Chapter 51: Making the Modern City
In the mid-19th Century, cities across the industrializing world began to modernize. New infrastructure was added, new layouts of streets and city resources were devised, and greater emphasis was placed on improving the quality of life for all people.
Topics covered in this episode include: Edwin Chadwick’s efforts to modernize Britain’s sewers; Ellis Chesbrough and the construction of Chicago’s sewer system; the underground London Metropolitan Railway; new street layouts in the Age of Enlightenment; Georges-Eugène Haussmann and the renovations of Paris; Ildefons Cerdà and the expansion of Barcelona; model villages like Saltaire; and the life and works of Frederick Law Olmsted.
Sources for this episode include:
Balgarnie, R. Sir Titus Salt, Baronet: His Life and its Lessons. Hodder and Stoughton. 1878.
Bausells, Marta. “Story of cities #13: Barcelona's unloved planner invents science of ‘urbanisation’.” The Guardian. 1 Apr 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/01/story-cities-13-eixample-barcelona-ildefons-cerda-planner-urbanisation
DeJean, Joan Elizabeth. How Paris Became Paris: The Invention of the Modern City. Bloomsbury USA. 2014.
Fry, Stephen. “Victorian Secrets.” (Ep. 6: Victorians Underground.) 2018.
Hamlin, Christopher. “Edwin Chadwick and the Engineers, 1842-1854: Systems and Antisystems in the Pipe-and-Brick Sewers War.” Technology and Culture. Vol. 33, No. 4, Oct 1992, pp. 680-709.
Johnson, Steven. The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic – and How it Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. Riverhead Books. 2006.
Johnson, Steve. How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World. Penguin Random House. 2014.
Kirkland, Stephane. Paris Reborn: Napoléon III, Baron Haussmann, and the Quest to Build a Modern City. St. Martin's Press. 2013.
Mann, Emily. “Story of cities #14: London's Great Stink heralds a wonder of the industrial world.” The Guardian. 4 Apr 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/04/story-cities-14-london-great-stink-river-thames-joseph-bazalgette-sewage-system
Martin, Justin. Genius of Place: The Life of Frederick Law Olmsted - Abolitionist, Conservationist, and Designer of Central Park. Da Capo Press. 2011.
Mason, Betsy. “How Boston Made Itself Bigger.” National Geographic. 13 Jun 2017. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/Boston-landfill-maps-history
“Nomination of Saltaire Village for Inclusion in the World Heritage List.” UNESCO. 2001.
“The 1848 Public Health Act.” UK Parliament. https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/towncountry/towns/tyne-and-wear-case-study/about-the-group/public-administration/the-1848-public-health-act/
Rudlin, David and Shruti Hemani. Climax City: Masterplanning and the Complexity of Urban Growth. RIBA Publishing. 2019.
Sánchez de Juan, Joan-Anton. “The City in Transition: Engineering, freemasonry, and liberalism in the planning of the modern city.” Observatory of Strategic Spatial Development of the Government of Catalonia, Spain. 2001.
Willsher, Kim. “Story of cities #12: Haussmann rips up Paris – and divides France to this day.” The Guardian. 31 Mar 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/mar/31/story-cities-12-paris-baron-haussmann-france-urban-planner-napoleon
Wolmar, Christian. The Subterranean Railway: How the London Underground was Built and How it Changed the City Forever. Atlantic Books. 2004.
Full Transcript
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Last month, I told you the story of Dr. John Snow’s investigation of the 1854 cholera outbreak on Broad Street in London, and how his maps of the outbreak were a major breakthrough in epidemiology.
But I don’t want you to think this was the first time an epidemic had been mapped. In fact, it wasn’t even the first one mapped in the British capital. More than a decade earlier, a mortality map was produced for a report on a serious Typhoid outbreak in London’s East End.
At least that Typhoid outbreak was what got the report started. By the time it was finished, it was detailing the unsanitary urban conditions to be found across the nation. And this Report on The Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain was conceived, produced, and paid for by one tireless civil servant named Edwin Chadwick.
Born in Manchester in 1800, not much is known about Chadwick’s early life. He attended local schools until his father, a journalist, moved the family to London in 1810. From there he received some tutoring, followed by an apprenticeship in a law office. When he was 23, he finally went to law school, and was admitted to the bar by age 30. He then briefly served as a secretary to Jeremy Bentham, in the final years of the philosopher’s life.
The big turning point in Chadwick’s career came shortly after Bentham’s death in 1832. That same year, the government of our old friend, Earl Grey, appointed Chadwick an assistant to the Royal Commission of Enquiry on the Poor Laws. In that capacity, Chadwick was a key player in the development of the 1834 Poor Law Act, which, you’ll remember, sought to disincentivize poverty by reducing aid to the poor and worsening the conditions of the workhouses. (Shout out Chapter 41!)
Now, also remember, that by the liberal theories of the day, this really was intended to help the poor, and Chadwick was recognized as a genuine champion of the poor. So, after typhoid broke out in the working-class East End in 1838, he pushed the government to tackle the country’s urban environmental challenges.
Chadwick sent questionnaires out across the country and collected data from his fellow bureaucrats across many sectors of government. His great report was finally released in 1842, and it argued that state investments toward public health would improve economic conditions, ultimately saving the government money. By removing waste from the streets, installing new drainage channels and sewers, providing clean drinking water, and appointing local medical officers, the government could literally save lives. And by saving lives, they wouldn’t need to dole out relief to widows and orphans.
For years, Chadwick lobbied the government on these grounds. Finally, after a massive cholera outbreak in South London, Parliament at last took up the issue. That year, they passed two pieces of relevant legislation.
