by Nancy Reagin
The first skyscrapers began to appear in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, although they were not tall by today’s standards: for instance, the Home Insurance Building, built in Chicago in 1885, was only ten stories high. Since then, such buildings have appeared all over the world, as badges of urban modernity.
The forerunners of skyscrapers were the multistory buildings that existed even in Roman cities, built from brick, stone, and cement. Yet technology limited how high masonry buildings could go. Walls had to be ever thicker to support the weight of the higher stories. The development of steel-frame construction allowed buildings to go higher than before, and the elevator made such buildings usable. Henry Bessemer introduced the Bessemer Process for steel production in 1858. This enabled the inexpensive production of steel in large quantities, and revolutionized the construction industry, shipbuilding, and the railways. Similar technological innovations must have enabled residents of the Star Wars galaxy to live in bubbles underwater in Otoh Gunga or among the clouds of Bespin.
The steel-frame building opened a way for architects to create upward, lifting the visual spectacle of the city toward the sky. The notion of the urban skyline contained both high-rise buildings to look at and such vantage points to look from. Before the invention of the elevator, the highest floors of a building were the least desirable and were associated with servants’ quarters. The modern skyscraper with elevators changed this, with the appearance of the penthouse apartment as the ideal of urban luxury. The convenient downtown location and the view became the selling point for such homes, as we see in the view from Padmé Amidala’s apartment in Coruscant. Besides offering a stunning view of vistas such as the Coruscant skyline, skyscrapers also projected modernity, ambition, and sophistication.
Skyscrapers increased both housing density and, by creating new workplaces in high-rise offices, drove demands for public transportation. These buildings radically changed a city’s appearance and the ways people lived. Offices created different modes of working in cities and led to the rise of the commuter lifestyle. Factory workers had tended to live close to the factories—often in purpose-built housing owned by their employer or in tenements nearby, as with the workers on Cloud City. We have yet to reach the technology that allowed Cloud City to be built, miles above the planet’s surface, as floating layers of urban cityscape housing five million people.
The view from Padmé’s apartment on Coruscant. (Revenge of the Sith)
The growth in technology also helped create ideas of urban planning and ideal living arrangements: as one urban historian notes, in the nineteenth century “enlightened planners wanted the city in its very design to function like a healthy body, freely flowing as well as possessed of clean skin.”4 This included the idea that cities should have circulation, as a human body does: circulation of vehicular traffic, railways, and subway systems, with green spaces to serve as the “lungs” for the urban center.
The traffic had taken different forms: initially horse-drawn, with buses and then streetcars that ran along tracks laid on the road. Later, the streetcars were electrified: the cars were powered by electrical wires strung above the roadway. Urban planners looked above (elevated railways), and below (subways), as they tried to find ways to move the increasing numbers of commuters through the city. These needs of growing urban populations produced some of the greatest feats of human engineering, such as the London underground system.
Cloud City resembles many crowded, modern commercial cities. (The Empire Strikes Back)
New York City began construction of its subway system in 1900.
The first underground railway was constructed in London in 1863. Other cities soon followed, adding underground systems that increased the volume of human traffic through the city. Subways changed the way of moving through the city by putting passengers in tunnels: they no longer saw the streetscapes they were traveling through. In London, the underground system later saved the lives of thousands of Londoners, who were able to use the underground stations as bomb shelters during the air raids of World War II.
City life not only changed how people lived and traveled, it has made us behave differently. Note how German sociologist Georg Simmel described the particular psychological effects of living in a city:
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. The metropolis exacts from man as a discriminating creature a different amount of consciousness than does rural life. Here the rhythm of life and sensory mental imagery flows more slowly, more habitually, and more evenly.5
Urban life also created new figures, for instance, the private or undercover detective: such policing was possible only once towns were large enough for anonymity in crowds. The idea of being “undercover” depended on cities with large populations and the need for such detectives (whether private eyes or police plain-clothes detectives) to solve crimes, for which the pool of suspects could be in the thousands. It is the plain-clothes detective who is able to move through the juxtaposed spaces of the urban site. Indeed, in Attack of the Clones Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi become, in a sense, private detectives as they pursue the would-be assassin of Padmé Amidala. Obi-Wan enters a bar and orders a drink, very much as that quintessential urban detective Philip Marlowe would do. The detective has to be able to operate at all levels of society and relate to a range of people. The Jedi’s mind skills offer a shortcut to this talent, which otherwise depends on a particular ability to relate and build a rapport. In another scene in Attack of the Clones, Obi-Wan goes to meet a friend in a diner, in a setup that could have been in any 1930s hardboiled detective movie. The robot waitress uses old slang such as “Java juice” for coffee, part of a diner vocabulary that evolved in mid-twentieth-century America.
