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Klaus Philipsen
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Most of human history was static. It was the British physicist David Deutsch in his book "The Beginning of Infinity" who first made me understand that the idea one could invent the future would have been ridiculously foreign to people who repeated what their fathers had done, their grandfathers and so forth.
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The Invention of the Future: A History of Cities
in the Modern World, by Bruno Carvalho.
(Princeton University Press)
[/td]in the Modern World, by Bruno Carvalho.
(Princeton University Press)
That progress is both possible and desirable is perhaps the quintessential idea of the Enlightenment. (David Deutsch)
Bruno Carvalho, a Brazilian-American Harvard Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, African and African American Studies and Co-Director of the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative similarly picks the period of Enlightenment as the starting point for his history of the city and makes the concept of planning the future the central theme in recently published book. (The Invention of the Future - A History of Cities in the Modern World )
His observations begin in the middle of the 18th century, precisely the time when science, thinking and technology started to take off in what we now call the era of enlightenment. Unlike Deutsch, Carvalho is less interested in science than in art, architecture, planning, culture and their effects on cities as lived and imagined spaces. His particular angle is Portugal and its former colony, Brazil. His book originated with lectures and studies in which he explored his topic over several years. Talking about his studies in an interview seven years ago he said:
The author's broad educational background brings together perspectives from the social sciences, design, cultural materials such as art, literature, film. He says that combined with historical knowledge this allows to confront entrenched intuitions and stretch the limits of the thinkable. It is important to him that he undertakes these cross disciplinary journeys with a Brazilian lens instead of the Euro-centric one- he calls the Atlantic- view that prevailed in enlightenment and a long time after in urban research.
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Bruno Carvalho (website)
[/td]He considers how social change such as the abolition of slavery and colonial rule enabled the rapid growth of cities in the global South, from Buenos Aires to Brasilia to Lagos and illustrates with graphs the global shifts in urban growth. As a child the later urbanist explored his native Rio de Janeiro in search of soccer, books, films, and music. When he married an architect, the observation of cities was enriched by watching buildings, the constituent elements of cities.
The question of whether we are objects in a predetermined world or whether we are subjects who can shape the future has been a longstanding debate among philosophers, psychologists and educators.
While Carvalho clearly sides with the belief that we can shape the future he is careful to emphasize the limits. He says right in the introduction that his book tells a story about how ever-changing modern cities defied predictions and remade the destinies of humanity. In other words, the future takes unexpected turns.
He cites the philosopher Walter Benjamin who mused about Klee’s angel painting how the angel facing backwards to the past is watching one "single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage" while he is driven forward by a storm of progress. The angel can’t pause, to "make whole what has been smashed.” “Reasonable expectations underestimate the range of possible outcomes”, Carvalho admonishes. Indeed, a firm believe can move mountains as the English poet William Blake noted 40 years after what Carvalho makes the pivotal event of his book.
Carvalho uses the destruction of Lisbon in 1755 when a giant earthquake leveled most of Lisbon center as the starting point of his observations on urban planning. This puts it 130 years before Peter Halls seminal history of urban planning visions "Cities of Tomorrow- An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design Since 1880", first published in 1988, another book investigating the history of the future, now widely used as seminal source in planning schools. Unlike Carvalho who starts with calamity, the late urban planner Peter Hall begins under the heading "Cities of Imagination" with comprehensive, often radical, utopian visions like the Garden City or Radiant City, which aimed to completely re-engineer urban life and often came out of anarchist ideas. Hall writes:
Similarly, Carvalho recognizes that by far not every plan goes according to what was envisioned. He states:
Though the immediate response to the Lisbon catastrophe of 1755 was despair and a loss of optimism, rather than a roll up the sleeves and build a new city attitude Not surprising in a deeply religious populace trying to come to terms with the destruction of 85% of all structures and maybe about 10,000 dead in a city of then about 200,000 people. But the disaster proved to be an opportunity for a secretary of the king named Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, later known as the Marquis de Pombal. By forging a rational and modern path out of the destruction. the Marquis eventually became the de facto ruler of Portugal The author doesn't acknowledge that his last name is the same as Pombal's, but it is a fun fact, albeit not particularly meaningful, since Carvalho is a common Portuguese name.
Portugal at the time was seen as backwards by the standards of other European countries which were more advanced in enlightenment thinking, but it was also rich as a colonial power, especially through the gold from Brazil, the author's birthplace.
Facing Lisbon's destruction, Pombal in very modern fashion asked the same engineer who had successfully designed a massive aqueduct for Lisbon, which survived the quake, to develop five alternative scenarios for Lisbon's future. The resulting options ranged from rebuild as it was to relocating the city altogether. Pombal eventually adopted the second most radical plan which introduced an all new rectangular street grid for the lower and most destructed portion of the city, erasing all old property lines along tangled streets and alleys and rebuild from scratch. Three years of refinements ended in a plan approved by the king.
