Photograph: Courtesy of Gebr. Mann Verlag, Berlin

Book Review

Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, Katia Frey, Eliana Perotti, editors
Anthologie zum Städtebau

Berlin: Gebrüder Mann Verlag, 2005-
Volumes 1,1 and 1,2: Von der Stadt der Aufklärung zur Metropole des industriellen Zeitalters
Berlin: Gebrüder Mann Verlag, 2008, xii + 1259 pp., € 128
ISBN 978-3-7861-2522-8

The Anthologie zum Städtebau (Anthology of Urbanism) is the first of its kind. The three-volume publication is a “comprehensive, critical and annotated collection of primary texts on the theory of urbanism in Europe and the United States from the eighteenth century to the present”* (p.3). The third volume, published in 2005, collects texts from the 1940s to the present. The first volume (in two parts), under review here, traces urban theories from the city of the Enlightenment to the industrial metropolis, and spans from the beginning of the eighteenth to the end of the nineteenth century. The second volume, to be published next year, will examine the texts underlying the emergence of urbanism as a discipline in the second half of the nineteenth century up to the modern city. Together, these volumes provide for the first time a comprehensive collection of texts that furnish the theoretical basis for the history of urbanism.

The overall aim of the anthology is pragmatic.  The introduction outlines four criteria for the selection of texts: an innovative position; a coherent and reasoned argument; an acknowledgment of the city’s complexity through dealing with several of its facets; and the proposition of a recognizable formal idea of the city. The criteria suggest that while there are multiple ways of reflecting on the city, an instrumental urban theory always ought to include the questions of how the city is to be built. As such, the anthology addresses itself primarily to architectural and urban theorists, but the breadth and diversity of its texts also makes it indispensible reading for a broader audience.** Academic rigor is shown in the editors’ choice of publishing all texts in their original language. However, this might lessen the impact it could have as a resource for research and teaching.†

In the introduction, Lampugnani argues that it is only in the eighteenth century that reflections on the city consolidate to theories instrumental for diagnosis and intervention in  the existing city. The textual trajectory from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century shows an evolution in the conceptualization of the city from a static entity, representative of its socio-political context, to a complex and dynamic phenomenon with its own patterns and regularities. The texts collected here not only provide a historical survey of eighteenth and nineteenth century urban theory, but also trace the emergence of urbanism as a broad but immanent discursive field.

The texts are ordered thematically and chronologically. The introduction to each chapter thoroughly outlines the context for its theme, and situates the selected texts in relation to key primary and secondary readings. Each text is preceded by a short introduction that provides biographical information on the author as well as publication details and a reception history.

The first chapter collects primarily literary and philosophical reflections on utopian cities, while the second chapter describes alternative utopias, rejecting the city in favor of bucolic, agrarian and greener settlements. Despite their antithetical solutions, both chapters describe a static correlation between a well-ordered city and an ideal society. More pragmatic approaches to intervening in the existing city are presented in the next two chapters. Architectural and landscape theory provided principles of intervention and new ways of perceiving the city.  Theories on the improvement of cities increasingly considered not only aesthetic and representational aspects, but also include the city’s functional and practical requirements, such as security, hygiene or transport infrastructure.  The urban utopias described in the fifth chapter no longer have the status of a philosophical treatise, but suggest alternatives responding to the perceived chaos of the contemporary city and its societal problems.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, the growth and densification of the city begins to be observed and registered. Critiques on the quality of buildings and urban spaces, unhygienic conditions and overcrowding are recorded, and topographies mapped patterns of health and the distribution of population onto urban space.  Concerns about housing and the condition and perceived threat of the working class contributed to the accumulation of knowledge about the city, and drew politics into the discourse of urbanism. European cities responded to these new urban challenges with extensions and improvement of its infrastructure. Chapter 8 collects texts that suggest the extension of individual quarters, the significance of the old centers or the infiltration of the city with green spaces. In the last two chapters, literary texts are again predominant. The city comes to be seen as a network of flows of movement, of air, people and goods, and the texts explore how transportation networks can serve as tools for urban restructuring.  Utopias of technological progress dominate the last chapter. Both affirming as well as criticizing the dependency of the city on technological innovations, the new utopian societies projected in the texts are a response to the dramatic reorganization of the nineteenth-century city.

The overrepresentation of literary utopian urban visions seems surprising in this trajectory of themes leading up to the emergence of urbanism as a discourse and discipline. Readers interested in the genealogy of the modern city ought to read the first and the forthcoming second volume together; in the latter we can expect those texts that propose frameworks of intervention responding to and activating the new conceptualization of the city as a complex and dynamic organism whose lines of emergence are traced in the present volume.††

The key contribution of this anthology is its breadth and diversity, which is impossible to capture in this summary.  It provides a foundation for the study of the city from multiple perspectives, and reminds us that the urban is too complex a phenomenon to ever be captured or described through a single perspective.  It is precisely the scope and quality of the selection of texts, as well as the academic rigor of its accompanying introductions that makes the Anthologie zum Städtebau a canonical reference for any scholar interested in the city.

Katharina Borsi
University of Nottingham

* The book focuses exclusively on texts and contains no illustrations.  All translations in this review are by the author.

** Lampugnani states in the introduction that the anthology includes “texts from literature, philosophy, politics and science of the state, architecture, art history, journalism, pedagogy, law, science, works of reference, daily press, written by social reformers, medical professions, writers, entrepreneurs, civil servants, police commissioners, philanthropists, scholars, urban planners, university professors, lawyers, members of the military, national economics, clergymen and even inventors and amateurs.” (p.1).

† Introductions to the chapters and to the individual texts are written in German. The anthology contains texts written in German, French, English and Italian, and one Portuguese text.

†† For example Ildefonso Cerdá’s Teoriá general de la urbanización y aplicación de sus principios y doctrinas a la reforma y ensanche de Barcelona (1867), or Reinhard Baumeister’s Stadt-Erweiterungen in technischer, baupolizeilicher und wirthschaftlicher Beziehung (1876).