The first bill was the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers Act, which established a commission to survey and, hopefully, modernize the sewers of London. Chadwick was among the first appointees to the commission, as was our old friend, the railway industrialist, Robert Stephenson.
The other bill was the Public Health Act of 1848.
As it was conceived by its author, Lord Morpeth (who would shortly thereafter become the Earl of Carlisle), the Public Health Act was intended to bring about a total overhaul of the nation’s infrastructure, guaranteeing modern sewers in every town and running water in every home. By the time it passed, of course, it fell far short of these ambitions, merely creating a new Board of Health for the United Kingdom. It was a relatively small board too, comprised of Chadwick, Morpeth, a medical advisor named Southwood Smith, and our old friend, Lord Shaftesbury. Over the next handful of years, hundreds of towns across the UK sought support from the Board of Health to modernize their infrastructures for waste and water.
But Chadwick’s tenure on both bodies was short-lived. He had a very clear vision for British sewers, and he was utterly uncompromising in his approach. The way he saw it, the sewers should be planned by bureaucrats in London, built in a hydraulic network across a town or city, managed by a single authority, and made of small-bore, glazed pipes, so they would be long-lasting and wouldn’t leak. But many of his allies were liberals who held a laissez-faire approach to modernization, and the pipes he was proposing were more expensive and difficult to engineer than simple brick tunnels. In fact, civil engineers became some of his most ardent critics, and he became probably their most ardent critic in return.
By 1854, shortly before the Broad Street cholera outbreak, Chadwick was pushed out of the Board of Health. (He had left the Metropolitan Commission even earlier.) His ideas faded into the background for some time. But they never entirely died. And by the turn of the 20th Century, they began to re-emerge. Today, engineers and historians – while maintaining some legitimate concerns about his approach – generally side with Chadwick’s take on infrastructure needs. And in his lifetime, he definitely moved the needle on the need to modernize sewers.
In fact, all across the world, industrialists, engineers, and policymakers were beginning to re-think their cities, and it led to an extraordinary transformation of our urban landscapes through the present day.
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This is the Industrial Revolutions
Chapter 51: Making the Modern City
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A few administrative notes before we get going.
First of all, I’d say there’s a fair chance there will be a month without an episode at some point in the next six months. Sarah and I have decided to look for a home to buy here in Boston. And if anyone knows the Boston housing market, they know that it’s completely insane. Simply put, there’s low supply and high demand, leading to a hyper-competitive environment which will inevitably suck time away from the podcast. So, I want to apologize in advance.
But, good news – this month there’s going to be another bonus episode! Since lately we’ve been talking about the challenges of urbanization and the strategies to overcome them, I thought this would be a good time to catch up with an old friend, Dave Amos, who teaches urban planning at Cal Poly and hosts the YouTube channel City Beautiful. I look forward to asking him about the challenges he and his colleagues in the field see in urbanization today, and what they’re doing to address them.
Second, I want to thank everyone who is supporting the podcast on Patreon. Now, I normally recognize patrons at the end of episodes, but there’s so many patrons now that it’s tough to fit them all in during the music. (I know, I know, good problem to have. )
Shout outs go to Jim Ankenbrandt, John Bartlett, Chris Bradford, Elizabeth Brooking, Jeppe Burchhardt, Tara Carlson, Amelia Dunkin, Molly Des Jardin, Michele Gersich, Jason Hayes, Herbyurby, Jeremy Hoffman, Eric Hogensen, Kyrre Holm, Brian Long, Mac Loveland, Emeka Okafor, Kristian Sibast, Jonathan Smith, Brandon Stansbury, Alex Strains, Ross Templeton, and Walter Torres. Thank you, as always.
Now, on with the show.
Part 1: The Underground City
Even with Chadwick removed from his positions of influence, the UK saw a surge of subterranean sewer construction over the next several decades. After the Great Stink of 1858, a new Metropolitan Board of Works was formed and empowered to raise a whopping £3 million for an expansive sewer system. (That’s about half a billion dollars today.) Under the leadership of Chief Engineer Joseph Bazalgette, new sewage lines directed waste and rainwater into main lines running parallel to the Thames, directing the discharge to the North Sea. By the end of the 19th Century, more than 1,200 miles of big, underground sewer lines were constructed in London alone, helping dissipate the waste of the booming industrial city.
At the same time, water delivery systems were installed across the country. Civil engineers like John Frederick La Trobe Bateman built massive new dams to create reservoirs for the growing cities, using the forces of gravity and steam-driven pumps to bring in clean water for their residents. The Longdendale Chain system Bateman built for Manchester took nearly 30 years to construct and was, at the time, the largest such system in the world. It still delivers Manchester much of its clean water today. Bateman built about a dozen other water supply systems in the UK, as well as in far-away lands like Argentina, Italy, Ceylon, and the Ottoman Empire.
With dirty water filtered out and clean water pumped in, cities all over the world would gradually become healthier to live in. And some of the engineering feats that went into it during this age were truly spectacular. Take, for example, the work of Ellis Chesbrough in Chicago, Illinois.
By 1850, Chicago really needed a sewer system. In the years since Cyrus McCormick moved there to set up his McCormick reaper factory (shout out Chapter 33!), the city had exploded from roughly 4,000 residents to nearly 30,000. And by 1860, the population would top 112,000. Not only was the city growing at an unfathomable pace, it was also situated on a relatively flat plain. Rainstorms would essentially turn the booming metropolis into a marshland. And with all the humans and animals there, there’d soon be a massive build-up of manure in slimy cesspools all over the city. I repeat, Chicago really needed a sewer system.
