Planning in the Ancient City
First we should ask whether there was a serious theory of the city in pre- Renaissance times. Depictions of ancient cities, especially as hieroglyphs--the crossroads inside the round walls--are a theoretical proposition, an idealization about the city as the meeting of roads and the protection of people and surplus by walls. For most ancient contexts, that would include Egypt, Solomon's Jerusalem, the Minoans, Babylon, archaic Greece, and many others, the structure of the city, and any possible theory of it descended from either the palace or the temple, as the prime architectural act of orientation and order. On the other hand, we saw in Classical Greece the debates on the polis in the philosophical dialogues of Plato and Aristotle, and the prominence of at least one theoretician, Hippodamus, who argues that a city be zoned according to functional classes--the religious, the secular, and the military. We also must assume with the numerous Greek colonies, all founded on variations of the grid, that despite the absense of specific textual explanations on the merits of the grid, nor the existance of a word for it, the orthogonal grid was an idea, a theoretical concept independent of architecture that was foremost in the minds of those making new cities. The idea of a set of city walls gives a sense of thinking of the city as a confinable whole, but the idea of the grid, a series of regular blocks or strips, is the great step toward understanding the city as an organic whole. Finally, as the culminating document of the theory of antiquity, we have the treatise by Vitruvius, probably not the greatest mind of his times, nor a great architect, but about the only textual source that relays what the ancients considered. In the first book of the Ten Books of Architecture, Vitruvius recommends a very temperate climate for the choice of site, with no extreme of heat or humidity (he must have been thinking of Houston), then he explains the ancient rituals of foundation in which the entrails of animals that had grazed on the site were examined. The planner examined the livers to see if the water was free of disease. He recommends that cities be walled with circular walls rather than square or angular ones. The walls should be thick enough that two armed men be able to pass each other on the ramparts. The towers set at "not more than a bow's shot apart" should be round or poligonal. The layout of Vitruvius's city is governed by the position of prevailing winds, which were considered to be unhealthy if allowed to enter directly. Proper orientation would strike an axis between the eight positions of the winds on a north-north- east, or south-south-west line for instance. He does not mention the grid by name, nor mention that the streets should be laid out straight, but seems to take it for granted since he elsewhere describes everything in terms of orthogonal geometry. The Christian and the Islamic cities we've been considering more recently were organized atomistically, each part handled piecemeal, with diverging sources of authority. Even if it would be difficult to describe or project these cities, we should not assume that this more casual order was less desired, certainly in retrospect the winding street, the covered casbah, the highly textured medieval pattern, appeals to the romantic sensiblity as the most natural method of making cities. Alberti in his masterful treatise of 1452 explains in his discussion of cities that one of the best systems of defense is a twisting street pattern that only initiates are able to negotiate. With the rise of the independent Communes in the 11th to 13th century, we begin to find the articulation of policies, some of which are quite obviously a critique of the casual order that preceded it. Straightening, widening, ordering the third dimension, protecting from fires, eminent domain, paving, sewerage, and the planning of defensive new towns (always based on the grid) demonstrate a high level of discussion about city form on a functional and aesthetic level. But the clearest evidence of the city in theoretical terms has to be pieced together from various forms of statutes, which varied from city to city. In the end the most comprehensive document was the fresco cycle by Lorenzetti in Siena, which certainly did not show a grid plan or straight streets, but rather a dense city that accomodated itself to civil activity, trade, and good agricultural policy. For the Commune, the issue of justice was the central question, and matters of form, beauty, and functional management were ideologically related to it.
