M10 - Cities in the Flow

Author(s)

Patrick Leitner (Ecole d'architecture Paris - La Villette)

Keywords

Greenwich Village, Street Opening, Local Life

Abstract

In 1914 Seventh Avenue South was cut through the heart of New York’s Greenwich Village. The aim of this one-kilometer long extension of Seventh Avenue was to improve the south-north traffic connection while also allowing for the construction of the subway’s Broadway-Seventh Avenue Line which opened in 1918. However, it caused a huge upset in the local urban life which not only lost some of its historical fabric but was also struggling against becoming a purely passing-through neighborhood characterized by a large open space (which had not been rebuilt), new speed and pollutions, and numerous gas and service stations.

With the help of archival material such as the report of the NYC Improvement Commission of 1907, minutes of various boards, land register, assessment and other legal maps from the 1910s, as well as historic photographs from the 1920s and 1930s, my paper proposes to discuss Seventh Avenue South from the viewpoint of the legal framework, its spatial consequences, and the slow and belated rebuilding of urban life. For while the thoroughfare was directly connected to the existing street system (contrary to a railway or speedway), it was nevertheless an example of what network planning for streets and public transport could do to urban life when not accompanied by specific legal tools permitting the creation of a newly built cityscape. The paper will demonstrate that, although proudly presented in monographs of that time as a major achievement in American urban planning, this avenue could never follow the much-admired model of the new Parisian boulevards built during the Second Empire. In New York, this model was known in depth for its planning procedures and its capacity of creating a new, albeit different, urban local life. In contrast, Seventh Avenue South offered for many decades the features of a highway very much at odds with this idea.

My paper will also offer a short reflection on the avenue's last decades which show that, in spite of all the initially unresolved issues, urban life has finally arrived on the avenue. One century after its opening, it is a place where networked flows and urban life make new meaning.

Author(s)

Thomas Vanoutrive (University of Antwerp) and  Greet De Block (UAntwerp)

Keywords

Antwerp, Transport, River Crossings

Abstract

The location near a river has played a significant role in the history of many cities around the world. This is also the case for the city of Antwerp and the river Scheldt. The city developed on the right bank of the river and in the 1920s land on the left bank was added to the territory of the city of Antwerp. An intermunicipal company was set up to improve the connections between the two banks of the river and to develop the land on the left bank. Until the opening of two tunnels in 1933, ferry services were the only alternative to cross the river. After the opening of these tunnels, some actors referred to the vicious circle of tolls and development: tunnel tolls were required to finance the development of the left bank but this development could not take off due to the tolls. The tunnels were thought out as infrastructures organising and enforcing relations between flows and urbanisation, yet the financial construct of tolls obstructed mobility and put the flow-urbanisation relation into a deadlock. Tolls were levied until 1951 in the pedestrian tunnel and until 1958 in the tunnel for motorized traffic. While discussions on tolls primarily focused on Antwerp and some nearby municipalities, opponents of tolls also referred to the role of the tunnels in the wider road network which connects Antwerp to other Belgian cities such as Ghent, but also to cities like Lille, France. As a consequence, this case is interesting to shed light on accessibility issues on the interplay between local, national and international scales.

Author(s)

Carlos López Galviz (Lancaster University)

Keywords

London and Paris, Railways, Public Benefit

Abstract

Transporting goods and people became paramount to the transformation that London and Paris experienced during the second half of the 19th century. Whether new and existing transport technologies should match urban and suburban growth constituted an important part of the thinking about the future of the two cities during this period. Moving heavy goods and minerals circumventing the city, or, allowing for traffic to concentrate into stations serving the post office, the market, or, the river docks were two of the ways in which railways shaped the flows, form and functions of the English and French capitals during this period. This paper will focus on what gradually and unevenly became known as the ‘public benefit’ in a process that brought together and apart the private interests of railway companies and a variety of interests from the national, regional, metropolitan and local authorities. It argues that a focus on ‘publics’ is better suited to understand urban change in nineteenth-century European cities.

Author(s)

Samuel Grinsell (University of Antwerp)

Keywords

Ports, Urban Infrastructure, Environment

Abstract

The nineteenth century saw rapid changes in technology, as steam transformed shipping and railways provided new modes of connection. Larger ships changed the physical nature of ports, and cities adapted by creating new facilities or moving some downriver to deeper waters. The relationship between water and cities thus changed dramatically. This paper examines how these developments transformed the urban form of London and Antwerp, financial centres in the imperial economy. How did the need for expanded facilities reshape neighbourhoods? How were some kinds of movement enabled while others were restricted? How does global modernity reshape static sites such as the port?