After they had their own 1854 cholera outbreak, city officials decided to take action. Early the next year, they established the Chicago Board of Sewerage Commissioners. And then they poached a prominent civil engineer working in Boston – Ellis Chesbrough.
Ellis Chesbrough was born into a wandering, entrepreneurial (though struggling) family, in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1813. He had to leave his formal education by age 9. But in 1828, his father was hired to survey the new B&O Railroad (shout out Chapter 31!), and he used his position to get Ellis a surveying job for the City of Baltimore. Over the next couple decades, Chesbrough traveled the country working on railroads, canals, and aqueducts. Eventually, he was appointed Chief Engineer of the Boston Water Works in 1851.
Now charged with solving Chicago’s sewerage problems, Chesbrough got on a steamer and traveled to Europe, where he studied the new sewer systems being installed in London, Paris, Amsterdam, and elsewhere. He came back full of ideas, some of which were pretty novel.
Basically, he had to deal with a few problems. Number one: How do we create an entire network of sewers under the existing city? After all, it would be massively expensive to tunnel under the buildings and connect pipes to them. Number two: When we finally have this subterranean infrastructure in place, where do we direct it? Where does all the waste traveling through it go? It couldn’t go into Lake Michigan, as that was the source of the city’s drinking water.
This is where Chesbrough’s experience on the railroads came in handy. He remembered this tool the engineers would use to get locomotives onto the tracks called a jackscrew. If you could use jackscrews to lift locomotives, why not use a whole mess of jackscrews to lift up the city of Chicago?
And, no joke, that’s what he did.
Assisted by a young engineer named George Pullman – who, yes, we’ll talk about more at some point down the road – Chesbrough and an army of workers spent the next several years going building-to-building, lifting them inch-by-inch, until they were high enough above ground to set on timber supports. Then they’d go under the buildings and quickly lay down sewage pipes running toward the streets. Below the streets themselves, accessed by new manhole covers, main sewers would take the waste from each building and direct it toward an intake crib, a landfill dredged out of the Chicago River.
With this remarkable feat of engineering, the United States installed its first modern municipal sewer system. But what’s most remarkable about it is that life went on as normal throughout the process. As a British visitor wrote when he watched Briggs House – a 750-ton brick hotel – lifted up in 1857, “The people were in it all the time coming and going, eating and sleeping – the whole business of the hotel proceeding without interruption!” At one point in 1860, they used six thousand jackscrews to lift up half a city block of five-story buildings weighing an estimated 35,000 tons.
Chesbrough would continue serving Chicago’s growing sewage and water needs for the rest of his life, building a two-mile tunnel out into Lake Michigan to access drinking water far away from the waste build-up, and initiating plans to reverse the direction of the Chicago River away from the lake, which was finally completed after his death.
Now, around the same time Chesbrough was lifting up Chicago to install its underground infrastructure, there was another project underway to lay underground infrastructure in London. But this project wasn’t about moving waste or drinking water. It was for an entirely new purpose of subterranean engineering – it was for moving people.
Okay, so when we last left our friend, Marc Isambard Brunel, he had just completed the first pedestrian tunnel under the River Thames and was knighted by Queen Victoria for it. The moment had marked a shift in the way Londoners thought about the world underneath them. If we can build tunnels going under us, and even going under major bodies of water, it means we don’t necessarily need to tear down the buildings around us. Rather than destroy and build up, why not preserve and build under?
Over the previous decade or so, rail lines and rail stations had been built in London, helping move people in and out of the city. With so much industry and commerce in inner-London, it was inevitable that people would need to come in. But where would they all go when the workday was done? The rail lines constructed were nowhere near close to adequate for addressing the overcrowding of the ancient metropolis.
Into the conversation stepped another one of these Victorian-era social reformers – a lawyer and local politician named Charles Pearson.
Born in the City in 1793 to a merchant family, Pearson had apprenticed as a haberdasher before studying the law. In 1817, around the same time he began working as a solicitor, he was elected as a councilman in the City. He was later made the Chairman of his local Board of Health, and was then appointed City Solicitor, an office he held until his death in 1862. He also served as a Liberal Member of Parliament for a few years at the end of the 1840s.
A Radical who supported things like universal suffrage, Pearson was concerned that the over-congestion of London was hurting the quality of life for working men, and so he began advocating for more rail options toward the suburbs, including through the East End. He wrote pamphlets, lobbied MPs, and connected various investors and engineers.
But between the Railway Mania stock bubble crash of 1845 to 1847, the high price of land in London (at least north of the Thames), the fears of rail lines disrupting existing neighborhoods, and the competition between the different rail companies of the age, neither Parliament nor a Royal Commission investigating the issue had the political will to sanction the rail construction needed within the capital.
So, Pearson recommended building below the capital. For nearly a decade, he produced proposal after proposal, encouraging various underground railway schemes. Repeatedly they were rejected, but – by 1854 – the royal commission agreed that certain points of his plan were needed. Some sorts of connections were needed between the area’s rail terminals, as well as to the post office and the docks.
Over the previous few years, various smaller rail developments in London were approved by Parliament, and it became a rather complicated web of bills and bribes and rail tracks that was clearly untenable. So finally, a group of rail developers – unrelated to Pearson – began promoting similar ideas to his. They raised pledges from the various existing railways – Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Great Western Railway, chief among them – to build underground connections between them and between other important sites across London. This centralized, Metropolitan Railway, hired a young engineer named John Fowler to lead the project, and they received royal accent to proceed in 1854.
But as the UK got bogged down in the Crimean War, the company struggled to attract the necessary investments to get going. And then this failure sort of became seen as proof of infeasibility. By 1858, the Metropolitan’s directors were nearly ready to give up.
