The gift of the hinterland
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 20: Cities on the Edge
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Tony Barrell
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Creating an entire city is something hard to plan, even now we know we are supposed to. Since Brasilia was founded in the 1950s, the brand-new customised city has, like the ex-urban garden suburb, gone out of fashion. Many of the cities with which we are familiar were laid out according to a great visionary experiment based on plans created over two millennia ago. The most enduring models are military: a grid of squares first promoted by Alexander the Great, or the castle or fort town on an important river or sea port. The model did not guarantee sustainability. What powered a city's survival was its capacity to adapt to circumstances, not plans.
Whatever its first function – city state, sea port, market-town, imperial capital – an urban centre always needs a hinterland to support it. Cities on every continent have disappeared into desert or jungle because the lands that surrounded them were lost, stolen or worn out. Rome and Athens continue to adapt, but why did the civilisation of Medieval Zimbabwe disappear? The human tendency to destroy hinterland cannot be exaggerated. Before the first cities, human activity set the process of terminal environmental degradation in motion. Cute though they seem when marshalled by a ragged lad tootling a flute, insatiable goat herds have been a persistent and efficient agent of desertification ever since the dawn of pastoralism. The Romans de-forested Sicily to build their navies. The Greeks did the same to islands in the Aegean. These days, global cities require global hinterlands. And so their sustainability is an international issue.
The reason for setting up a city may not explain why it has been sustained. The first impulse may be to display power, either at the centre of an empire or at its edges. But what starts as a fortress for the king, or a boundary fort to repel or contain barbarians, survives the fall of empire only if it becomes useful to traders. I know three very different civic entities which survived by evolving beyond their founding function. One began as a minor city-state in the archaic era of Greece, the second was a Roman town set up to define the boundary of the empire's control in Britain, and the third was created as the centre of a new empire in Japan. This last city, Kyoto, is perhaps the most ambiguous of all. In all its ancient, spiritual and architectural splendour, it began with an unpretentious and efficient imperative: a castle town to house the emperor and his army. Now, Kyoto must depend for its future on that most dubious of all aspects of postwar modernism – the nuclear fuel cycle which, for it all its claims of self-sufficiency, needs a global hinterland.
Some towns have been sustained by modest hinterlands. Chester, where I went to school in England in the early 1950s, got its name from the Latin for camp, castra (although the Romans called it Deva). Its reason for being was military – the subjugation of neighbouring Wales. After the legions left, Chester slowly changed into a centre of regional commerce. Not only are the footings of its Roman walls still visible, they provide usable walkways which define the inner town. Instead of surviving as decaying Medieval lumps, Chester's old red sandstone walls still circle the city, the form of which is simply a cross of two intersecting streets which pass out through three surviving substantial gates. The walls continue to provide the means for people to negotiate the city entirely on foot, and as ‘recently' as 1644 helped the local royalists survive a fifteen-month siege by the forces of Oliver Cromwell.
The central part of Chester is still well populated with half-timbered black and white cottage buildings with mullioned windows and steep, slated roofs. It seems archetypically ‘ye olde', but is also quite strange and unique; running along three of the four main streets are elevated walkways known as ‘the rows', wooden or stone pavements above the ceilings of ground-floor shops, with another level of businesses and residences overhead. The rows were not planned; they just grew from the lines of street stalls, but eventually removed pedestrians from the street and the weather. To pass along the older parts of the Watergate and Bridge Street rows, you need to duck your head to miss the old black oak beams, and the floor level often changes from shop to shop. It is possible for pedestrians to get around a lot of the town without ever descending to pavement level, although at the end of each block, you climb down narrow stairs, cross a street or lane, and climb up to the next section.
It may be hard to see, but the original ground plan of the army camp was the strongest influence on the development of Chester's form, long after it shifted to a completely different function. The rows were the focus of its evolved purpose as a centre for the trade in farm produce from the rich county of Cheshire. In the twelfth century, the town acquired a wide-open market square, consolidated in the nineteenth century into a permanent interior hall, and in turn reconfigured into defiantly anti-Medieval stone and glass structure in 1970.
At no time in its post-Roman history did any power group or individual decide what Chester should become, but instead of slumping into obscurity when the Romans gave up trying to subjugate the Welsh, its commercial classes developed practical and profitable strategies for being. They kept the walls and the rows because they were both useful and protective. They were lucky the Roman site was conveniently on the border of Wales and the rich farm lands of Cheshire, and connected to coastal traffic through the wide estuary of the River Dee and the Irish Sea. In the late eighteenth century, the Shropshire Union canal linked the town to the Industrial Revolution's national transport network. Chester has been sustained by an evolutionary adaptation to its changing hinterland. You couldn't find a more conservative and lucky city in the entire British Isles; its present population of eighty thousand has grown by a mere twenty thousand since I was at school there in the 1950s.