Sofia Greaves
Last year, at the conference ‘Fondare e Ri-fondare. Origine e Sviluppo di una città,’ in Parma, Mayor Federico Pizzarotti expressed his desire that the ancient city should receive greater acknowledgement in Parma. He described the need to produce, ‘Una Parma che siamo capace a raccontare’. To his mind, discussing the ancient city was a means to ‘rethink our identity’, ‘construct a dialogue which we need’, and produce ‘better citizens’. The conference image superimposed a grid over the contemporary city.
What is the persistent importance of the ancient grid as a symbol of urban identity and social cohesion? I have been thinking about the grid with reference to Neapolitan modernity in the 19th century. We can explore the grid as a spatial system across time, with Italian, Iberian and Islamic examples. It is a spatial system with a tradition, and representative of three major themes: rationality, resilience, and revival.
The Roman grid: Reclamation and control
Hippodamus of Miletus is generally credited with introducing the grid system, but the Romans did it on a massive scale. In the Roman practice, building on the grid was a means of introducing a rational system to an irrational space. Roman centuriation is the archetypal example of landscape control - a statement of power, reclaiming terrain from the realm of the unruly. It also worked to prevent the unruly. The colonial castrum blueprint enforced Roman values and order spatially with a degree of consistency across the Empire. The easy access provided by the road system safeguarded against potential rebellions. In both the urban and rural environment, the Roman grid functioned as an ideological statement.
Two primary ideas emerge from the Roman grid - first, the idea of reclamation, and second the idea of control. These two ideas persist across time.
Reclamation and rationality
The narrative attached to reclaiming a city space from an unruly state naturally reflects critically on the previous system. In this case, the grid corrects a perceived decline or loss. This could relate to spiritual values, social cohesion, moral rectitude, logic and coherence. In late nineteenth century Italian engineering texts, ‘rectifying’, is, for example, synonymous with rectilinearity. The rational grid is ‘reclaimed’.
We see this exemplified in the Christian reconquest of the Iberian peninsula. The grid is seen as a spatial expression of liberation and reclamation. Over four centuries, the Islamic urban pattern had gradually altered the Christian city. In the Christian city, land was owned by the church and nobility, public space was protected by local authorities, and the street and house were connected. In contrast, state involvement in the Islamic city is limited to religious or military buildings, and the urban plan is neither religious nor juridical. Consequently, in the medina, private initiative reigns supreme. When combined with the domestic model, the urban ‘plan’ is dominated by dense and unregulated blocks, a network of cul-de-sacs, blind alleys, and blind walls. This city space is termed ‘Moorish’. In the twelfth century reconquest, eliminating the “Moorish streets” is portrayed as a restoration of order and rationality. Francesc Eiximenis called, for example, at the Council of Valencia in 1393, to reimpose ‘les Crestianes Maneres’ upon the illegible Islamic city. Eiximenis claimed, ‘all beautiful cities should be square, for straight is more beautiful and more orderly.’[1] With the orthogonal city, came ‘everything which appears to be the Christian regime and the Christian manners.’ The image and spatial experience of the grid revives the sacred values of Christian living and re-establishes Christian control. It wipes away the irrational Islamic ‘urban mind’.
Reclaiming the rational with the grid is a process linked not to particular values, but to control. Five centuries later, modernity applies the same system, in order to diminish Christianity. Lisbon provides a good case study. In 1755, an earthquake destroyed eighty-five percent of the buildings in Lisbon. It caused the city to “sway like corn in the wind before the avalanches of descending masonry hid the ruins under a cloud of dust.”[2] In the areas nearest the sea, the Mannerist, Baroque, the Islamic and medieval city were burnt to the ground. Most of the impressive monuments constructed under Manuel I and Joao V in the sixteenth century shared this fate, excluding the Tower of Belem and Jeronimos Monastery. Now estimated to have measured around nine on the Richter scale, the tremors toppled the remaining inhabited structures at Volubilis, in Morocco.