Diners specialized in being open long hours (often twenty-four hours), providing for the needs of shift-workers but also, in cities, for nightclub partiers, who wanted to get breakfast or a snack in the early hours. Occasionally, disused railway dining cars were turned into cafes, often near a railway station. This created a style of a long narrow room, with a counter and stools, much like that on a railway dining car. So popular was this aesthetic that prefabricated diners were built to resemble such carriages. Their streamlined shape, often accented with chrome, became an icon of the American landscape from the 1930s onward. This is the design of the diner in Attack of the Clones, suggesting a similar urbanizing process there, too.
Star Wars also shows us the layers of economic development that follow the rise of urban industrialization. The Jawas on Tatooine sell discarded or stolen droids, as they sell C-3PO and R2-D2 to Owen Lars—and as in our world used cars, motorcycles, and other appliances are sold by entrepreneurial middle-men. We can compare them to the rag-pickers of nineteenth-century European cities and some of the slum dwellers of India today. Living on the fringes of cities, they collect discarded items to repair or resell. This kind of secondary economy has always sprung up around cities, especially in the Industrial Age, as the volume of manufactured goods means there are more things to be discarded or recycled.
Dex’s Diner in CoCo Town, Coruscant. (Attack of the Clones)
The Summit Diner in Summit, New Jersey, is a prototypical “rail car” style diner built in 1938.
London and Coruscant: Cities at the Center of It All
A long time ago in a galaxy not so far away, the first envoys of the East India Company were sent by Elizabeth I in 1601. Their goal was to make contact with the King of Aceh, to form a trading relationship for spices that were of high value in Europe. Companies such as this were given charters to trade and colonize certain parts of the world. As Michael Laver discusses in chapter 10 of this book, the East India Company, similar to the Trade Federation in Star Wars, had troops and ships, to defend (and enforce) their trade routes. As Venice had introduced share investment, the joint-
stock company became key to British colonial expansion, with the East India Company, the Virginia Company, the Hudson’s Bay Company (and others) allowing private investors to drive colonial expansion.
As trade grew, the need to improve geographical knowledge grew, too. The British government and its trading companies relied on accurate maps to delineate colonial territory, and ships needed precise charts to avoid heading off course. This resulted in a contest for a means of establishing longitude (allowing ships’ navigators to accurately establish their location). Inability to establish longitude while at sea led to maritime disasters, as navigators miscalculated their locations and hit rocky shores or reefs. Clockmakers, astronomers, and mathematicians attempted to solve the problem. As long as they knew the time in one place (for instance, the home port), sailors could establish longitude by figuring the solar time where they were and calculating the time difference from home. The problem they faced was that clocks were unreliable on sea voyages. Given the importance of naval power and merchant shipping to London, it was there that this problem was solved.
The successful establishment of international longitudinal measures in 1884 placed London—specifically, the Royal Observatory at Greenwich—at the center of the world, longitudinally. The Prime Meridian (or zero degrees west or east) is the reason we still observe Greenwich Mean Time, because all time zones are counted outward from London. Every time we set our watches to a new time zone, we are in a way acknowledging London’s historic legacy and dominant position in the global economy of the eighteenth century. For the inhabitants of the galaxy in Star Wars, Coruscant fulfills this role, with its coordinates of 0,0,0. In both cases, the use of these coordinates reflects the fact that both London and Coruscant were the political and economic centers of their respective worlds at the time the systems were set up.
That Coruscant long endures at the center of the Star Wars galaxy stands in sharp contrast to our history. Great cities rose and fell over the centuries. As Fernand Braudel explained,
Dominant cities did not dominate forever; they replaced each other. . . . When Amsterdam replaced Antwerp, when London took over from Amsterdam, or when in about 1929, New York overtook London, it always meant a massive historical shift of forces, revealing the precariousness of the previous equilibrium and the strengths of the one replacing it. The whole circle of the world-economy was affected by such changes and the repercussions were never exclusively economic.6
Like Coruscant, London from the sixteenth century onward was a center of commerce, if not always the greatest center for world commerce that it eventually became, which meant that ships carrying all kinds of goods would be at the docks at any given time. To many residents and visitors, the city itself was a wonder. William Dunbar wrote, “London, thou art the flour [flower] of cities all!”7 By the time that London became the capital of the largest empire ever known, the city boasted residents hailing from all over the world. In the eighteenth century, traveling to London from the colonies was a primary ambition of those who wished to be worldly and educated (and who had the money to do so). It offered high life, low life, and all manner of cultural diversions. London’s financial services were also sufficiently developed—and trusted—that when France sold Louisiana to the United States in 1803, it was not a Paris or Philadelphia institution, but Barings Bank in London that handled the financial transaction. Even Napoleon and Thomas Jefferson respected London as the financial center of the world.
