Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
began in Paris in 1662; the system fell into disuse following the Revolution,
then reappeared in 1812 in Bordeaux and in 1827 in Paris. By the late nine-
teenth century, extensive urban electri
fi
cation led to the electric tram,
fi
rst
operated for the Berlin Exhibition in 1879, and the
fi
first streetcar, in Rich-
mond, Virginia, in 1888. Streetcars of
ered lower levels of friction between
the wheel and rail, allowing heavier loads to be pulled with less power. Within
a decade of their introduction, the average radius of American cities rose
from 2.5 to six miles (Schae
ff
er and Sclar 1975). Other mass transit systems
included the London Underground, starting in 1890, the famed subways of
New York that began in 1904, and the elevated train system in Chicago. Such
systems led to greater accessibility across the urban landscape for labor, cap-
ital, and consumers alike and greatly expanded the size of commuting sheds.
Without them, corporate employers would never have been able to move large
numbers of workers to the dense urban cores dominated by complexes of
skyscrapers. Within the variegated spaces of social reproduction that
emerged in the wake of such networks arose dense working-class com-
munities, typically deeply segregated by race and ethnicity. The expansion of
urban space in the wake of this process of reworking is illustrated in Figure
4.8, which reveals how various parts of Berlin were made ever more accessible
to the urban core by the growth of the urban transport network.
The formation of the modern city in the late nineteenth century was also
predicated upon the development of ubiquitous street, water, sewer, postal,
gas, railway, telegraph, telephone, and electrical systems that are generally
invisible until they fail. These infrastructures re
ff
ected the pervasive
Enlightenment tendency to rationalize space and time, and formed funda-
mental prerequisites for the emergence of mass production and consumption.
Graham and Marvin (2001:40) argue that “Standardised, compartmentalized
notions of space and time, were, in a sense, constructed through the rolling
out of networks across wider and wider spaces.” Modernity itself came to be
de
fl
ned by the unfolding of the industrial infrastructure, a process that played
out in countless di
fi
erent local contexts. The formation of urban infra-
structures as spaces of mobility for some and not others generally entailed
the exclusion of substantial populations of the poor and politically dispos-
sessed. The topologies that welded together the modern city were thus deeply
biased socially as well as spatially, a theme evident from Baron Haussmann's
reconstruction of Paris to Robert Moses's innumerable projects in the New
York region to the formation of the U.S. Interstate Highway System (Tarr
and Dupuy 1988).
Haussmann's famous renovation of Paris is perhaps the best-known
example of state-led restructuring during the epoch of industrial time-space
compression. Jay (1993) maintains that during the nineteenth century, in
cities such as Paris, “City of Lights,” an ocularcentrism arose that paralleled
the hegemony of industrial capitalism and commodity fetishism. The wide
boulevards, based on the linearity of railroads, sliced through the heart of the
medieval districts, implemented in an authoritarian, militaristic style, soon
ff
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