The earthquake was a tragedy, and a catastrophic point of erasure - but it also facilitated an intensive re-planning and reconstruction. A large chunk of Lisbon’s history was obliterated. Joseph I and the Marquis of Pombal rebuild Lisbon on the grid. This was a moment of ‘re-founding’. Here, the grid can be taken as a symbol of resilience. Pombal’s chief engineer Manuel de Maia had proposed five plans. One option was to abandon Lisbon in favour of a totally new city site near Belém. Choosing to rebuild here was clearly a strong statement that the modern man could overcome natural disaster. In Lisbon the grid symbolizes law and order restored to a collapsed city, by the Portuguese. The grid is also a means of asserting state control. The Portuguese engineers were military men, steeped in the tradition of fortress building.[3]
Building on the grid was a strongly secular move. One of the five plans proposed to rebuild Lisbon as it was. This would, however be a risk to public safety and defy common sense. Instead, the road system was arranged hierarchically by function, creating boundaries for public buildings and mercantile activity. A central road, the rua Augusta, links the two main piazze, the Praça do Comércio and the Praça Rossio. The final plan is presented in de Maia’s ‘dissertation’, named Memory. Like Wren in London, Pombal championed lower density buildings in the interest of hygiene and fire safety; constructions were limited to a certain height, and the standardized Neo-Classical houses designed to resist seismic shocks. These pine log systems can be seen today, under the Bank in Rue Do Comercios. The city emerging upon the reclaimed land was built in accordance with secular values, in the interests of public safety.
Public safety also allowed Maia and Pombal to refuse the reconstruction of church towers. Pombal promoted secularization in Portugal and was a leading opponent of the Jesuits. A consequence of choosing not to build the city as it was, was a new set of building regulations which diminished the medieval and Islamic city. These contested that Portugal was a backwards and religious nation isolated from enlightened Europe.[4] Perhaps we see in this moment how perceptions of health and hygiene begin to enter into the politics of modern urbanism. Foucault places the emergence of health politics in the eighteenth century. If health and happiness is determined by the institution, hygiene becomes a mechanism for control and linked to state power. Pombal’s grid is linked to scientific practice and the public good. Pombal’s grid represents a new system of thought. Much like in the Christian city, with the grid, one system of values supersedes another. Here it is a system which prevents more than earthquake destruction; it serves the secular state.
What is clear from the Iberian example is that whilst the grid may have represented rationality, revival and resilience, it did not constitute a return to origins. This is, perhaps surprising in Lisbon. Founded by the Phoenicians, conquered by the Carthaginians, and Roman after the Punic Wars, Lisbon is an ancient city. As the main port on the Atlantic Coast, it served as a harbour base for Brutus’ legions in the North, and was monumentalised as the Augustan Colony, Felicitas Iulia. The orthogonal system could have created an attractive link with the city’s Roman roots. The ancient city is, however, just one of Lisbon’s very diverse urban pasts - the Visigothic, Islamic, and the Christian. It had never been a source of representative power. Most of it remains were dismantled or unexplored until relatively recently. Naples shows how the ancient city does not have to be visible or monumental to constitute an important component of the city’s self-representation. Yet, it goes some way towards explaining why it has not acted as a mechanism of power for Lisbon’s subsequent rulers.
Rebuilding Lisbon on the grid did not embrace the ancient city as an ideal because it was not a representation of power. The most significant tie between the ancient city and the grid is the main road: the Rua Augusta. The Imperial name is the most powerful re-evocation of this past. The grid itself re-affirmed a different ideal. This was Lisbon, not as the colony, but the colonizer. The city’s ideal past was located in the ‘Age of Discoveries’, a period of intense exploration, commercial activity and political ambition. In the fifteenth century, Lisbon became the centre of Portuguese Empire and maritime expansion. There is a reaffirmation of the colonial image. The Praça do Comércio, ‘the door to Lisbon’, was constructed on the site of the ruined Royal Palace. At the centre of this enormous square, facing the Tagus river, stands an equestrian statue of Joseph I (1750-1777). Joseph is flanked by two falling figures, subdued by allegories of Triumph and Fame, and accompanied by an elephant. They are representative of the continent. The road to the rear of this statue is accessed through a triumphal arch finished in 1837, bearing the inscription ut sit documento, topped by Vasco da Gama and the Marquis of Pombal.