But instead, they put up £1,000 in a last-ditch effort to attract investors and, when they did, Charles Pearson took it upon himself to help save the project. Although he had not been involved with the Metropolitan Railway, he believed the project was too important to see it fail. He used – arguably even abused – his position as Solicitor for the City of London to get the City to invest £200,000 in the endeavor. He then successfully lobbied Parliament to approve the planned line.
By 1859, the project had the funding it needed. The next year, construction got underway.
Thousands of navvies were hired to dig earth, day and night, for three years. A new conveyor belt contraption was built to move dirt out of the ground and dumped in west London. And the firm of Beyer, Peacock and Company was hired to build the locomotives.
In the end, it was not the super-expansive underground rail network Pearson envisioned, nor did it get out to the East End. It was a single line from Paddington Station, just north of Hyde Park, to Farringdon, just north of the City, making five stops along the way, including King’s Cross. Also, like half of it wasn’t even entirely underground. And while they definitely saved some money digging below the existing city – not having to dole out huge payments to landlords for eminent domain – they nevertheless managed to destroy thousands of homes in the process, mostly in working-class neighborhoods.
Despite the ways it fell short, it opened to great fanfare. On January 10th, 1863, its 120 trains carried some 30,000 passengers who crammed onto just four carriages per locomotive. Sadly, Charles Pearson was not among them, as he had died the previous year. Demand had clearly been underestimated, but the railway managed to yield an impressive £850 on Opening Day. Gaslighting inside the tunnels – the gas being pumped through pipes thanks to new rubber bags – was particularly impressive to the passengers, who appreciated not having to travel in total darkness beneath the earth.
But here’s the thing: This was not the subways we know today. They were open-air carriages, going through covered tunnels, on the back of steam-powered locomotives. The air the passengers breathed in was damp and incredibly, incredibly smoky.
As one journalist later described for a piece in English Illustrated Magazine:
“…off into a black wall ahead with the shrieking of ten thousand demons rising above the thunder of the wheels. The sensation altogether was much like the inhalation of gas preparatory to having a tooth drawn…Visions of accidents, collisions, and crumbling tunnels floated through my mind; a fierce wind took away my breath, and innumerable blacks filled my eyes. I crouched low and held on like grim death to a little rail near me. Driver, stoker, inspector, and engine—all had vanished. Before and behind and on either side was blackness, heavy, dense and impenetrable…finding that I was still alive and sound, I began to look about me…The road now began to be uphill, and at the same time the air grew more foul. From King’s Cross to Edgware Road the ventilation is defective, and the atmosphere on a par with the ‘tween decks, forrud’ of a modern ironclad in bad weather, and that is saying a good deal. By the time we reached Gower Street I was coughing and spluttering like a boy with his first cigar.”
Beyer and Peacock had tried to account for all this as best they could, but they were still limited by the technology of the day. Still, it didn’t stop Londoners from riding the Metro. Nearly 12 million people rode it in its first year alone and kept riding it into the 20th Century, as the lines expanded. But the idea did not catch on elsewhere. It would be decades before other cities around the globe installed their own subways, and only because – by that point – they could be driven by electric rail.
Before we move on, there’s one more thing worth noting about the movement to build under the industrializing cities – not only did it move us into the future, it also brought back up the past. In the process of all the digging, a new necessity of construction-site archaeology was needed. For instance, several ancient Roman buildings and artifacts were uncovered in London in the second half of the 19th Century, for which guys like the antiquarian Charles Roach Smith sprang into action to collect and catalogue these discoveries for posterity. When America’s first subway was finally being constructed here in Boston – at my subway stop on Boston Common, in fact – they found the bones of British soldiers stationed here during the American Revolution. Over the next seven months, they relocated hundreds of buried bodies.
And that’s something you’ve got to appreciate about old cities – they grew organically. We just kept building on what was here before. Many of the streets we walk are the streets our predecessors were walking hundreds or even thousands of years ago.
But that’s not true of all cities. Heck, that’s not even true of all old cities. Because this wasn’t just an age of digging under cities – it was also an age of reimagining and redeveloping them.
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Part 2: The Planned City
Alright, if you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, you know that before moving to Boston we lived in Sacramento – a younger city, for sure.
Sacramento was built up during the California Gold Rush of 1848 to 1849. It went from, like, a handful of people living in a tiny settlement to a city of 10,000 in about a year. Anticipating that rush, a team of surveyors mapped out a new city to build shortly before the fortune-seekers arrived. It would be laid out in a grid of square blocks. The streets that ran north-to-south would be numbered – first street, second street, third street, and so on – as you went from west to east. The streets that ran east-to-west would be lettered – so there was J street, K street, L street, etc. – as you went from north to south.
And let me tell you, this grid is super-convenient. If you were on 25th and O, and a friend called you up and was like, “hey, meet me at this restaurant on 15th and H,” you wouldn’t even need to think about how to get there. It made living in Sacramento real easy.
Then we moved to Boston, which is like the polar opposite of easy to get around. It was founded as a tiny Puritan settlement in 1630 and none of the founders were planning for a post-industrial city. Seriously, if I live here another 50 years, I will need to rely on Google Maps for the entirety of that time. But the modern city of Boston grew around that settlement – and I mean that very literally.
Much of the land itself was put here between the 1860s and the 1890s. Neighborhoods like the Back Bay and Seaport just didn’t used to exist. It was just water. The same is true for much of Southie, Eastie, Charlestown, and elsewhere. There were only a few tiny islands where the huge airport is now. Amazingly, timber pilings hold up much of our most expensive real estate, along with garbage, mud, and sand – meaning some of it is slowly sinking and (if it wasn’t sinking) it would rot and collapse instead.
