The urban landscape of the modern European streets

Description

The urban environment of the cities’ streets is a space loaded with meaning, a cultural meaning connected with personal or collective stories and local identities. This very meaning produced by different components, varying from historical events to architectural elements, is deeply connected with every street’s specific character and atmosphere. This paper explores the notion of urban street character through its manifestation in early 20th century European novels, in which the cities serve as the plot’s predominant figure. It is based on the premise that the novel - a primary form of representation of human reality addressing the major existential questions that had previously been the province of philosophy (H.-G. Gadamer, M. Kundera) - can be seen as capable of mapping the qualities of a rich and vibrating urban environment, revealing truly significant aspects that architects tend to ignore in analytical and scientific tools of representation, like the modern maps that depict Cartesian isotropic space and have become normative for our world civilization.


The paper argues that the novels under examination can actually be read as alternative maps of the cities and the streets they portray. Before maps became associated with diagrammatic representations of an area of land (or sea) showing physical features in geometric space, or with a collection of data showing the spatial arrangement or distribution of something over an area, aiming at a supposedly objective orientation - like in our global positioning systems - the word was also used to describe a person’s face. Maps were literally physiognomies revealing the interconnections between humans and their experiential (in the past, mythical, religious) worlds. Based on this very definition, the paper examines three characteristic European streets depicted by compelling novels of the beginning of the 20th century, looking at the qualities of the urban space as they emerge through the literary language; qualities that diagrams or figure-ground studies (meaning the traditional means or architectural representation) fail to capture. The novels that provide the context are Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, all published in the 1920s. They have been chosen because (along with James Joyce’s Ulysses) they all partake from the characteristics of the peripatetic literary subgenre (P. Barta). They share analogous textual features with the narratives unfolding along with the heroes’ wanderings in the city, while the city is a predominant figure of the plot described as it really is, avoiding intentional fictive elaborations. Whenever the heroes are in the urban environment, the cities seem to cast a big influence on them and their decisions, sometimes even directing their paths.


The paper looks thoroughly at the central “artery” of each city: the grandiose Nevskii Prospect in Saint Petersburg, the crowded Alexanderstrasse in Berlin and the vivid Victoria Street in London. Bely’s Petersburg reveals how the austerity and the rational straight line of the grandiose Nevskii Prospect influence the citizens’ consciousness. Specific passages manifest how the strict geometry obliges for conformity in the inhabitant’s social behavior, discouraging any personal engagement with the urban space and why the characters throughout the novel don’t feel “at home” while on the Prospect. Moreover they display how the street’s exaggerated linearity, an urban reality that allows for a clear unobstructed view of things even in a long distance, conveys the sense of constant surveillance making the heroes feel that they are under the street’s controlling gaze; a gaze that turns them into “nondescripts” and makes them want to hide in the smaller nearby streets which on the contrary can turn them into “shadows.”
In Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz the attitude in terms of appropriating the urban space is strikingly different. The big constructions for the subway metro line, taking place on the streets around Alexanderplatz as described by the author, seem to create a chaotic and messy urban environment that allows for a sense of freedom and active urban participation. Moreover the main protagonist of the novel is working on the street selling newspapers and he many times walks on the streets just for the enjoyment of it. Through these walks, the author describes the flourishing mercantile character of the Berlin streets in the 1920s and shows how the big display glass windows (a material that became a great fascination for architects and urban planners in the beginning of the 20th century) emotionally qualifies the walking experience and perception of space. The shops’ windows reflect both the walker and the city’s environment, putting him in the city’s picture and allowing him to see himself. Döblin’s descriptions reveal how this material reflectivity blurs the boundaries between the object and subject in the experience of the city and motivates reflections on the walkers’ part; a walker that is depicted as significantly different than the 19th century flâneur.
Lastly the paper looks into excerpts from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, which published at the same time period as well, presents a more social and shared space of communication, always in relation to the street’s shops. The novel depicts how London’s Oxford Street, a remnant of Victorian England’s urban design possessing the intense theatricality that characterized the 19th century European streets (R. Sennet), seems to acquire characteristics of a room’s interior, reminiscent of a ballroom where someone’s entrance is noticed and discussed. Given a specific event in the plot – the passing of the Royal car that catches everyone’s attentions – the walkers on the street seem to feel simultaneously a vibration of national pride. Contrary to Bely’s expressed discomfort or Döblin’s understanding of the street in more private terms, the street in Woolf’s case is understood as a space that can unite people, even temporarily, transmitting to them the idea of a common aim or a shared identity.


Despite the differences in plot, the varying political realities behind the cities and the difference in perspective due to each hero’s social background (an aristocrat, a low class petty criminal, and a middle class woman), the paper explores how in the different novels the public space of cities’ streets, the “space of appearance” (Hannah Arendt) is presented as the site of architectural meaning. It moreover elaborates on the significance of this kind of space for contemporary architectural practice. It dwells on the fact that this walking literature coincided with the period that witnessed architectural modernism and rational design flourish in Europe, obviously seeking an expression of modern life in the design of cities. In the 1929 plans for the “City of Three Million Inhabitants,” Le Corbusier produced perspective drawings and sketches conceived from a “flying” point of view and not from the point of view of the walker, expecting that “the car would abolish the human street, and possibly the human foot while some people would have airplanes too,” while another visionary, Vladimir Tatlin in Russia, actually designed and tested the Letatilin, a personal flying machine. As Robert Hughes critically points out in his Shock of the New, it seems that in urban spaces like this “the one thing no one would have, is a place to bump into each other, walk the dog, strut, one of the hundred random things that people do, because they would have surrendered their freedom of movement to the omnipresent architect.”
Along with Hughes, many researches have clearly shown that the rational and functionalistic approaches of planning that had their origin in 19th century positivism and bloomed with modernity are insufficient to construe and build places resonant with cultural aspirations. The novels under examination describe instances of the space of the street that urban planners and architects failed to see and generally disregard even today when they speak about public space. The way the public place is appropriated by its users (including its full range of interactions, from the private house to public institutions) is nevertheless an issue that needs to become more predominant in the architectural discourse because the resonance of new buildings with their historical and cultural context leaves much to be desired and formalistic novelty in architectural expression which has become common as a result of powerful digital tools and research on new materials, is clearly not the answer to the question. Taking the position that modernity is always in flux or “a tradition against itself” and therefore observations remain valid in this day and age - as explained by Octavio Paz in his study The Children of the Mire - this paper argues that the peripatetic literature of the 1920s sensed and mapped “another spatiality” (M.-M. Ponty) of the urban fabric, one that could still guide our steps in current and future design decisions. In an epoch when architects and urban planners can practice world widely and mistakenly tend to trust Google Earth for all the information they need regarding the place where they are supposed to build, such literary descriptions can enrich the design professional’s understanding of the street space, not in terms of efficient circulation but as emotionally charged places of communication, addressing the inhabitants’ active participation.

Period	2012
Event title	SPATIAL PERSPECTIVES : LITERATURE AND ARCHITECTURE, 1850 to present
Event type	Conference
Location	Oxford, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International