The street grid wasn't the only innovation, the new plan mandated more seismic resilient construction, featured cisterns and sewers and large apartment buildings replacing the small and crowded old tenements. The facades of the buildings were cleansed of baroque opulence in favor of more functionality. The plan even banned catholic cathedrals from the usual prominent locations and instead envisioned civic plazas instead.
I recall during my first visit to Lisbon some 50 years ago looking down on to the Baixa, i.e. Pombal's city of 1758, and its Praça do Comércio (Commerce Square). A tourist guide still called it the "new town" and explained how progressive it was at the time.
Of course, Pombal and his architects and engineers worked from precedents, including Cristopher Wren's reconstruction plans for London after the Great Fire of 1666 which remained largely unbuilt because London ultimately opted for a far less drastic approach. Turin in Italy had grid based expansion quarters, but they were built on open space, so was the new city of Petersburg in Russia. The author points out that the 1573 Law of the Indies, enacted by Spain, set forth planning rules for new settlements in the new South American colonies that mandated the grid as a system of order, rationality and control and imposed for each city a plaza mayor. The grid was also used in several Roman cities and was used in Aztec cities All this makes Lisbon as the starting point of the book a bit questionable, but then, the book is less about a particular physical form (the grid) but about the modern notion of planning as a tool of realizing a different future, a future that wasn't destined by prophesy or God. In the new Lisbon not churches but commerce occupied the most prominent spots.
The author uses Lisbon as his baseline case for how urban planning relates to rationalism, bureaucratic centralization, technical innovation and economic reform. This same mix can also be found in the Law of the Indies but in Lisbon it came with a new secular twist. Possibly Carvalho's emphasis on Lisbon is belated making up for the lacking foreign resonance regarding Pombal's modern rebuild plan at the time. Most international attention back then was on the still ongoing medieval practice of burning people on the stakes long a thing of the past in more enlightened countries. Even Pombal wasn't safe. He wasn't burned but his statue would be removed, like Haussman in Paris a century later, Pombal would deposed and fall out of favor for a while. Churches made a comeback in his modern Lisbon whereas in Paris after Haussman came the Commune.
Early on it was Paris, not Lisbon that attracted ideas about the future. The year 1771 produced the first literary utopia placed in a distant future. In it the novelist Mercier fathoms the Paris of the year 2440 with wide, rectilinear boulevards, large public plazas and buildings, all buildings of a consistent height, quite how it actually became after Haussmann, about half a century later. Mercier, of course didn't anticipate the automobile. His utopia included many societal changes such as the abolition of slavery or that the people of Beijing would speak French and a strong bent on the role of literary cultures.
Carvalho is less interested in a chronological development of cities or even the corresponding utopias and more in the inherent contradictions of urban settings and their planning. Urbanity is defined by diversity and flux while planning is trying to bring control, order and discipline. He also points to other dualities such as the romantic preoccupation with rural life and "the pastoral" juxtaposed to the decadent city as the healthier alternative, something he locates in the Jeffersonian model of the United States.The seeming contradiction between planning the future and the resulting unexpected outcomes is what seems to fascinate the author the most, though. Carvalho's frequent excursions to cultural and artistic sidebars extoll the uncontrollable side of urban life which time and again foils the ambitions of autocrats, planners or architects. This ambivalence of the author can frustrate the reader since the narrative arc of the book suffers when -just as in real life- heroes and villains are never neatly divided.
The book includes various period graphics such as William Heath's cartoons on "the march of Intellect" which poke fun of the urban life and the aspirations of an easy future at the same time.
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"Poking fun at liberal ambitions for education reform, the rapid pace of industrialization,
and a fashionable interest in applied knowledge, William Heath’s
and a fashionable interest in applied knowledge, William Heath’s
March of Intellect
series offered a satirical vision of the wonders and potential cost of progress. While extravagantly dressed ladies window-shop for pastel finery and forgo stairwells in favor of belt-driven slides, a child is moments away from being paved into the road by a carriage at full gallop. The automation of domestic labor — through a device called the “Grand Servant Superseding Apparatus for doing every kind of household work &c &c &c &c” — leaves women more time for recreation (or idle folly): smoking shisha in public, riding horsy hovercrafts, and traveling effortlessly to South America, Bengal, and Cape Town through the use of vacuum tubes, accelerator bridges, and pedestrian tunnels. Men gorge themselves on pineapples and guzzle bottles at the Champagne Depot. Postmen flit around with winged capes; a clocked-in shoeshiner has the time to read a newspaper in French, thanks to his boot-cleaning engine. Even convicts have it better: they embark for New South Wales on a gargoyle zeppelin, but still have panoramic views." (Source: Public Domaine Review)
Heath's cartoon also illustrates the ambiguity of progress. It reminds me of how we are trying to come to grips with the onset of AI. The anticipation of Elon Musk's Hyperloop tubes in the cartoon's vacuum tube to Bengal is eerie.
