The City: A Global History (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 21)

by Joel Kotkin

  This search for another approach grew from the fact that all three of these countries industrialized without the democratic traditions that had helped America or Britain adjust to the shock of the new urban condition. These societies—making a rapid shift to the industrial city under essentially medieval political systems—lacked the legal structures and social attitudes to cope with what Sigmund Freud, in his landmark Civilization and Its Discontents, described as the “cultural frustration” with life in the large, often impersonal world of the modern metropolis. 5

  JAPAN’S SUDDEN INDUSTRIALIZATION

  Freud wrote these words in Vienna just four years before that city fell to National Socialism. He would have recognized as well in Japan the familiar symptoms of a “cultural frustration.” Japan’s transformation to the industrial age was made all the more difficult by both its suddenness and its enormous rapidity. After the overthrow of the Tokugawas in 1868, Japan embarked full-bore on modernization. The architects of the Meiji Restoration worked busily to catch up with the dominant industrial powers, giving priority to both infrastructure investment and importation of Western technology.

  Prior to Meiji, Japan’s urban development had been slowed by the decision of the Tokugawa bakufu to ban most contact with foreigners. 6 Yet when Commodore William Perry’s gunships in Tokyo Bay broke this isolation in 1853, Japan’s cities—blessed with a highly literate population, a developed national market, talented artisans, and a strong entrepreneurial tradition—were better positioned than any outside Europe to meet the challenges of the industrial age.7

  As in Britain and America, the rise of the manufacturing economy brought with it a rapid surge in the urban population. Doubling in the first half century after the Meiji revolution, city dwellers already accounted for nearly one in four Japanese by the 1920s. Osaka, with a vast assortment of smaller factories, was now dubbed the “Manchester of the East”; its population more than quintupled between 1875 and the 1920s. Nagoya, too, was transformed from an old castle town to a major industrial center, including the base for what was to become one of the world’s most dominant industrial corporations, Toyota Motors. Provincial factory towns like Kawasaki, Fukuoka, and Sapporo grew even faster.8

  Tokyo emerged as the first among all Japanese cities. Replacing Kyoto as home to the emperor, the city gained “instant legitimacy” as the spiritual as well as temporal capital of the nation.9 Many leading business institutions now found it advantageous to locate their main offices there in preference to traditional commercial centers such as Osaka or one of the many rising industrial towns.10

  Even after its devastation in the Kanto earthquake of 1923, which killed one hundred thousand and left millions homeless, Tokyo continued to consolidate its dominant position. By the 1930s, Tokyo boasted an imposing downtown hub, complete with tall buildings, department stores, and sophisticated mass transit.11 For the first time since industrialization, Asia possessed a city that could compare itself with New York or London. And, for a time, it could even dream of surpassing them.

  “THE IRON MONSTER”

  Amid these signs of progress, industrialism also wreaked widespread social, moral, and environmental havoc. Even in the late nineteenth century, a writer noted, “red crested cranes could still be seen soaring through the skies” above Tokyo. Foxes and badgers proliferated, and the waters of the Sumida River could still be used for brewing tea.12 Yet by the 1920s, Japanese city dwellers endured widespread pollution, numbing ugliness, and the devastation of a splendid natural environment fundamental to their traditional religious beliefs and ancient culture. Canal-laced Osaka, once known as “the city of water,” had become a “city of smoke,” its canals now fetid and filled with noxious chemicals. 13

  The new technologies assuredly also brought many wonders. Former peasants rode trains and streetcars to factories operated by electrical power. Lowborn artisans or impoverished samurai transcended ancient class barriers to become the new leaders of Japan’s rising industrial economy. Information once limited to scholars and government officials now became widely available through universal education, mass-market books, newspapers, and eventually radio.

  Yet there remained a pervasive sense that traditional ideas and nobler ways of life were now under assault by impersonal and dangerous foreign forces. Maps issued in the 1860s still referred to the mythological and historical interest of places; the railway maps of the new era eschewed poetics, concentrating instead on precise measurements.

  The author Natsume Soseki, writing in 1916, protested against the “violent way” that “the iron monster” tore through the countryside and threatened one’s sense of individuality.14 The “iron monster” seemed to be devouring the brightly colored ancient central symbols of traditional Japanese urban life—walls, temples, great central markets—and replacing them with belching factories and dull gray concrete office buildings.15

  RECONSTRUCTING JAPANESE CITIES

  The severe economic downturn of the late 1920s and early 1930s led many Japanese to question the validity of Western models. More and more, Japanese leaders now thought about reconciling the demands of their ever more urban industrial society with a deeply traditionalist, often aggressively xenophobic sensibility. Rather than accept the conflict and anomie associated with industrial cities in America and Europe, some Japanese sought ways to build urban society around the more familiar and less contentious notion of extended family networks—what the sociologist Setsuko Hani calls “the idea or consciousness of the house.”16

  Asserting the hierarchy of the “house” had the effect of reinforcing the authority of parents, firm owners, military and political leaders, and, ultimately, the emperor. Many government and intellectual leaders now deemed Western notions about coping with dissent and gradual democratic change inappropriate for Japan. Instead, they sought ways to, in the words of the Ministry of Education’s Spiritual Culture Institute, “perfect and unify the nation with one mind.”17

