Ted Stolze: Resources of Hope, Logics of Struggle

9/8/02: Eric Hobsbawm on Urban Design, Demonstrations, and Insurrection.

"[T]hree main administrative methods of countering riot and insurrection suggested themselves: systematic arrangements for deploying troops, the development of police forces (which barely existed in the modern form before the nineteenth century), and the rebuilding of cities in such ways as to minimize the chances of revolt. The first two of these had no major influence on the actual shape and structure of cities, though a study of the building and location of urban barracks in the nineteenth century might provide some interesting results, and so might a study of the distribution of police stations in urban neighborhoods. The third affected the townscape very fundamentally, as in Paris and Vienna, cities in which it is known that the needs of counter-insurgency influenced urban reconstruction after the 1848 revolutions. In Paris the main military aim of this reconstruction seems to have been to open wide and straight boulevards along which artillery could fire, and troops advance, while at the same time --presumably-- breaking up the main concentrations of potential insurgents in the popular quarters. In Vienna the reconstruction took the form mainly of two wide concentric ring roads, the inner ring (broadened by a belt of open spaces, parks and widely spaced public buildings) isolated the old city and palace from the (mainly middle-class) inner suburbs, the outer ring isolating both from the (increasingly working-class) outer suburbs.

"Such reconstructions may or may not have made military sense. We do not know, since the kind of revolutions they were intended to dominate virtually died out in western Europe after 1848. (Still, it is a fact that the main centres of popular resistance and barricade fighting in the paris Commune in 1871, Montmartre-north-east Paris and the Left Bank, were isolated from each other and the rest of the town.) However, they certainly affected the calculations of potential-insurrectionaries. In the socialist discussions of the 1880s the consensus of the military experts among revolutionaries, led by Engels, was that the old type of uprising now stood little chance, though there was some argument among them about the value of new technological devices such as the then rapidly developing high explosives (dynamite, etc.). At all events, barricades which had dominated insurrectionary tactics from 1830 and 1871 (they had not been seriously used in the great French Revolution of 1789-99), were now less fancied. Conversely, bombs of one kind or another became the favorite device of revolutionaries, though not marxist ones, and not for genuinely insurrectionary purposes.

"Urban reconstruction, however, had another and probably unintended effect on potential rebellions, for the new and wide avenues provided an ideal location for what became an increasingly important aspect of popular movements, the mass demonstration, or rather procession. The more systematic these rings and cartwheels of boulevards, the more effectively isolated these were from the surrounding inhabited area, the easier it became to turn such assemblies into ritual marches rather than preliminaries to riot. London, which lacked them, has always had difficulty in avoiding incidental trouble during the concentration, or more usually the dispersal, of mass meetings held in Trafalgar Square. It is too near sensitive spots like Downing Street, or symbols of wealth and power like the Pall Mall clubs, whose windows the unemployed demonstrators smashed in the 1880s.

" One can, of course make too much of such primarily military factors in urban renewal. In any case they cannot be sharply distinguished from other changes in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century city which sharply diminished its riot potential. Three of them are particularly relevant.

"The first is sheer size, which reduces the city to an administrative abstraction, and a conglomerate of separate communities or districts. It became simply too big to riot as a unit...

"The second is the growing pattern of functional segregation in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century city, that is to say, on the one hand, the development of specialized industrial, business, government and other centres or open spaces, on the other, the geographical separation of classes...

"Twentieth-century working-class rehousing and planning for motor transport further disintegrated the city as a potential riot centre. (The nineteenth-century planning for railways had, if anything, the opposite effect, often creating socially mixed and marginal quarters around the new terminals.) The recent tendency to shift major urban services such as central markets from the centres to the outskirts of cities will no doubt disintegrate it further.

"Is the urban riot and insurrection therefore doomed to disappear? Evidently not . . . . The reasons are mainly social and political, but it may be worth looking briefly at the characteristics of modern urbanism which encourage it.

"Modern mass transportation is one...

"More important than transport are two other factors: the increase in the number of buildings worth rioting against or occupying, and the development in their vicinity of accumulations of potential rioters.

(From Eric Hobsbawm, Revolutionaries, [NY: The New Press, 2001 (1973)], pp. 268-74.)

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