The East/West Dichotomy
Today, I would like to consider Chinese planning principles as a generally more universal and worked out system of urbanism. The thrust of this course has been mostly Eurocentric, aside from a few forays into the Middle East, and this is mainly due to my background, but also to the generally greater accessibility to Western historical documents about cities. Much more is preserved in Western cities, both of the urban fabric and of the textual sources, than in other contexts, and in the end we must admit that history itself is a western fixation. It shouldn't surprise us to learn that there was an Asian city just as powerful and populous as ancient Rome, that was doing business with it--this was the first Chang'an in Western China, a city with an estimated 1 million population in the 2nd century AD. The presence of great Asian cities certainly surprised Marco Polo, especially when he came across Hangchow during his late 13th century journey to China. Hangchow, a city near modern Nanking on the eastern seaboard of China, probably had a million inhabitants, with orderly paved streets, canals on alternate streets, stone bridges and an infrastructure for trade that would have put any European city of that time to shame. That China would have populous and magnificent cities shouldn't surprise us, but it usually does because China remains for many historical reasons, not least of which is China's own isloationism, an unknowable other for the West. In approaching Chinese cities we come across dangerous categories, dangerous because they usually lead to racist assumptions, of Western versus Eastern. In fact the father of modern sociology Max Weber, saw these two categories as the way to explain the model of progress in the West versus the static, cyclical patterns of the East. The West supposedly has the tradition of independent city authority and mechanisms of self rule, the eastern city is always bound to some greater authority, like the emperor or the state. But the only good thing about categories is that they can be so easily broken. The role of merchants, for instance, in both the East and the West often makes the two cultures more similar than political history will allow, just as the constant presence of autocratic states that controlled European cities throughout its history, makes one have doubts about presumed western autonomy. As we have seen in several cases, Athens, Florence, and elsewhere, freedom for the individual was contingent on a collective agreement about who had the right to be an individual. This did not include women, non-property owners, or slaves--and much to the embarassment of the West slavery existed not just in the colonies but throughout Europe until not so very long ago. The freedom of the individual, however, was a project that grew exclusively in the West and affected 19th century ideology and thus history writing. We will look briefly at 15th century Beijing, the quintessential imperial center, with its thousands of slaves and its eschelons of corruptable bureaucrats, a city that can be seen as the culmination of a centuries long tradition, the perfection of the Confucian art of rule, where such things as the arts and sciences reached a higher degree of development than in the West. Westerners might aspire to Athens because it corresponds to our notion of freedom: the right to speak, the right to a fair trial, the right to vote, and the right to mobility--none of those rights were protected, or necessary, in imperial China, where the order was prescribed and there were no doubts as to who was to say or do what to whom and when. The Mandate of Heaven was a project for a strict social heirarchy that comes in and out of focus during China's long history. There were many interregnums and moments of dissolution in China when the city was subject to other realities than central authority like the power of merchants. If we had to pursue the east/west comparisons, it is usually the ideology and not the reality that gets compared. But when you consider who was able to exercise freedom in Athens or Siena, about 10% or less of the population--not women, foreignors, slaves, and certainly not anyone who did not own property--you find that it is not so remote from the proportion of privileged classes of the imperial system of Mandarin bureaucrats, that is at a level of well being. The difference, of course, would be that the Athenians spent an inordinate amount of time negotiating among themselves around the notion of self- determination, while the Mandarin cultivated his personal study of painting, gardening, and philosophy. Each system, the democratic and the autocratic, was based on the genuine respect for others, its just that one placed those others horizontally while the other put them vertically.
The Importance of Walls in China
Chinese cities, although they often had a well developed class of merchants and a productive sector, never produced the sort of urban class struggle that led to the polis or the Commune. Instead all classes and all differences were regularly absorbed and assimilated (or when this was not possible, destroyed) into the greater entity of the state. The polis is a word that reminds us of the political nature of humans; the state, a word that recalls, status quo, and static. Commerce itself was often couched in the idea of tribute and at different moments of Chinese history, the children of merchants were forbidden entry into the examinations that were the only guarantee of elevating one's status in Chinese society. The Chinese empire will change dynasties 25 times during its three millenia, sometimes falling to outsiders such as the Mongols and the Manchus, but it will always remain pretty much the same, a huge territory with the world's largest population ruled by a single source of authority. The land of China was assembled around two of the world's greatest river systems, the Yangtze in the south and the Yellow River in the north and hemmed in on the north and west by the non-arable regions inhabited by nomads. Despite the varieties of cultures and the strong geographic distinctions of its regions, China persisted as a single state, from about the time David was founding Jerusalem until the present. The word for city in Chinese is "cheng," which couldn't be farther away from the concept of the western idea of polis, as it also signifies wall. The wall is a recurring theme in Chinese spatial organization, we need only think of the Great Wall, the only human artefact visible from outer space. It stretches along the northern borders to keep out Mongolian invaders. Since the foundation of the state in the first millenium, a great wall had been a recurrent strategy of posing the stable against the mobile. The version we know today was built in the 15th Century by the Ming emporers, and although it has never been accurately surveyed probably is about 2000 miles in length--that would be like between here and Los Angeles! The Great Wall is only the largest and best built of numerous other walls constructed during China's many attempts to repell nomadic invaders. These territorial walls were not urban, and yet the word means city, and gives the idea that you can't have a city without a wall. The great wall sets up a succession of walls: the wall also surrounds the city, usually with a double set, and there was a wall for an inner city for the elite, each neighborhood in turn was contained in a walled ward. Finally there were walls surrounding the traditional courtyard house itself. The pre-industrial Chinese environment was planned like a series of Chinese boxes with walls within walls, within walls.