This is all very fascinating, sure, but it also serves as an interesting comparison between the old world and the new. You see, because of its age, Boston is one of the few American cities that has more in common with European cities – in terms of geographic development – than those of the rest of the United States.
It wasn’t long after the Puritans settled in Boston that the Age of Enlightenment began a paradigm shift. With “untouched” landscapes at their disposal (at least that’s how they saw it) English colonizers, caught up in the spirit of rationalism, started mapping out their American cities before actually building them.
Among the most famous examples was James Edward Oglethorpe’s 1732 plan for the new town of Savannah, Georgia. The layout was made up of six wards, each composed of four residential blocks and four smaller civic blocks around a town square. Each residential block would contain 10 houses. The civic blocks would be used for various public buildings. And as the city expanded, it would simply add new wards along the parameters of this design.
While few were as rigid as Savannah’s, other American cities took the same approach. William Penn chose a riverfront site for his City of Brotherly Love (AKA Philadelphia) and mapped out the blocks before construction got underway. After New Amsterdam became New York City, planners used the natural boundaries of Manhattan for a series of parallel streets running river to river, crossing long, wide avenues that stretched far to the north.
And it wasn’t just American cities. After an earthquake shook Lisbon to the ground in 1755, architect Manuel da Maia proposed a brand-new layout for the downtown area. Rectangular blocks with wide streets and beautiful plazas and courtyards transformed the Portuguese capital into one of Europe’s most elegant cities.
The American capital too would be built from scratch. French engineer Pierre Charles L'Enfant drew up a plan in 1791 overlaying standard square blocks with a long, spiderweb grid of wide avenues – which may or may not be some sort of homage to Freemasonry. (It’s probably not.)
Of course, it’s all very well if you can start a new city from scratch, right? It’s a lot harder to take an existing city and re-plan it. But as industrialization swept across Europe, driving peasants into urban areas for new jobs in the mills and other factories and so forth, at least one major city would have to rethink and rebuild: Paris.
When we last left the streets of Paris, the revolution of 1848 had put an end to the July Monarchy, the people experimented with democracy and socialism, and then Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was elected president. From there, a counter-revolution took hold, and Prince President Bonaparte was crowned Emperor Napoleon III.
Now, one of the reasons the Parisians were so antsy to overthrow their government in 1848 was likely the conditions of the city itself. It had been nearly 200 years since the City of Light had its last great makeover, during Louis XIV’s efforts to fortify the capital. He made various upgrades to the quality of life while he was at it – new green spaces, some boulevards, street lanterns, and new systems of postal delivery and transportation. Over the years, additional efforts to beautify and modernize Paris had been made, but nothing that would adequately address the stresses the Industrial Revolution put on the city.
For the most part, it remained the medieval city it had always been. The sewerage infrastructure was largely inadequate. The winding streets were narrow – blocking sunlight – and were filthy too. Cholera outbreaks were common, as was traffic congestion, as was crime.
Many Parisians became concerned that the city’s character was being lost. Well-to-do citizens simply didn’t bother coming into the city center anymore. New neighborhoods popped up around it to accommodate the growing population, but there was little that tied them together. And with the capital’s population topping one million now, some of these neighborhoods were among the densest places on Earth.
Still other Parisians resisted attempts to change the city. They figured the congested, dark, dirty conditions helped give the city its character. (This was still the cultural capital of Europe, after all. This is where the great writers and artists hailed from. The physical environment of the city must deserve some credit for shaping them.) This crowd had a sort of “Keep Paris Weird” mentality. Others might have been fine with changes, in theory, but not so much in their own neighborhoods. So, this “Not in My Backyard” crowd also spoke out against redevelopment efforts. And ultimately, these efforts kept stalling out.
Then came Louis Napoleon Bonaparte.
As we discussed back in Chapter 47, the future emperor was an ideas man. He spent a lot of time thinking about issues of government, economics, etc., and he had all sorts of plans for when he finally took the reins of power. In 1852 – the same year he ascended to imperial status – he decided it was time for Paris to undergo a major replanning. There was to be no looking back. And for this effort he chose a career bureaucrat with a track record of almost flawless success.
Georges-Eugène Haussmann was born in Paris in 1809, the son of a Protestant family of German heritage and bureaucratic, Bonapartist credentials. He received a progressive education, heavy in the arts, and then studied law at the Sorbonne. After graduating, he entered the civil service, where he was posted to various provincial offices. But he struggled to get promotions, due in part to his pragmatic yet insubordinate personality. When Bonaparte won the presidency, he practically bolted to Paris to meet the future emperor, hoping this would be his big break.
For whatever reason, Bonaparte saw enormous promise in Haussmann and, in 1853, appointed him Prefect of the Seine. In his first official meeting, Haussmann made it clear to everyone that this great endeavor was not going to be a democratic one. There would be no paralysis by analysis – no death by committee. This was his project, and the only approval he needed for his plans was from the emperor himself. Haussmann didn’t really care about the ancient character of the city, nor about the displacement of countless working-class Parisians. He had a vision for the future, and he pursued it ruthlessly.
Over the next 17 years, with billions of borrowed francs spent in the process, Haussmann remade the map of Paris. He started by literally remaking the map, tacking a 15-square meter map of the city on the wall behind his desk and dictating all the changes to be made. There were to be straight streets with long views of the city toward the horizon. Anything that disrupted these vistas were to be leveled to the ground. Some 12,000 buildings were knocked down in the process.