  To impose such moral unanimity on an increasingly sophisticated, urbanized society required high degrees of regimentation and repression. Working-class organizations were either co-opted or suppressed.18 Authorities also initiated a cultural crusade against Western influences— attacking everything from Western fashions and jazz to Hollywood movies and women’s emancipation. Tokyo, Osaka, and other great Japanese cities, where Western influences were most pervasive, now would be purged of cultural norms emanating from New York, Los Angeles, and London.19

  In addition to these moral reforms, Japanese urban planners dreamed of ways to refashion urban life that would be more congruent with traditional lifestyles. With the riches of a growing empire to draw on, some devoted themselves to developing ideal new urban centers in Manchuria, Korea, and other parts of the emerging Japanese “co-prosperity sphere.”

  Closer to home, they worked on plans, particularly around Tokyo and Nagoya, to replace sprawling apartment blocs with greenbelts and neat, satellite communities. Uzo Nishiyama, one of the most influential planners, based his urban vision on the traditional neighborhood structure, the machi. Work and housing would be integrated as much as possible, promoting a way of life closer to that of the traditional village. Nishiyama’s traditionalist sensibility also led him to oppose the high-rise construction increasingly emblematic of American cities, favoring instead the development of what he called “life spheres,” decentralized, self-governing neighborhoods.

  THE NAZI EXPERIMENT

  Nishiyama and other Japanese planners drew some of their inspiration from neotraditionalist ideas developed by the National Socialist theorist Gottfried Feder. In his book Die nue Stadt, Feder forcefully advocated the creation of decentralized urban zones surrounded by agricultural areas.20 Feder also shared the unease of Nishiyama, and other Japanese, about the negative impact of cosmopolitan, Anglo-American society on what he considered traditional values.21

  As in Japan, the Industrial Revolution arrived late in Germany, but also with sudden and unsettling consequences.
Nowhere was this more evident than in Berlin, the capital of the newly united German state. After centuries as a stodgy and rather unimpressive Prussian “barracks town,” Berlin at the end of the nineteenth century suddenly had developed into a vast metropolis of over 1.5 million. The city was ringed with vast industrial plants where, as one observer noted, “every chimney [was] spewing out great showers of sparks and thick billows of smoke, as if it was the fire city of Vulcan.”

  Widely acknowledged as the most modern city in Europe, the capital of the newly united Germany was also known as “America in miniature” or “Chicago on the Spree.”22 This rapid evolution brought with it the familiar problems of industrial cities—slum housing, crime, and a startling rise of illegitimacy. By 1900, Berlin was both the most crowded city in Europe and a prime center for radical Socialist agitation. 23

  Berlin’s thriving industry attracted Germans from the rural provinces as well as immigrants from the impoverished Polish hinterlands. Many of these newcomers felt alternately inspired and appalled by a city where “the money economy” overwhelmed traditional values. A native Berliner, the sociologist George Simmel, observed:

  With each crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life, the city sets up a deep contrast with small town and rural life with reference to the sensory foundations of psychic life.24

  As in Japan, this assault on Germans’ “psychic life” engendered a sharp rise in xenophobia. The Jews, long objects of European hatred, fear, and resentment, bore the brunt of this growing antiforeign model.25 In 1895, voters in Vienna, the sophisticated cultural capital of the German-speaking world, elected an avowed anti-Semite, Karl Lueger, as their mayor.

  The mayor’s successful exploitation of anti-Semitism impressed one young provincial, Adolf Hitler, then a struggling artist in the Austrian capital. Decades later, the National Socialist führer would call Lueger “the mightiest Mayor of all times.”26 Like Lueger, Hitler and the National Socialists, including his adviser Gottfried Feder, identified the Jews— both for their capitalist savvy and their prominence among the leading Socialist agitators—as the primary economic and moral threat to the German urban middle class.27

  Like the Japanese, the Nazis waged a broader cultural war against what they saw as foreign art, music, and culture. They campaigned against Anglo-American styles of dress, “degenerate” jazz, and literature, then widely popular in German cities. Such decadence was identified most particularly with Berlin—a place the local party boss Joseph Goebbels derided as “that sink of iniquity.”28

  Once in power, Hitler jettisoned much of Feder’s program for deconcentration of urban areas and sent his old mentor off to a respectable semiretirement. Rather than return to the village past, the Nazis now sought to mold their cities into their own “alternative form of modernity.”29 Hitler now insisted Berlin be “raised to a high level of culture that it may compete with all the capital cities of the world.”

  Following the brilliantly staged 1936 Olympics, Hitler’s chief architect, Albert Speer, developed elaborate plans to transform Berlin into Germania, a massive metropolis that would serve as a modern-day equivalent of ancient Rome or Babylon. The city would be graced with massive boulevards and ceremonial centers, including a domed meeting hall capable of holding 125,000 people and an Adolf Hitler Square, which could accommodate a throng of 1 million.