Chang'an
Looking at the earliest of the large capitals, the T'ang capital of Chang'an, around 700AD, a city of about a million people, we can find the textbook layout of a chinese city according to cosmological planning principles. Chang'an is located in a major fertile region of the upper Yellow River, and became the principal depot for silk goods going to the west--there was trade already with Rome--the Romans called the Chinese "the silk people". It was the site of an earlier imperial capital of the Han dynasty also known as Chang'an, about which even less is known. Rome in fact would have been the only other city in the world that could have compared with Chang'an in size, also having about a million inhabitants by the first century. During the eighth century, the only competing cities in size were Baghdad, with perhaps 400,000 and Constantinople with perhaps 300,000. The layout of 8th century Tang Chang'an as can be reconstructed from archeaological evidence (it disappeared about 1000 years ago) is similar to the diagram for an ideal city known as the Wang Cheng found in the 2nd century book of rites known as the Chou-li. The theory of the Chinese city is rooted in this system and undergoes little variation during 2000 years of urbanisation. Chang'an is oriented to the cardinal points, north-south and enclosed by an orthogonal double set of walls, with three sets of gates on each side. It is divided into a checkerboard grid, each block reserved for one of the 108 wards (called "fang"), which would have had as many as 10,000 inhabitants in each. The ward is enclosed in its own walls with gates that were closed every night. As with the Arab-Islamic city, these wards were organized according to geographic provenance and ethnicity--Chang'an was a multi- ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-religious center--there were even Christian churches here. The central street was reported to be 160 meters (480 feet) wide and led to the palace complex in the north which of course was walled off and accessible only courtiers. Three major east-west streets crossed three major north south streets, each of them about 300 feet wide (this is like the width of a freeway), and each of the major streets led to a city gate. Slightly different than the Wang-Cheng diagram, the palace was placed on the north rather than in the center. The ancester Hall, the principal shrine for the city, was placed in the east and the altar of land and grain on the west. The emperor was not only son or pivot of heaven but also as the first farmer, helping perpetuate the agricultural primacy of the country. The two city market places for weekly markets were also on the east and west. In this checkerboard of a city there was no public space that we could recognize as such, no spaces like the Agora or the piazza, no names for such spaces, no areas for assembly in the western sense, but only places of passage, market, and ritual. And yet it was eminently more spacious than any of the cities we have encountered.
Confucianism
Most historians of Chinese architecture present it as a fairly unchanging tradition over 3000 years, which is quite a shock compared to the abrupt changes of style in Western architecture from century to century. Philosophical attitudes of Confusianism and Taoism are one explanation. Confucianism in particular is about the changless order known as the Mandate of Heaven. Confucius lived between 555 and 479 BC, the exact dates of the formation of Greek democratic constitutions. The Golden Rule as transmitted by Confucius is quite interesting to compare to Christianity's; it is essentially the same but the obverse, written in the negative: "he does not do to others what he does not want others to do to him." It is a passive strategy. Confucianism, which is more of a philosophy than a religion, came to dominate Chinese thought as dogma during the height of expansion under the Ch'in dynasty which gave its name to the state. The territory of China was outlined by 221 BC and the emperor became known at this time as "son of heaven" the chief instrument for fullfilling the mandate of heaven. In order to sweep away opposing opinions a decree in 213 that all books not sponsored by the official ideologues by burned. In 136 BC, under Emperor Wu, the dogma of Confucianism was consolidated by chief minister Tung Chung-shu a great Confucian scholar. Tung convinced the emperor that Heaven always punishes man for his evil, sending plague, famine or invasion, but that man can always influence heaven through his moral conduct. The essentially conservative message of Confucianism is connected to the preservation of the Mandate of Heaven, which implies the hierarchic chain of command for society. Only virtuous men should be allowed to judge and they should use as their standard of right and wrong the sayings of Confucius. The philosophy cannot be easily reduced, and it certainly has dictums that would contradict the highly structured social situation that evolved--take for instance: "It is man that can make the way great but not the way that can make man great." This sort of statement, however, begs for the right man in the right place, which is what led to the elaborate method of filling the ranks of the hierarchy through the examination system. Confucianism honored the ruler and the policy of driving off the Barbarians--its central rule was based on the "three bonds": that is ruler- father-husband to be served respectively by the minister-son-wife. The virtue needed to act at high levels was to be acquired from the scholarship of the five books based on Confucius's saying. The significant class of Mandarins, the bureaucrats who administered China, were organized into nine ranks, each wearing a different type of button to distinguish his status. The precision of the social structure begged for its urban correspondence, which is an important reason for the persistance of regular planning in China.