In particular, Haussmann went after the tenement housing and slum stables, which he said “…seemed to shame France, an admission of impotence on the part of her government…” With so much land cleared, he was able to build new rail infrastructure and many new, wide boulevards. Not only did this help bring sunlight into the previously dark streets of old Paris, it also made it more difficult for Parisians to erect barricades for revolutions. Ahhhhh. And, yeah, after about a century of revolutions in Paris, made possible by urban barricades, this was very likely not an accidental consequence of the renovations – but, rather, a deliberate motivation of the emperor’s policy. Of course, it also helped reduce common crime, as muggers and other criminals weren’t able to hide in alleys as easily as they used to. Plus, gas lamps went up everywhere, so that helped too.
Along the way, Haussmann also remade the architecture of the city, with iron railings, artful columns and domes and whatnot. These buildings included rail stations, theaters, hospitals, and more. There were new bridges, new parks and gardens. A massive system of new aqueducts was constructed to bring potable water into the city from a large, new reservoir, while an unprecedented network of large, subterranean sewer lines routed rainwater, industrial waste, human waste, and other noxious debris out of the streets. Cholera outbreaks pretty much ceased in Paris from that point forward.
Additionally, many suburbs were incorporated into Paris, expanding the geographic reach of the city, where the renovations continued. Some of the poorest, most desperate workers of the Paris area saw their meager homes demolished in the name of progress. When Haussmann’s liberal economic beliefs didn’t pan out – and these poor Parisians couldn’t find new, affordable housing like he assumed they would – Napoleon III had to step in. A new social housing policy was explored, although it would take years before anything came to fruition.
In 1857, the emperor ennobled him Baron Haussmann – but, by the 1860s, Paris had had enough of the prefect. Between the staggering fiscal cost of his renovations – today it would come out to over $90 billion – and the even more staggering social cost, French politicians were calling for his removal. Napoleon – preoccupied with a looming war against Prussia – conceded to their demands. He asked for Haussmann’s resignation, but Haussmann refused. Finally, the emperor dismissed his loyal prefect from service.
Baron Haussmann’s renovations of Paris changed the city forever. Paris is just not the Paris it was before 1853. Crime, disease, and traffic congestion fell. Property values, cultural institutions, and aesthetic beauty rose. At the same time, the means to which he pursued these ends made Haussmann a villain to Parisians even to this day.
Urban planning is often a controversial endeavor. Trying to make the perfect city inevitably pulls at larger questions about what the perfect society would look like. And there will be winners and losers, as well as supporters and detractors. Paris wasn’t alone in this. And before Haussmann was finished there, another major urban planning effort was underway down in Barcelona.
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Part 3: The Utopian City
Spain was one of those countries that had been relatively untouched by the Industrial Revolution. With weak political leadership and a primitive financial sector, the Spanish economy was still mostly focused on agricultural production. But there were some regional exceptions to be found – namely, in the Basque country and in Catalonia.
Nowhere was this truer than in Barcelona. With the kingdom’s first railway brought there in 1848, a long-established Mediterranean port for global trade, and hundreds of Catalan textile mills springing up, Barcelona became known as “Spain’s workshop.” By the end of the first Industrial Revolution, the population had topped 187,000 – with some 73,000 working in the mills. Yet, they were trapped within the city’s medieval walls, a physical barrier that served as the boundaries for where they could live. Incredibly, Barcelona was more than twice as densely populated as Paris. Most streets were less than 10 feet wide. And with the population growth came a big growth in mortality. Cholera claimed over 13,000 lives in Barcelona between 1834 and 1865.
Finally, in 1853, a public proclamation was issued:
“‘Down with the walls!’ has said this province’s council, and ‘Down with the walls!’ has no doubt answered your town hall, which knows the importance of making this girdle disappear that is squeezing and choking us.”
The next year, the Spanish government gave Barcelona permission to tear down the walls. Immediately upon learning the news, citizens rushed the walls with pickaxes and began smashing away.
Then, in 1855, the government approved a plan to extend the city – the “Eixample” as it’s called in Catalan – submitted by a retired civil engineer who had moved to Barcelona somewhat recently and was horrified by the city’s conditions.
Ildefons Cerdà i Sunyer was born in rural Catalonia in 1815. The son of a well-to-do liberal family, he studied civil engineering in Madrid and joined the Corps of Engineers, which took him to projects across Spain, before settling in Barcelona in 1848. He then received a large inheritance upon the death of a brother and left his job for a more leisurely – well, not career, but pursuit – in public service.
When it became clear the walls would soon come down, Cerdà decided to get involved in the expansion of Barcelona. As a utopian socialist, he saw it as a great opportunity to create a model for urban working-class conditions across the industrializing world. Perhaps he could even create a city free of class distinctions. But when he set about his research for his plan, he discovered there was no body of work to turn to. Nobody had really bothered studying urbanism before, at least not in any kind of comprehensive way.
So, first, Cerdà had to create this field from scratch. In fact, in doing so, he coined the word “urbanization.”
Among other things, Cerdà worked on calculating the volume of air an individual needed to breathe correctly. He discovered there was a correlation between street width and the prevalence of disease. He looked at various economic data to try to predict what kind of jobs people would do in the Eixample, and what kind of resources and services they would need – schools, shops, health care, etc.
But beyond these basic considerations, he also wanted to create a better quality of life for the workers living in his new neighborhoods. He wanted to make sure that every citizen – regardless of wealth or status – had sufficient access to clean air, sunlight, and physical space.
Cerdà produced a map of a significantly expanded city. Outside the boundaries of the old city, Barcelona would be made up of new, mostly octagonal blocks, with a few long, diagonal boulevards thrown in (not unlike the map of L'Enfant’s Washington D.C.). In each block would be buildings of the same height. In the centers of the blocks would be large communal gardens. In each building, there’d be shops and worksites on the ground level. Bourgeois families would live on first floors above and, in the floors above them, would be flats for the working-class families. This way, all the citizens of Barcelona could occupy and enjoy the same neighborhoods. Spread evenly across the city would be the necessary hospitals, markets, schools, and so forth.