James Boswell, in his Life of Johnson, famously wrote, “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.”8 In the nineteenth century, Benjamin Disraeli described it as a “modern Babylon,” and Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “London is the epitome of our times, and the Rome of to-day.”9 London could be all of these things, offering the best and the worst of life, as one historian has described it: “the modern city was increasingly to be seen as simultaneously Babylon and Jerusalem: a city of license (and potential disorder) was also a city of individual liberty; a city of toil was also a city of opportunity for self-betterment; one person’s disorganisation . . . was another person’s community.”10
Meanwhile, the image of the city was not aided by the popular perception of it as full of crime and danger. “Commonplace nineteenth-century popular imagery of the city states simultaneously that the city’s streets are paved with gold and that the city is a snare and destroyer of youth.”11 Even Jane Austen admitted, “We do not look in our great cities for our best morality.”12 She was referring not only to urban life, but to political corruption, as we also see in the Galactic Senate on Coruscant.
Along with moral risk, a concern in such crowded cities historically was disease: large numbers of people in close proximity could turn an outbreak into an epidemic. The Black Death, for instance, ripped through the cities of medieval and Renaissance Europe. Potentially even more lethal is the Blue Shadow Virus, recreated as an airborne contagion by Dr. Nuvo Vindi in The Clone Wars. During the nineteenth century, major cities were still struck with diseases such as cholera and yellow fever. Such instances spurred scientific research into the causes and prevention of such diseases, as well as urban populations providing (unwittingly) perfect subject populations for studying how outbreaks had occurred, thus helping doctors trace the source.
New York: The Empire City
In what is known as the Gilded Age, the last quarter of the nineteenth century, New York began to overtake London as the world’s cultural capital, and it is seen even now as the world’s most important city. The center of gravity in the financial world began to shift from London to New York around this time, too, with the rise of firms such as J.P. Morgan making Wall Street the world’s financial heart. This process was accelerated by World War I and was largely complete by the 1920s. This importance meant that the Wall Street crash of 1929 triggered a global economic downturn. Home of the United Nations Headquarters since 1952, New York is perhaps the most similar to Coruscant (home of the Galactic Senate) of our contemporary cities. Although obviously not a planet city, Manhattan is an island city, and indeed Manhattan is for many of us the quintessential “urban” space.
With its neon and beautiful buildings, asked Ezra Pound, is New York “the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there. . . . Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.”13 The city itself was a great human achievement, an image of optimism for a capitalist age. Thomas Wolfe wrote that “New York blazes like a magnificent jewel in its fit setting of sea, and earth, and stars.”14
Cities have always been centers of creativity and innovation, the opportunity to meet the like-minded. Artists and musicians have honed their crafts, often as entertainers for the diverse crowds in such cities. The musicians in the Mos Eisley Cantina are like so many who developed different rhythms and new sounds while playing in the speakeasies of the Prohibition era.
The victory parade on Naboo. (The Phantom Menace)
Urban space has offered audiences and community for grand processions and display, as seen in The Phantom Menace, which shows a parade following the battle victory on Naboo. Although parades have long existed, the use of ticker tape (essentially, a waste product of modern communication technology) as a kind of confetti created a new kind of visual celebration medium. The corridors of tall buildings in Manhattan particularly lend themselves to this, with people able to throw tape and confetti from the windows of high floors. This allows for a level of group participation that would not be present in a parade that was simply watched, and it is also a tactile experience for those in the parade, being “showered” with the recognition of the city’s residents and workers. The first ticker-tape parade was in fact spontaneous, after the opening of the Statue of Liberty in 1889, so there was no person or group being hailed, so much as a general group party atmosphere.
The celebration on Coruscant after the fall of the Empire. (Return of the Jedi)
A
1926 ticker-tape parade in New York City.
This is shown in the images of celebrating cities at the end of Return of the Jedi. In New York, ticker-tape parades quickly caught on, however, as a custom and were organized during the next century for major figures who were visiting the city. Parades and public events can also mark solemn occasions, as at the end of Revenge of the Sith, when Padmé Amidala’s funeral is shown as a grand public event, attended by throngs of mourners. Her hearse is led through the city to be seen by all of the residents whom she represented in the Senate.
Yet the gilded urban surface often concealed an underbelly of crime or danger. Cities, or their dock areas, were often regarded as seedy or disreputable. Mos Eisley is the lawless space that many port cities have been, historically. Qui-Gon describes spaceports as “havens for those who don’t wish to be found” in The Phantom Menace. Of Mos Eisley, Obi-Wan (who by that stage is a long-term resident of Tatooine) says, “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy,” in Star Wars: A New Hope.
Bars in such areas were regarded with particular suspicion. These were often places where men would meet, and respectable women would not go near, as well as having a reputation as havens for criminals and social deviants. In port cities, they could be places to exchange information: sailors recently arrived would have the most up-to-date news of the ports they had come from. Port taverns were places to trade goods, make deals, and participate in gambling and other entertainment. We see this in A New Hope, where Obi-Wan knows that the Cantina will be the place to find someone who is willing to provide transport and who will not ask too many questions.