Anglo-American Conference of Historians 2009: Cities
Institute of Historical Research, 2 - 3 July 2009
Utopia and Ruin: News from Metropolis
Chair: Richard Dennis (University College London)
The idea of the panel is to explore the notions of utopia and ruin in the context of four different cities during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The papers will draw on the examples of Buenos Aires, London, Paris, and Pripyat (Ukraine) in order to examine the relationships between visions of the future, conflictive readings of the present, and the often neglected influence of the past.
The panel will be introduced to the audience by presenting a few preliminary questions which each speaker will address separately in his paper.
Abstracts
Petrified modernism: Chernobyl, Pripyat, and the death of the city
Paul Dobraszczyk (University of Reading)
From the nineteenth century onwards the contradictory impulses of modernity have been consistently imaged as resulting in the eventual ruin of the city. This urban apocalypse has taken many forms: from the New Zealander confronting the ruins of the modern city in the far-distant future in London: a Pilgrimage (1872) to the machine-created hell of The Matrix (1999). More recently, apocalyptic visions of the city have seemed to move ever closer to reality and the not-so-distant future, whether as dire predictions of the effects of climate change, international terrorism or financial meltdown.
This paper offers a reading of urban ruin through a personal experience: a visit in 2007 to the town of Pripyat in Ukraine, abandoned after the catastrophic accident at the Chernobyl nuclear station on 26 April 1986. Drawing on documentary photographs charting the experience of moving through the architectural spaces of the ruined town, I set out how we might re-imagine modernism through such a direct experience of its own demise. The ruins of Pripyat offer a provocative and distressing picture of the end of urban modernism, seen as a conjunction of petrified remains - of ideology, technology, humanity, and architecture. Such a sense of petrified modernism runs counter to conventional images of urban apocalypse throughout the modern period, where ruin is imagined into the future rather than directly experienced in the present.
Buenos Aires between America and Europe: dreaming of a metropolis from a peripheral location c.1880–1910
Dhan Zunino Singh (Centre for Metropolitan History, IHR)
Buenos Aires emerged as a modern metropolis at the beginning of the twentieth century through the construction of transport infrastructure and architectural monuments. Despite its important trade links with Britain, the new Argentinean capital looked to Paris as its model, a viewpoint given its most direct expression in 1910, when the country’s Centenary Celebration proclaimed Buenos Aires to be the new Paris of South America.
Urban historians have largely stressed this French influence on the architecture and urbanism of Buenos Aires (either to celebrate or criticise it). However, this view might reduce the notion of ‘influence’, which is based on a complex circulation of ideas, goods, capital, workers and experts, to a mere ‘copy’ of the French capital. Challenging this view and focusing on the construction of the underground railway in Buenos Aires, this paper reveals a much broader range of influences on the modernisation of Buenos Aires from a host of European and North American cities, such as London, Chicago, New York, Glasgow and Berlin.
The paper explores the circulation of cosmopolitan ideas and images related to the technological innovation of transport and urban traffic during the debates on the implementation of underground railways (c.1880–1910). Considering that each new urban technology put in place reflects the modernising will, those innovations will be analysed as fragments of Buenos Aires’ past that contain ideas and images of a metropolis ‘under construction,’ remains of a dreamt city, or ruins of a peripheral metropolis.
Modern utopias: London, Paris, and the nineteenth century
Carlos López Galviz (Centre for Metropolitan History, IHR)
Utopian visions of the city from modernist architects such as Otto Wagner were based upon three fundamental elements: (1) the belief that the city's growth could be effectively planned and controlled; (2) their conviction that the progressive extension of the city limits could be made by the successive execution of stages or parts which constitute a whole; and (3) the universal character of the 'conceptual city' as it applied to all cities requiring only minor adjustments according to every specific context. Wagner's plans involved, therefore, an innovative reading of the present, a critical reassessment of the past as well as the creation of a transformative vision for the future.
In this contribution I will look at one of the possible origins of these visions of utopia. I will focus on two plans produced in London and Paris towards the second half of the nineteenth century when the idea of taking trains underneath, on and above the streets was inextricably linked to the need of improving the two metropolises. The visions of the city as proposed by Charles Pearson (London) and Fl. de Kérizouet (Paris) encapsulated dreams of a better future, but they were also, and perhaps more significantly, articulate and systematic challenges to the restrictions they both identified in the context of the two cities.
