly inferior. Mexico City is a good illustration of such a concentric order: the Spanish occupied the center with their offices, churches, monasteries, colleges, and business premises, including many dark-skinned servants in their midst. The next circle consisted of new immigrants, ranked according to their place of origin. Finally, the outside circle was made up of Indian villages.
²⁴⁵
In 1900 Moscow looked much the same: the best places were in the center, and conditions grew worse the farther out one went. Outer areas were wild and rough—poorly lit streets, wooden huts still without kerosene lamps, a lot of overgrown land, barefooted people—the end of civilization for bourgeois and aristocratic Muscovites.
²⁴⁶
In many of today's megacities, the shantytowns of the jobless poor lie similarly on the outer periphery, cut off from the center.

It was therefore not a matter of course that the values of core and periphery should be reversed. Where this happened, where it became desirable to live far from downtown, it became the third major revolution in the urban history of the nineteenth century, after the railroad invasion and the general cleanup. Suburbanization, understood as a process whereby outlying areas grew faster than the inner core and commuting became a normal part of life, began in Britain and the United States around 1815. It would eventually be taken to extremes in the United States and Australia, whereas Europeans would never develop such a fondness for living outside the city center.
²⁴⁷
Even before private automobiles became widespread in the 1920s, the ideal of the spatially isolated household took solid root in the United States. Few things are as characteristic of the US model
of civilization as the preference for home ownership and for detached housing in low-density areas far from the workplace. This trend reached its apogee in the post-1945 “metropolitan sprawl,” nowhere more so than in Los Angeles, which has been described as “the rejection of the metropolis in favor of its suburbs.”
²⁴⁸

National styles of suburbanization differ from one another in many respects: a French
banlieue
is not the same as the German or Scandinavian type of gardenplot settlement (
Schrebergarten
) that first became popular in the 1880s. Nevertheless, there are basic mechanisms of European suburbanization, which are well exemplified by trends in England. In London, the birthplace of suburbia, and elsewhere in southeastern England, it had long been an upper-class custom to retreat to the country, to enjoy a well-cushioned retirement on a landed estate or in a villa (modestly referred to as a “cottage”). Suburbanization was something new and different. People who still had a regular job in the city center gave up their residence there and commuted on a daily basis. As early as the 1820s the upper middle classes, who could afford to commute by carriage, began to move into mansions and semidetached houses in gentrified areas in the vicinity of central London. John Nash's Regent's Park created an attractive combination of city and country, which would be the model for parklike abodes all over England. When the Parisian townsman Hippolyte Taine visited such districts in Manchester and Liverpool in the 1860s, he was startled by the calm that prevailed there.
²⁴⁹
The central areas of Manchester were abandoned by “swells” even earlier than those of London; one would have lunch at one's club, and in the evening be driven home in a carriage. The pattern was similar in any, the second major country of suburban villas and “fine residential areas” set apart from the city center. But was the “villa,” with its ancient Roman connotations, really a European specialty? When the Moroccan sultanate liberalized in the last third of the nineteenth century, so that well-to-do people no longer had to make themselves small in the eyes of the ruler, the heights above Fez, an old Islamic city with a medieval feel, were soon built over with magnificent houses.
²⁵⁰

The suburban living of ever larger sections of the middle classes presupposed higher incomes, more convenient transportation links, more time available for traveling, and a greater supply of commercially built housing. Early suburbanization should not, of course, be considered in isolation; it was closely bound up with another process in the Victorian city—the rise and fall of slums.
²⁵¹
Industrialization driven by the middle class led to more densely packed low-grade housing in the inner cities, as a result of which the middle class fled the insalubrious poverty and moved into the suburbs. But it still continued to draw an income from the slums, either in the form of rent or from the proceeds of selling the land on which they were built. “Slumification” and suburbanization thus appear as two aspects of the same capitalist process, which for a long time acted itself out under the conditions of a politically unregulated market. Not before 1880 did the view spread in Europe that a free housing market might not provide minimum standards for all, and only after the First World War did an
effective public housing policy begin to operate in a number of countries, such as Great Britain.
²⁵²

This gradual politicization of the housing question presupposed that it was actually defined as a problem. So long as policymakers regarded extreme poverty and slum conditions as “normal,” or even, in a moral twist, as brought on through the fault of those who suffered them, there seemed to be little need for action—as if it was evident that slums were only a first step toward the integration of immigrants into urban society.
²⁵³
In the United States, rather exceptionally, slums arose in high-density city centers (that is, in multistory tenements, most commonly in New York and Cincinnati), where the composition of their population was more ethnically mixed, and they were seen more and more as an abyss of misery and deviant behavior. Under these conditions, the limits to the assimilation of lower-class immigrants were widely discussed around the turn of the century. The continuing slumification in certain European cities—for example, Glasgow, Liverpool, Dublin, Lisbon, or the twelfth and thirteenth arrondissements of Paris—was present as a constant warning.
²⁵⁴
In Britain, slums were feared and abhorred more as a breeding ground for physical or moral disease, as a nagging reminder of the limits of modernity, and not least as an unproductive misuse of valuable land.
²⁵⁵

The middle classes seldom returned to cleared slum areas, which usually became commercial districts. But the flight to spacious and healthy green belts and villa districts was not always the rule in Europe, or even in the United States. The bourgeoisie of Paris, Budapest, or Vienna hung on in its large urban dwellings with sumptuous reception rooms and fairly modest private quarters; in 1890 the centers of those cities were accordingly twice as densely populated as inner London.
²⁵⁶
They too saw a trend away from center to suburbs, but it never reached the scale or speed of the process in London. In this respect New York was an exception to the characteristic American pattern. Between the 1860s and the 1880s, the city dwellings of the upper middle classes—hitherto mostly narrow tenements raised above street level—became more and more voluminous; this happened, at the expense of private gardens, in a context of rising land prices. In the end, apart from the superrich,
all
New Yorkers had hardly any private land at their disposal. One alternative to a move away from the center was the fashion for “French flats” that developed in the 1880s. With the proliferation of hydraulic or electric elevators, it became possible to market high-rise luxury apartments in the inner city. Someone who did not have their heart set on an expensive villa was able, from the turn of the century on, to move into a mid-Manhattan unit complete with telephone, pneumatic mail, and hot and cold running water in a building with a swimming pool and a basement laundry
²⁵⁷