But while the Spanish government liked Cerdà’s plan, the elites of Barcelona did not. One local architect compared his map to the vision of our old friend, Charles Fourier, blasting it as “communist phalanstery-like squares.” And he kinda had a point.
He went on to complain of Cerdà that,
“He has been nibbling at and turning all the gardens...and spaces destined to public buildings into the monotony of an American city, destined for a pretentious tribe without more aspirations than the agglomeration of houses to eat, drink and sleep…”
Instead, the local government opened a public competition of plans for Barcelona’s expansion in 1859. The city’s chief architect, Antoni Rovira, was declared the winner. But before Rovira’s plan could be executed, the Spanish government intervened, creating a new ministry of public works with power over the local city councils. And then the new ministry put the project back on track with Cerdà.
The map of the Eixample today is almost exactly what Cerdà had planned. Barcelona would continue to expand in the years to come, but – despite their initial reservations – it was the bourgeoisie that most fell in love with the neighborhood. As the years went by, they competed with each other to build the most interesting buildings in the Eixample, tapping creative new architects like Antoni Gaudí.
Nevertheless, Cerdà’s revolutionary approach to urbanism caught on. Across the world, this new field of urban planning was adopted to make the quality of life better for all citizens of all backgrounds.
On September 20th, 1853, a grand banquet was held on the site of a new development on the River Aire in Yorkshire, England. More than 3,700 guests showed up in a lavishly decorated hall to celebrate two things – (1) the opening of this new development, and (2) the 50th birthday of the industrialist who made it possible: Titus Salt.
Extravagant as this banquet was, here’s what you need to know: First, the lavishly decorated hall was actually the combing shed of a new textile mill; Second, the guests attending were mostly the workers who would soon be coming into the mill each day. And they’d be coming into work from homes being constructed nearby in a new model village for them.
Titus Salt was born to a nonconformist-Protestant family in a little market town outside Leeds in 1803. His father worked a variety of jobs – as an iron worker, cloth merchant, chemical worker, farmer, and perhaps some other things over the years.
As a young child, Titus was sent to school, but eventually went to work for a new business his father set up in wool manufacturing. Eventually he took over the business and, from 1833 to 1848, grew it into one of the most successful businesses in the region. Located in the City of Bradford, near Leeds, he was, by that point, the #1 employer in town. He also got involved in public service, briefly serving as a Liberal MP and as a city councilor.
Then around 1850, Salt began plotting his next business expansion, but he was concerned about how he was going to be able to do that in Bradford. The city was overcrowded as it was, with cheap, shoddily-constructed homes for the mill workers, pollution in the streets and in the air, and the ever-present problem of public drunkenness.
So, instead, he turned his sights north to the edge of town, and chose a small plot of land between the River Aire and the Leeds and Liverpool Canal to build his next mill. And just to the south of the canal, he built his new workers’ village. It would be called “Saltaire.”
Eventually moving all his other operations to this centralized facility to maximize efficiencies, he ended up investing an estimated £100,000 in the mill itself, which today comes out to about $170 million. But over the next 15 years, he also invested in building up the community. Nearly 900 housing units were constructed for the workers. Unlike the slum houses found in Bradford, these dwellings were made of stone and so well built that nearly all of them remain today. Room was allocated for gardens and other green space, as well as things like public monuments, and the streets were laid out in a convenient grid.
The architecture may seem a bit drab by our modern sensibilities, but at the time, it demonstrated a real aesthetic care for the people living there – like they weren’t just tools of the capitalist; their village wasn’t solely utilitarian. A Congregationalist church was built, as were wash and bath houses, shops, a hospital, and a community center, which included a library, a gym, a science lab, a concert hall, and a rec room with billiards tables. Additional mill buildings were constructed in the years to come as well.
What was not built were alehouses. Booze was not to be sold in this village. Though not a strict teetotaler (as was believed for a long time), Salt was a supporter of the Temperance Movement and he intended Saltaire to be a dry community.
Shortly before he died, Salt was elevated to a baronetcy, making him “Sir Titus Salt” – and he’s a fairly beloved figure today.
But why did he do it?
The motivations aren’t entirely clear. But it seemed to be where his many different identities intersected. He was a devout Christian who saw his workers as his brothers and sisters, and he did not want them to lead miserable lives. He was also a shrewd businessman, who likely saw this venture as a way to attract a loyal and productive workforce. And, as a proud citizen of Bradford, he no doubt saw this as an opportunity to make his beloved city better off.
But while Saltaire was perhaps the most famous, it was far from the only model village built in the Victorian Era. More than a dozen other such villages were constructed during those years, all over England. Much like Robert Owen had decades earlier, many British industrialists sought to improve the conditions of their workforces by providing clean, safe, vibrant, and affordable communities to them. And while the model village movement has been largely forgotten, the villages themselves still remain. People are still living in them.
This new attention paid to improving the quality of life for ordinary people also took the form of public investment in large, public parks.
Parks had existed for a long time, of course, but they were usually private spaces funded by and for the primary use of the rich. Think of the great gardens of the aristocratic estates designed by Capability Brown. (Shout out Chapter 43!) But in the early 1840s, a new Improvement Act empowered the local government in Birkenhead – across the River Mersey from Liverpool – to invest its municipal funds for creating such a park – a public park. They hired our old friend, Joseph Paxton, to design it (remember: he’s the guy who designed the Crystal Palace) and bought up about 200 acres of fields and marshland for the project.