The cities around the North Sea were centres of global power in the modern era, commanding maritime empires that defined the commerce and politics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for much of the world. Yet the modern history of this region has generally been broken into national specialisms. Bringing the North Sea into the urban history of modernity would change the ways in which we think about cities, seas, rivers, ¬¬and the ways in which these spaces combine.

This study uses nineteenth century port architecture to understand the production of urban space. The complex interaction of waterscapes, buildings, street layouts and trading routes makes the port a particularly dense site of contestation. Both Antwerp and London expanded their docks in the nineteenth century, reshaping the cities’ relationship to water, river and sea. Comparing the two enables us to trace the different ways global trading relations were transforming urbanism in this period. Putting infrastructure at the heart of the analysis of historical urban space takes up arguments by Swati Chattopadhyay; while examining ports as moments in environmental history builds on work by Michael Chiarappa. By drawing together these intellectual currents this paper will reconsider the place of ports in the assemblage of the city and of urbanism in global webs of trade.

Author(s)

Diego Inglez de Souza (Universidade do Minho)

Keywords

Fishing Architecture, Atlantic History, Sardine Canning

Abstract

Based on the production of canned sardines, we seek to understand and map the effects that fishing techniques and fish preservation industries have had on the urbanization of territories along the European Atlantic coast. Over the last two centuries, following the development of fish preservation techniques in France, these territories were transformed by the multiple circulations of capital and ‘traditional’ and scientific knowledge between Portuguese, Spanish and French fishing ports. In this paper, we argue for the need to develop an integrated perspective between sea and shore in order to understand and map the major impacts that fishing and canning have had on architecture, infrastructures and urban history.

To understand the circulations and exchanges between various countries during two centuries of the canning industry, the Atlantic must be viewed as a space of shared knowledge. Fishing has been studied in different disciplinary fields, but, to fully grasp the complexity of its dynamics, the marine environment must be regarded as a common ground for understanding the natural, industrial, urban and social dimensions of this significant exploration of sea resources.

The transformations of important fishing ports on the Portuguese coast, such as Setúbal and Matosinhos, during the 20th century can be understood in relation to international dynamics, such as fisheries ecological instabilities and labour force strikes in French Brittany. These social and environmental obstacles to the economic rationality underlying production and exports brought radical changes to the canning industry. Even if a classical delocalization process can be described through the economic history of different brands held by the same economic groups, both political and scientific discourse continue to be linked to national and regional readings of the phenomena. Migrations of techniques and fishing schools are constantly mentioned as external factors that led to important transformations in the fishing and canning industries, yet rarely understood as transnational exchanges resulting from connected factors.

Rather than accept modes of fishing production as national or regional symbols and identity makers, we propose to broaden the scope of spatial narratives across borders, thus contributing to a wider notion of architecture inscribed into a particular socio-ecology.

Author(s)

Elif Simge Fettahoğlu Özgen (Munich Technical University), İpek Akpınar (Izmir Institute of Technology) and Benedikt Boucsein (Munich Technical University)

Keywords

Urban Mega Projects, Territory and Urbanism, Istanbul

Abstract

Spearheaded by major highway projects, the city of Istanbul expanded from a city of 1 million to a metropolis of 15 million in the last 50 years, imploding and exploding simultaneously. The city's overgrowth followed specific forms of informalities, and post-planning and post-legitimizing measures within that timeframe. The last decade of urban interventions, however, indicates a scalar and geographical shift, with the introduction of Urban Mega Projects(UMP's) as prevailing form of spatial production through new governance practices that, in lieu of a master plan imposes top-down decision making; as they are one-by-one realized in an unprecedented scale, scope and pace. The new Istanbul Airport, as one of the largest aviation projects in the world and 'the greatest project of Turkish Republic' to date is central to the plans, resulting in a territorialization and re-scaling that has, has the potential to overthrow the thresholds that sustain Istanbul, and the capacity to reverse the macroform that historically followed a south-bound pattern, extending along the highway belts and large infrastructural projects. Behind the visible, the undertow of geographical claims, of geographies of tension and transformation is inherent. The territories are bounded, re-shaped as new rhythms of mobilities are introduced and uneven development patterns are formed. The aim of the study is, thus, to place the UMP's and infrastructures their territorializing and de-territorializing capacities into context by investigating historical perspectives of infrastructure-led developments in the case of Istanbul. The aim of the study is to precede patterns of development, and future claims on the territory. Following a contextual description, it discusses how the territorializing potential of the infrastructure spaces and UMP's are unfolding. Secondly, it provides a prospective look into the development patterns, and finally aims to provide a broader understanding of the effect of large-scale infrastructures, specifically of airports and their bundling and splintering nature over the territory.