LITMIR.BIZ

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contextualized. Some rules of thumb about where to start looking might be worth mentioning.

      What constitutes the centre of the city or, in big cities, often the centres (plural)? Historically, the polar cases were, at one end, an open public space, an agora or forum (as in republican Athens and Rome), and, at the other, a castle or palace (as in Beijing and Edo/Tokyo and in monarchical Europe) or a temple (like in Tenochtitlán). What are the functions of the centre(s)? How is/are the centre(s) connected to the rest of the city? Here the main inherited alternatives are structurally linear-axial or concentric. That is, either through linear thoroughfares, as in both ancient Chang’an and in modern Brasília, Islamabad and Abuja, or through rays of streets radiating out through a concentric urban space like an Indic mandala, in Yoruba Ife, or in European Baroque Versailles, Karlsruhe and Saint Petersburg. Blurring these alternatives of stark centrality indicates more complex configurations of power.

      Seclusion of the centre from the periphery is a manifestation of a power of social exclusivity. A dramatic example is, of course, former apartheid cities, where the working and servant classes were kept in ‘townships’ far away from the centre, separated, as in Pretoria, by unbuilt wasteland. Paris has maintained a clear boundary between the city proper and its suburbs or banlieues, separated by a motorway running on the demolished city walls.

      The regularity of the street system, for instance a grid, and the uniformity or harmony of its buildings demonstrate a power concerned with urban structure – which Islamic rulers, for instance, historically were not – and capable of implementing its design. The width, and sometimes also the length, of streets are often deliberate manifestations of power. Pierre L’Enfant, the designer of what became Washington, D.C., called for avenues ‘proportioned to the greatness which … the Capital of a powerful Empire ought to manifest’.¹⁹ The Paris of the mid-nineteenth-century Second Empire would make wide avenues a standard of national capitals and of all ambitious cities.

      Archaeologists have long paid attention to the size patterns of building lots as indicators of hierarchy and inequality. An extreme example of spatial density differentials is offered by contemporary Nairobi. In 1999 there were between 360 inhabitants per square kilometre in Karen and 80,000 in Kibera, pointing clearly to the power of the few over the many.²⁰ A similar indicator of inegalitarian power is the existence and extension of built-up, non-produced space – in plain English, of slum areas on raw land, without prepared streets, a water supply or sewers.

      A topography of hills and plains is often used as a power gradient. The (high) plateau of Abidjan and Dakar, for instance, is the site of first the colonial and then the national elite. The High City of Brussels or Kyiv is historically the city of political and religious power, the Low City of the secondary economic power of merchants and traders. But it may also be used as an instrument of hierarchical integration. In pre-modern Edo and Addis Ababa, the lords lived on the hills with their retinue around them, below. In Addis this is still visible, albeit rapidly disappearing, in poor neighbourhoods adjacent to modern buildings of wealth and power.

      Still another important variable of a city’s spatial layout is accessibility of space. We may here distinguish between official, private and public space: the first accessible only to the proper authorities, the second only to the owners and the public to everybody. The relative size and importance of the three can be read as manifesting the relative power of an exclusive state, of private property and of the citizenry, respectively. Recently, post-Communism has meant a reduction of official space but, like in most other capitalist cities, an expansion of private-only space, through private shopping malls replacing public markets (or department stores) and private gating slicing up the urban space.

      It should not be forgotten that the ‘public’ can be, has been and in some cities still is gendered^* and/or racialized. Racial exclusion from public areas has become prohibited, but a female public presence is still contested in Arabic and West Asian Islamic and in North Indian Hindu cities.

       Functionality

      The functioning of a city has two main dimensions, their supply of opportunities – of money and employment, above all – and their supply of services. In this study, the former is partly covered by our focus on political capitals, although we shall have reason to take notice of variations in their socioeconomic structure. The extent and the distribution of urban services, on the other hand, are direct manifestations of city power.

      Urban life is significantly structured by the availability and accessibility of a number of necessary urban services. First of all, water supply, sanitation, electricity, garbage collection and waste management: are they provided, adequately, for everybody? Street lighting, pavement, safety and policing, mail delivery? Housing, food and employment are often left to markets: to what extent are they kept functioning and properly regulated? To what extent is there adequate public transport? Are urban roads properly maintained? Are there schools, health clinics and basic stores in all areas and accessible to everybody?

      In today’s North Atlantic region, the functioning and accessibility of these services are basically taken for granted, but their history is rather short, even here. Their full importance was brought home to me during a collective study of African capitals, most of which have a huge service deficit.²¹ Only a third of households in Addis Ababa and Kinshasa had (as of around 2005) piped water on the premises, in Abuja 40 per cent. Only half of the population of Kinshasa had access to sewage or latrines, in Addis less than one in ten.

      Poverty and underdevelopment are one reason for this, the powerlessness of the African powerful. But there is also a question of priority, between what Mussolini once called tasks of ‘necessity’ and tasks of ‘grandezza’. Historically, while the Paris of Napoleon III and his prefect Haussmann became a world model of grandeur, Victorian London was both a European pace-setter and the leading world exporter of water and sanitation services.

      The functioning of urban services is currently a major political issue in a number of cities: the Washington Metro, public transport in Bogotá and the supply of water and electricity in Delhi, for example. The exclusivity or inclusivity of city power can be gauged by the city’s functionality.

       Patterning of buildings

      The pattern of buildings might be seen as a special aspect of the spatial layout. It refers to the relative location and size of buildings, above all in the city centre. What kinds of buildings occupy the most central location? How do the central buildings relate to each other?

      For example, all over Latin America, except in Montevideo, Bogotá, and Brasília, the Presidential Palace is the overpowering or dominant central building, with Congress clearly offside. In Mexico, until recently, it was almost anonymous, and in Chile it was relegated to a refurbished hospital in Valparaíso. In Ottawa, Washington, Montevideo and Brasília, on the other hand, the congress or parliament building has centre stage. In the new Malaysian capital of Putrajaya, the dominant building is the prime minister’s office. City halls have no prominence in any American capital, while they are major buildings in Tokyo, Seoul and Copenhagen and clearly, if not quite successfully, compete with the state buildings in Vienna. When the Belgians created their national capital in the mid-nineteenth century, the Royal Palace was larger than the Parliament opposite it, but the largest building of all was the Palace of Justice. The main government building, whatever it is, is usually protected against construction competition by various rules of permissible height (as in Washington, D.C., for instance) and distance. But in Tokyo the official office of the prime minister is overshadowed by the non-descript corporate tower of an undistinguished insurance company. Some cities, Paris for instance, have no central representative governmental building at all: what does that imply?

      The patterning of buildings takes other significant expressions, too, such as the uniformity and harmony or unrelated heterogeneity of buildings along main streets, or the extent of contrast between main-street buildings and back-street or peripheral buildings. Moreover, there is a noteworthy temporal dimension. When a regime embarks upon a building programme, what representative buildings are given priority and how are the priorities of time and money set between representation and utilitarian construction, service infrastructure or housing? Are there meaningful clusters of representative buildings?

      These

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