Trees and shrubs were planted. Lodges, gates, and a grand neo-classical entrance were designed. In 1847, Lord Morpeth (yes, the same Lord Morpeth from earlier in this episode) officially opened it to the public. More investments and improvements were made in the years to come.
Birkenhead Park provided some much-needed green space for an area that was becoming polluted and overcrowded thanks to the Industrial Revolution. It allowed people of all backgrounds to get back to nature – just like the transcendentalists Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emmerson had done (shout out Chapter 44!) – even if just at a small scale.
And it also kicked-off a public park movement. New urban parks were added in Birmingham and London, including the East End. New civic associations were established across England to lobby for additional green spaces.
But where this movement really took off was across the pond. Because one of the people who visited Birkenhead Park and was really inspired by it was an American tourist. It would change the course of his life and the lives of American cities.
Frederick Law Olmsted was born into an old Hartford, Connecticut family in 1822, and he would live a fascinating life. The son of a successful store owner, Olmsted spent his teens and twenties bouncing around, trying to figure his life out. He tried out as an apprentice for a New York silk merchant, then as a sailor, then as a college student at Yale, then as a farmer, then as a journalist. In fact, it was his 1850 trip to the UK – seeing the country’s public gardens and Birkenhead Park – that led him to write his “Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England”, which got his writing career off the ground.
Olmsted would spend the next few years of his life as a reporter. But before he did, his work writing about parks and gardens put him in contact with a renowned landscape architect and publisher named Andrew Jackson Downing.
In his magazine, The Horticulturist, Downing had proposed the creation of a large park for New York City, which was seeing astronomical population growth. (Between 1820 to 1860, the city had gone from about 150,000 residents to nearly 1.2 million.) Downing wanted this park to be like the Birkenhead Park which had so impressed Olmsted. And to help make it happen, Downing recruited an English architect named Calvert Vaux to the cause.
Now, Downing ended up dying in a crazy steamboat fire on the Hudson in 1852, but not before introducing Olmsted and Vaux. And the two men would end up forming a longtime partnership to make Downing’s dream a reality – and not just in New York.
In 1858, Olmsted and Vaux submitted a plan in a contest to design a massive park in the center of Manhattan. Their plan won and Olmsted was put in charge of managing the construction of this new green space – New York’s world-famous Central Park.
Now, like in London with the Metropolitan Railway, and like in Paris with the Haussmann renovations, the construction of Central Park meant the displacement of poorer, less-powerful people. The neighborhood of Seneca Village had been founded decades earlier by African Americans, many of whom had been recently freed from slavery. Immigrant communities – mostly Irish famine refugees – had moved into the area too. Among the city’s elites, these neighborhoods had a bad reputation of being demonstrably poor and presumptively crime-ridden. Using the power of eminent domain, the city seized the property from the homeowners – disenfranchising the Black men in the process – scattering them to the peripheries of Manhattan, so the massive park could go there.
This was before Olmsted’s involvement, though, and he viewed Central Park as an opportunity for creating egalitarianism through a shared space for all classes of New Yorkers – not unlike what Cerdà was trying to accomplish back in Barcelona.
As he put it:
“It is one great purpose of the Park to supply to the hundreds of thousands of tired workers, who have no opportunity to spend their summers in the country, a specimen of God's handiwork that shall be to them, inexpensively, what a month or two in the White Mountains or the Adirondacks is, at great cost, to those in easier circumstances.”
Over the next 20 years, the city spent roughly $14 million as some 20,000 workers moved some 5 million cubic feet of earth to clear the 778 acres of land. They planted half a million trees, shrubs, and other plants; added new reservoirs and sprawling fields; bridges and entry ways were built.
Before Central Park was even completed, Olmsted and Vaux got to work creating Prospect Park across the river in Brookyln. Over the next 30+ years, Olmsted would continue what I can only describe as his ADHD-driven career – working as an executive in a health agency during the Civil War; as a recruiter of African American soldiers; as a failed California gold mine operator; and as an architect of insane asylums. But what he was most successful at (and most famous for) was being a park designer.
Together with Vaux he was responsible for establishing public park systems across the country – Buffalo, New York; Louisville, Kentucky; my hometown of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Seeing the disastrous over-development of Niagara Falls, he created a state park reservation there.
They also got involved in urban planning, designing an entire suburb of Chicago from scratch – Riverside, Illinois – the first planned community in the United States and the model of American suburbanism.
Later, Olmsted moved his office up here to Boston, where he designed the so-called Emerald Necklace – a long string of parks circling the city – as well as landscapes for the National Mall in Washington, D.C., for the Chicago World’s Fair (which did a lot to reshape the physical environment of Chicago, generally), for university campuses across the country, and for several of the country’s first National Parks.
Now, many of the developments we’ve talked about today were only precursors to what would come later. From the spread of modern sewers and subways to the study of urbanism, the seeds planted during these years would be reaped nearer to the turn of the 20th Century. Urban planning really got its foothold during the Progressive Era, and it began with something called the Garden City Movement – a movement it’s difficult to imagine without the influence of Olmsted. But we’ll leave that for the future for now.
Olmsted’s work is remarkable because of how lasting this legacy has been. He drove communities to invest in shared spaces. These parks are still with us today. But, more importantly for the people of the time, these places represented a vital refuge from the smoke and brick and iron of the industrial cities where they lived and toiled.
And the people of the time needed that refuge because – in a lot of ways – the world around them seemed to be getting worse and worse. And in particular, industrialization was making the oldest tragedy of the human experience worse than it already was: War – next time on the Industrial Revolutions.
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Don’t forget, later this month we have a bonus episode coming out in which I interview an urban planning professor, so you’ll want to check that out.
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Thank you.