The History and Future of Places: Part 4 – The Age of Reason and colonial expansion

“Tis all in peeces, all cohaerance gone” declared the poet John Donne at the end of the 16th century. I think he had suddenly become aware that the values of the religious world in which he had grown up had lost their import.

For places, a new type of coherence – one based on reason rather than religion – had in fact been developing for some time. The writings of the Roman architect/engineer Vitruvius had been discovered in the mid-15th century, and since then newly made buildings and places had begun to take on a classical character. Churches in Italy, including St. Peter’s Basilica, were built with columns, pediments and domes similar to those of ancient Rome. Plans for towns were given geometric regularity.

The merits of a rational approach to making places were explicitly stated by Rene Descartes in his 1637 treatise Discourse on the Method – the foundational philosophical text for the Age of Reason. At the beginning of the work’s Part 2, he declares: “Old cities which, from being at first only villages, have become, in course of time, large towns are usually ill laid out compared with the regularity of constructed towns which a professional architect has freely planned on an open plain.”

Descartes further suggested that the “indiscriminate juxtaposition (of buildings)” and the “crookedness and irregularity of the streets” in old cities (i.e. those of the Middle Ages) must have been a matter of chance. By contrast, towns planned by architects demonstrated “human will, guided by reason.”

He may well have been thinking of the entirely new towns of the era, fortified for defensive purposes and often built in elaborate geometric star patterns. The star-fort of Naarden in the Netherlands, laid out in the 17th century, is a perfect example. Naarden was part of a ring of defensive settlements intended to protect Amsterdam. The promontories allowed cross-fire in the event of an attack, while the street pattern was orderly. Even the fields beyond the fort walls were strictly rectangular.

In fact, the shift to rational order in making places had been underway for more than a century. This was partly due to the renaissance of classical ideas, and partly because the dissemination of these ideas had been facilitated by the invention of the printing press in the mid-15th century. The printed word promoted literacy, democratised education and made it possible for new ideas to spread rapidly from place to place. Advances in navigation and seafaring ensured that some of these places were distant colonies on recently discovered continents. Place names and cultural practices were transplanted, and, in perhaps the most notable indication of the placemaking preferences of the Age of Reason, so were the rational town plans that had come into fashion. This was nowhere more clearly demonstrated than in the Spanish colonial possessions.

The apogee of this ideal occurred at the end of the 18th century in the newly created United States of America. There, orthogonal surveys were adopted as the basis for preparing much of the new nation for settlement; rectangular patterns were imposed on countryside and town alike. In that same spirit, the new government commissioned a plan by the French-born American architect Pierre Charles L’Enfant for the capital city of Washington D.C. L’Enfant sought to reflect the rational principles of democratic government with a great avenue, the Mall, leading to the Capitol, and other less grand avenues leading to the White House and cutting across much of the rest of the city.

However, places in the Age of Reason were not all order and reason. The Enlightenment cast some dark shadows. The historian Fernand Braudel described the great capital cities of the time as “urban monstrosities…machines for creating both civilization and misery.”

He was thinking of Paris, which by the mid-18th century had grown to 600,000 people, and London, where the population had reached 750,000. While these cities both had new districts of elegant streets with circles and squares lined by well-proportioned dwellings, they also had neighbourhoods of great poverty. Often in these impoverished quarters, people survived in crowded squalor and dulled their misery with alcohol. Artist William Hogarth captured the hopelessness of their existence in the engravings Beer Street and Gin Lane. 

Furthermore, the Age of Reason was no exception to the fact that the creation of new places, no matter how reasonable, inevitably involves the destruction of existing places. The great palaces and country estates often required the displacement of entire villages. On a far larger scale, the massive placemaking aspects of colonialism were counterbalanced by equally huge place unmaking, as indigenous peoples were pushed aside and devastated by imported diseases. Most dramatically of all, roughly 13 million Africans were uprooted from their homes and transplanted to other continents and unfamiliar places.

The history of place is no more about building and settling than it is about destruction and deracination.

• Next week: The Industrial Revolution

• Read Professor Relph’s blog Place, Placeness, Placenessless