cityscapes - Adas

The way many of the convener’s questions are posed obfuscates the profoundly colonial nature of early American cities. In approaching metropole-colonial issues such as these, it is critical to keep in mind that the United States began as disparate colonial enclaves and remained colonial for a century and a half before it became an independent nation. During this formative era, American urban design and society were shaped in planning, layout and architectural design by English precedents as well as French models and Iberian examples. Though somewhat distinctive colonial variants emerged, the urban influences of several European metropoles was apparent, often remarked upon by European visitors, and readily acknowledged by travelers, urban notables, and savants among the migrant residents in the colonies.

In the early modern period then, “transnational” models and exchanges, such as those envisioned by Mumford and scholars like Pirenne long before him, are indeed useful. As recent scholarship by Jack Greene and others has shown, cities on the eastern and southern seaboard of North America can best be understood as nodes in intersecting colonial trading, intellectual, and politico-military networks that extended over much of the Atlantic basin and had tendrils that reached into the Pacific and Indian Oceans and the China seas. The term transnational needs to be bracketed in this period and well into the 20^th century because many, if not most, of the cities in the imperial circuits were in colonized societies not nations in any meaningful sense of the term.

This colonial legacy endured as a source of patriotic sentiment, aesthetic excellence, and tourist interest. Yet, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, when a distinctive pattern of American urban development was forged, it was regarded as a relic of the pre-modern, colonial past and relegated to the realm of the preservationists. The influence of Georges-Eugène Haussmann on the configuration of Detroit and other U.S. cities notwithstanding, Sullivan’s skyscrapers, and Manhattan’s grid were seen as a clear departure from European precedents. They also apparently owed little or nothing to colonial cities, whether they were in American-held enclaves, such as Manila or Panama City, or were showcase sites for colonial rivals. The miniscule size of the formal U.S. overseas empire was a critical factor in this regard, as was the fact that influences in terms of urban design and development flowed overwhelmingly from metropole to colony. This tendency was most readily visible in Manila, the capital of America’s largest colonial possession. The layout and architecture of the new administrative sections of the city resembled a more modest Washington, D.C., and the harbor and its accompanying esplanade, despite “Orientalist” touches here and there, were modeled on comparable areas in rapidly growing U.S. cities in the fin de siècle.

The overwhelmingly one-way transmission of urban influences, particularly those related to sanitation – including sewage and clean water systems – and commercial and transportation improvements was also determined by the low regard on the part of the American colonizers for virtually all of the Spanish institutional arrangements and physical changes introduced in the centuries preceding the U.S. takeover of the islands in 1898. Like those encountered in Cuba and Puerto Rico, Spanish cities in the Philippines – with special emphasis on Manila – were viewed as chaotic, filthy, crowded and disease-ridden. Indigenous precedents, insofar as they still existed, were simply beyond the purview of American engineers and planning. The physical makeover of the colony spearheaded by Republican and Democratic Progressives – epitomized by William Howard Taft -- which was arguably the centerpiece of what was touted as the American variant of the civilizing mission, was all about modernizing technologies, knowledge and projects, emanating from the continental United States. As the much-touted Filipino exhibitions at turn of the century World’s Fairs amply attested, other than side-show curiosities and model American-style elementary classrooms, the indigenous peoples from the Philippines or Hawaii had little to contribute to American city building or any other aspect of American life.

However blinkered, this perception was reinforced by the fact that  societies which became US colonies had not historically been highly urbanized, in contrast, for example, to China, India and much of the Islamic world. And this may help to account for the fact that historians of US overseas expansionism have not produced studies, such as those by Thomas Metcalf on the fashioning of a British imperial capital at New Delhi or Gwendolyn Wright’s engaging study of French colonial architecture in North Africa, that explore the interplay between  urban planning and design in the metropole and the colonies. And in the case of informally colonized areas, such as China, with which Americans were increasingly engaged at various levels from the mid-19^th century, political and economic decline led US colonizers to assume that Chinese cities were poorly planned, shabbily built and unsanitary – hence hardly worthy of emulation. Unlike the Philippines, Hawaii and Puerto Rico, where Americans had conquered and then set about administering, US colonizers felt little compulsion to engage in efforts at urban renewal over most of Africa and Asia that was colonized by various European powers and by the early 20^th century, the Japanese.

To some extent the neglect of  colonial urbanization and built environments in US historiography has been countered in the past few years by studies, including Warwick Anderson’s study of disease and medicine in Manila and David McBride’s Missions for Science on the Carribean, even though these works are not centered on urbanization per se. Interesting comparisons were also made by participants in a recent conference at Johns Hopkins between American city planning and development in the Philippines, and that in European and Japanese imperial enclaves in Asia in the 19^th century fin de siècle. These suggest that in the American case, influences on planning, organization and administration were predominantly one-way – from the US metropole to colonial cities. Consequently, greater attention to the latter may not have had an appreciable impact on thinking and writing about US urban history in this era.

Fragmentary research and writing on the post-colonial period in the second half of the 20^th century suggests that these trends persisted, but that urban impact of US interventionism overseas reached a whole different level of magnitude. Though these processes extend beyond the purview of this forum, at least two major trajectories of urban transformation can be discerned. On the one hand, the transfer of US skyscraper architecture and dense core urban design over much of the developing (and developed European and Japanese) world. On the other, the fragmented, refugee-packed, dysfunctional urban environments in cities like Saigon and Baghdad that have proved to be major consequences of American interventions in post-colonial nations. Few historians have taken up the provocative challenge of Samuel Huntington’s advocacy (in the case of Saigon in the 1960s) of this mode of forced urbanization as a counter to peasant or sectarian insurgencies in the post-colonial world. Perhaps more than any other US overseas initiatives, these urban implosions serve to underscore the consequences of the implementation by the denizens of the “new” American empire of Naomi Klein’s “shock doctrine” approach to non-compliant societies in the post-colonial developing world.