As is well explored, “architecture and memorials in capital cities materialize a state’s geopolitical agendas.”[5] In Lisbon, Pombal creates a piazza centred upon the earthquake as an event, and the Age of Discoveries as an ideal. It is a monumental space facing the sea, linked along the coast with the Manueline Jeronimos Monastery, and the Tower of Belem. The Jeronimos Monastery stands atop the chapel where da Gama and his sailors prayed before embarking on their journey to Calicut. Nearby, the Tower of Belem, completed in 1520, served as a ceremonial gateway to Lisbon. Both monuments are built in the estilo manuelino, a visual idiom characterized by nautical or geographical motifs. In the Jeronimos Monastery, for example, the knots, shells and symbols of foreign lands are clearly visible atop da Gama’s tomb. Standing tall after the earthquake flattened the city, they would have been very visible points, anchoring the sense of urban identity.
The grid does not, therefore, necessarily link to urban roots. Power in 18th century Lisbon did not choose to align the grid ancient values and practices. The opposite was the true of 19th century Naples.
Naples too had a many layered history of occupation. Neapolis was settled by the Greeks in the eighth century.[6] It was Greek, then Samnite, until colonised by the Romans in the third century, after the second Punic War. After Constantine, the city was ruled by the Goths, Normans, Angevins, Aragonese, and Bourbons. In 1860, Garibaldi entered Naples, proclaimed it Italian, and signed the plebiscite the following year.
In nineteenth century Naples, the grid is something which has remained, despite foreign rule. One Neapolitan claims, for example, ‘Naples is one of the cities originally most regular; its street plan appears even now very symmetrical.’ The grid is a symbol of urban roots and resilience. It represents origins and conjures an image of the city at its foundation. For Vincenzo Spinazzola, for example, the grid is, “a miraculous arrangement which has conserved itself over twenty-five centuries, and through it we are witnessing, to say it like this, the ceremony with which the first Greek colonies traced, according to their custom, the sacred lines which were to enclose and divide their small Naples.”[7]
It is a symbol of resilience because it stands in contrast to a perceived period of decline. In literature, urban planning maps and manuals, the Neapolitans are able to see their past as a succession of layers and form a value judgment. Whereas the focal point of identity in Lisbon was located in the prosperous ‘Age of Discoveries’, in Naples, it is the Roman period which is idealised. The nineteenth century Neapolitans believe themselves to have had the most importance under both Republican and Imperial Roman rule. As the municipium, Naples “continued to govern itself with its own laws, kept its fleet - which Rome asked for in times of need, provided the priestesses of Ceres to Rome, and kept the rights to host exiles until the social war, and to mint coins, even, under empire.”[8] Under empire, the city was important for Rome, and for Italy. One writer claims, despite a lack of material evidence, that Naples “was in its good period (the Greco-roman period) rich with very beautiful buildings, temples, theatres, gymnasia, baths, art galleries, very splendid gardens and villas.”[9] Clearly this has a particular relevance as a representative strategy in the nineteenth century context, when the city is orienting itself relative to the new capital.
In the nineteenth century, the Neapolitans want to be seen as an ancient city, not, as French, or Spanish. The centuries of ‘foreign occupation’, are denounced for allowing the ancient city to decline. These are periods of suppression, represented by a city of “tight, narrow, tortuous streets deprived of light and symmetry.”[10] The winding city is an entity which reflects the lack of political coherence, peace and welfare. It is an infectious breeding ground for disease, and death.
In modern Naples, as it was in Pombal’s Lisbon and Eiximenis’ Spain, to build in the image of the grid is to build in the interest of the public good. In Naples, this is both because the grid is a hygienic form, and, because as an ancient city Neapolitan citizens enjoyed the best version of their city. In antiquity, the ancient city was ‘regularly constructed and square’, with a ‘studied and fixed plan’. It was a hygienic city. A hygienic city is also the ultimate goal of modernity. The Director of Neapolitan Public Hygiene, for example, idealises ancient Naples. He says, ‘It’s no surprise therefore that a city built and laid out like this, was not only an aesthetic, but also a hygienic construction’.[11] Reclaiming and reviving the ancient city, the modern city would supersede the intermediate period of decline. It is in the interest of the public good to eliminate this decline with a new grid. Marino Turchi, who devised urban planning strategies for Naples, claims that with the ancient city template ‘The present Latin race will be put in the same conditions as the Romans lived and will return to be Roman.[12] Building in the image of the ancient city is a return to the ancient tradition of urban planning, and reviving what might be termed as the Roman ‘urban mind’.[13] Reconnecting with the grid in this way as a symbol of ‘urban roots’ and an ideal state, links the ancient and modern city.