  Still, not all of Feder’s ideas were discarded. In their plans for their new occupied eastern territories, the Nazis envisioned an archipelago of compact German-dominated industrial centers, surrounded by agricultural settlements and traditionalist villages.30 These grandiose plans, like those of the Japanese imperialists, ended with the devastating loss of World War II. Utterly ruined, Japanese and German cities, at least in the West, would rise again, but only under American tutelage.

  RUSSIA: THE THIRD ALTERNATIVE

  Russia’s urbanization lagged behind that of other countries, including both Japan and Germany. Czar Peter, who assumed the crown in 1689, had traveled extensively in Europe, visiting great cities like London and Amsterdam. He wanted his empire’s capital to be both modern and outward looking. Only when Russia had caught up with its European rivals, he believed, could they “show their ass” to the West.31

  Peter’s new capital of St. Petersburg, founded in 1703, was envisioned to combine the commercial energy of the Dutch capital with the glorious architecture of Italy and Versailles. It was to be everything Moscow— “Asiatic, anti-western, heavy-handed, vulgar, oppressive and provincial”— was not.32

  As the new locus of political power, St. Petersburg expanded rapidly, attaining a population of two hundred thousand by Czarina Catherine’s death in 1796 and half a million by the mid-nineteenth century.33 Its development as a manufacturing center, however, was slow. Russia, like North America, was naturally well positioned for industrial growth, with both enormous resources and a vast inland network of rivers. These physical advantages were largely offset by an exceedingly regressive social order; as late as 1861, much of the population, including many residing temporarily in the capital, consisted of serfs legally bound to their agricultural villages.34

  Even after emancipation, Russian cities suffered from the absence of the large independent property-owning class so critical to urban growth in Britain or America. Most economic resources remained in the hands of the state, the aristocracy, and, increasingly, foreign investors. The middle ranks consisted largely of petty traders and officials, academics, and other professionals serving the regime.35

  This highly inflexible class structure, and an authoritarian political system, served to widen the gap between the urban population and the ruling elite. With little hope for gradual reform, or a stake in their nation’s progress, the middle and working classes became increasingly radicalized.36

  THE ROAD TO REVOLUTION

  The Russian workers and middle class had ample reason for their rage. As Russia began to industrialize, its municipal institutions and basic physical infrastructure lingered in the feudal past. The ancient capital of Moscow remained a haphazard collection of one-story wooden buildings, often wretchedly constructed and without basic sanitation. The city also lacked a professional police force and adequate medical care.

  The chasm between these realities and the luxurious life of the ruling classes was most evident in St. Petersburg, where, as the playwright Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol noted, “everything’s an illusion, everything’s a dream, everything’s not what it seems.” A stone’s throw from the Italianate elegance of the Winter Palace, workers lived in poorly ventilated, fetid slums in what was contemporary Europe’s most disease-ridden city.

  St. Petersburg’s industrial structure was dominated by large manufacturing facilities, which inadvertently facilitated the mass organization of workers. After failing in their demands for more food and better working conditions, these workers organized into “soviets,” or self-governing committees, and turned on the regime itself.37 In October 1917, St. Petersburg’s factory laborers, a tiny urban minority in a largely agricultural country, helped put into power a new regime that would create the third, and most long-lasting, alternative to the Anglo-American industrial city.

  THE SOVIET SYSTEM

  The triumphant Bolshevik regime turned out to be, if anything, more autocratic than that of the czar. Their rejection of Western materialism was even more far-reaching than that of the Japanese or the Nazis. “Everything was cancelled,” recalled the novelist Aleksey Tolstoi. “Ranks, honors, pensions, officer’s epaulettes, the thirteenth letter of the alphabet, God, private property, and even the right to live as one wished.”38

  The Communists embraced Czar Peter’s dream of creating a highly urbanized Russia. Even in 1917, observed one historian, Russian cities were little more than “islands in an ocean of peasants”; only 15 percent of the population lived in urban centers. With their consolidation of power, the Communists determined to reverse history, making these “islands” ever
larger and more powerful.39

  As the chosen capital of the Soviet revolution, Moscow regained its favored position. Keeping Moscow’s population contented now constituted a key political concern of the Bolshevik leaders. “The salvation of the Moscow workers from starvation,” Lenin noted, “is the salvation of the revolution.” Food was taken, often by force, from the farmers to feed what was deemed the new ruling class, the urban proletariat. 40

  Moscow’s population fell drastically during the civil war that raged between 1917 and 1921 but began expanding rapidly again in the mid-1920s, reaching over 2 million people by the late 1920s. With the reimposition of order, death rates dropped and birthrates soared. Seeking work in the new center of power, tens of thousands of ambitious, often hungry people migrated every year into the city.41

  More cosmopolitan St. Petersburg, renamed Leningrad after the Soviet founder’s death in 1924, fared worse. Well in advance of their counterparts in Japan or Germany, the Communists launched a sweeping assault against Western urban culture. Anyone even receiving letters from abroad, a group most concentrated in the old capital, could be hauled off to the ever expanding gulag. The great purges of the 1930s stripped away much of the city’s intellectual and artistic elite, including some fifty curators at the Hermitage.42

  “SHARPENING OUR AXES”