When Carvalho brings up the late German theorist of history Reinhart Kosseleck, and his book Futures Past in which Kosselek shows that in modernity past and future become 'relocated', not unlike Benjamin's angel who his pushed into a future while looking back. Kosseleck's distinction between prophecy and prognosis in their relation to time could be an ordering element for Carvalho's book. He mentions it but then drops the thought again.
Modernity with its promises of freedom, progress, and human improvement created an accelerating world toward an unknown future producing options and also the promise of utopian fulfillment. Koselleck points out that novel experiences require structures of repetition within the stream of history, resolving the tension between repetition and rupture (or as Carvalho likes to put it -"fixity and flux") in a dialectic manner. I was also reminded of a 2011 exhibit "The History of the City's Future" which illustrated how wrong many optimistic predictions or prognosis have been, mostly due to their fixation on technology which ignored social development. Carvalho alo pay tribute to some of those utopias depicting a number of corporate advertisements of the 1950s in which the sky is populated with all kinds of flying transportation. To his credit, Carvalho always keeps and eye on the social, political and artistic side of things.
Carvalho moves through the centuries and around the globe in a tour de force which swells the book to 342 pages of text. Much is only very loosely related to his title "the invention of the future" and not always adds new insights to the history of urban planning, for example when he describes the plans of north American cities such as New York's Manhattan plan of 1811, DC's L'Enfant plan, or William Penn's Philadelphia plan. In spite of ample quotes from Peter Marcuse to Max Weber to Rem Koolhaas, he hardly covers new ground, except when he adds to future categories of destiny and prognosis the category of chance which comes from capitalism's steamrolling acceleration of change.
Carvalho also deviates from the traditional narrative of a history of urban planning with his frequent references to the global south, to colonialism, slavery and native peoples, for example when he stresses the strong link between rural slavery (cotton) and thriving cities (textiles). He quotes Frederick Douglass' memory of his slaveholder telling him to have "complete thoughtlessness of the future", this illuminating the liberating aspect of laying out a future but immediately pointing to the ambivalence of cities, also illustrated by Douglass who arriving in Baltimore observed "a city slave is almost a freeman, compared with a slave on the plantation" but later, when working in Baltimore's shipyards suffered the foreclosure of possibilities. Urban planning, says Carvalho, would navigate between the transformative and liberating potentials and the restrictive powers seeking to limit those as well as some of unhealthy effects of crowded urban living.
It seems that the book exhausted its author as well. In his epilogue he asks "what will the cities of tomorrow be like" but offers no answers beyond the current conventional wisdom of mixed use, transit oriented development and the 15 minute city. He offers some truisms such as that "one constant in the history of urbanization is a degree of indeterminacy" or "that the appeal of cities has endured". He then seeks refuge with Dante and Italo Calvino. "Futures not achieved are dead branches" he quotes but then reminds us that dead branches feed the future plants. "The future can be a thing of the past, he it is never dead. Futures are closed for some and open for others" he says at the very end, once more emphasizing ambiguity.
None of this addresses the real challenges for which the current city needs to find a viable future: Remote work and automatization of work already decimating downtowns in many countries, climate change in its many facets from too much to no water, extreme temperatures, excessive wind speeds, the increasing isolation of individuals overwhelmed by change and the population decline that many developed countries face. Because he presents such a rich canvas of the urban past in its many facets and with plenty of cross references it is perfectly understandable that there is no room for detailed predictions, even though the past offers a splendid foundation, as the author himself points out.
This could be Carvalho's next book as we may find ourselves on the threshold of another breakpoint that could one day be seen as a rupture equal to enlightenment- the onset of artificial intelligence. In its most recent incarnation as "agentive AI" this tool is on the cusp of allowing planners to prognosticate and optimize various planning scenarios with previously impossible accuracy and detail. The author's careful distinction between prediction and prognosis may become obliterated, the risk of unintended consequences and unexpected results finally reduced. Not in the sense that the future is preordained but that it can be better planned than ever before.
Klaus Philipsen, FAIA
The author has taught the History of Planning and written the book, "Baltimore- Reinventing the Industrial Legacy City"
Related on this Blog: Can we Design a Desirable Future?
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