This is all to argue that, in nineteenth century Naples, the grid functions as it has throughout time. It is representative of rationality, and order. It is representative of resilience and revival. The difference in this context, is that in Naples, the grid is a proud image of urban origins and an ideal past. It serves as a point of contrast with subsequent historic identities. The moderns look upon the ancient grid and reflect critically on what came afterwards. In performing this critique they are given the power to supersede all previous urban entities. Using hygiene as a mechanism of power therefore provides modernity with a legitimate reason to shape the city as it wishes. Given that the model for modern urban hygiene idealises the ancient city, unlike in Pombal’s Lisbon, modernity draws upon antiquity as an expression of power.
By way of a conclusion I think that we can make three general points. First, the grid has a tradition as a spatial system. It is not a natural form, but a logical subdivision of space, regulated and imposed on the landscape. Consequently, it represents a system of man-made practices and values. These adapt variously in accordance with historical context – we see it both in Christian ideas about the grid, and in Corbusier. The legibility of the grid as a statement allows it to represent a clear set of values and behavioural patterns determined by its implementor.
Second, the rational, and legible elements of the grid determine its success as a means of articulating a break with the previous power. It is able to legitimate the erasure or, superimposition of what came before. To western eyes, the spatial language of the Islamic city cannot visually represent a rational mind or state. The unplanned and unmonumental medieval city is vilified by the moderns for this same reason. Perceptions of rationality condition the image of the ideal city and legitimize the erasure of certain urban identities.
Lastly, its representation in this capacity, as a form of spatial conquest, may indicate it is always deployed as a ‘return’. Of these examples it is only in Italy, that the grid constitutes a return to origins. In Naples, the grid represents the rationality, resilience and revival of the ancient past. These three points of identity are claimed by the modern planners when shaping the image of modernity.
[1] Eiximenis, Dotze llibre del Crestia (1384). Medieval Urban Planning. The Monastery and Beyond. (XXX): 177-180.
[2] Thomas Downing Kendrick, The Lisbon Earthquake (New York, Lippincott Company, 1955): 46.
[3] Recent scholarship argues that neither London nor Turin offered real models for the reconstruction of Lisbon.
International Conference on 18th Century Architecture and Culture. Books with a View. Celebrating the Birth of the Portuguese architect and city planner Eugénio dos Santos (1711 – 1760). Fundacao Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, November 23 – 25th 2011.
[4] The break with Castile in 1640 contributed to Portugal’s cultural isolation. Nuno Gonçalo Monteiro, in R. Ramos (ed.) Historía de Portugal. 3rd edition (Lisboa, A Esfera dos Livros, 2009): 343.
[5] Gear O’Tuathail, “(Dis)placing Geopolitics. Writing on the Maps of Global Politics,” Society and Space, 12 (1994): 525-46.
[6] As the Neapolitans understand it, the Cumaeans invaded the Etruscan settlement of ‘Partenope’ in 474, after which Neapolis (the new city) was founded nearby. Partenope came to be called Palaepolis (the old city). Over time, the two merged.
[7] Vincenzo Spinazzola, “Il Nome di Napoli,” Napoli Nobilissima, Fasc. 4, Vol 1 (1892): 49 -51.
[8] Spinazzola, “Il Nome di Napoli,” 49 -51.
[9] Anon., “Napoli nel 1854 descritta dal Gregorovius,” in Napoli nelle descrizioni dei viaggiatori stranieri (No date, no publisher): XXXVII. Emphasis mine.
[10] Orazio Caro, L’evoluzione igienica di Napoli (Cenni storici – osservazioni e proposte – dati statistici (Napoli, Francesco Giannini & Figli, 1914): 8.
[11] Caro, L’evoluzione igienica di Napoli, 2.
[12] Marino Turchi, Della Italia Igienica. E Principalmente della Pretesa Degenerazione della Razza Latina (Napoli, 1876-7): 61.
[13] Paul Sinclair, “The Urban Mind: A Thematic Introduction,” in P. J. J. Sinclair, G. Nordquist, F. Herschend and C. Isendahl (eds.) The Urban Mind. Cultural and Environmental Dynamics (Uppsala, Uppsala Universitet, 2010): 12-29.
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