Jian, or Constructed Units
But aside from Confucianism, there is something in Chinese building traditions, in the vernacular of China that reinforces both the sense of changelessness and the dependence on a theory of planning. The word for building in Chinese is t'u-mu, meaning wood and mud--this intimates the perishability of Chinese buildings--in fact there are very few that survive from earlier than the 14th century. Only things such as Buddhist pagodas, part of the syncretic absorbtion of different faiths into China. There were also meteorological instruments like this tower built in the 8th century. But otherwise there were very few masonry buildings. Perishability means constant rebuilding and restoration, so the change is not to form but comes in the act rebuilding the same form. There are allegedly very few changes to Chinese architecture in terms of style or typological development. The form was based on a system of repeated bays called jian, usually 9 by 18 feet or 9 by 27. If more space was need another jian would be added, either to the same structure or next to it. So the method was the addition of conventional units of geometry. --collected around an axis --connected by covered walk ways --courtyard house--hip roof, individual roof for each room. brackets for speciaiil bldgs, raised beams(tai-liang), orientation to a Void, columns painted red in temple or palace, brown in house, dragon motif for palace. --most of the fabric of Beijing is made of courtyard houses, seen on this map from 16th century, they give on to long street with very little penetration of the street wall. This practice of using the jian bay system and building enclaves around an axis is what makes all Chinese cities despite their constant destruction and rebuilding somewhat alike and unchanging previous to the industrial period--composed of a myriad of fragments, with a few interruptions of either the vertical or the horizontal plane and some linkage to a strong axis. There is more permanence in Chinese impermanence. The Chinese Empire was also revised according to external threats, the constant puncturing by nomadic warriors. The capital of the empire was moved many times after undergoing invasions and sacks by hordes of nomadic peoples coming from the north and the west. The state relied too heavily on an army made of conscripted peasants and often found itself indefensible, despite the impressive walls it had constructed. One of Marco Polo's observations about the residents of the southern city of Hangchow, which was the temporary capital of the Song dynasty gets to the problem: in 1280 he reported "They have no skill in handling arms and do not keep any in their houses. There is prevalent amont them a dislike for strife or any sort of disagreement. They love one another so devotedly that a whole district might seem, from the friendly and neighborly spirit that rules among men and women, to be a single household." The militia was gathered by conscription, which did not guarantee great loyalty, and it is surprising how frequently Chinese capitals were erased, how vulnerable they were despite their impressive fortificaitons. Hangchow like Chang'an, each immense cities of a million people, was wiped out leaving few traces.It is hard to believe that a city once great will not always exist.
The Ching Ming Festival in Kaifeng
There is no way to know exactly what the ancient Chinese city was like, they have all disappeared, gobbled up by raiders and the sands of time. There is however, an extraodrinary document, a unique scroll painting depicting the Ching Ming festival in the 12th century city of Kaifeng, which was the Song capital city before Hangchow. The scroll has become the most famous vision of an idealized Chinese city. It stretches about 20 feet and is read fro right to left, and shows the balance of country and city. We start off in the fields and watch people progress toward the center along the banks of the two rivers of Kaifeng. Along the route we find tall ships that have brought goods from the seaports up stream from the Grand Canal, joining the two river systems that was built in the 7th century. There is a theater along the way. The clusters of merchant activities intensifies as we get closer to the imposing gates of the city's outer walls. Approaching the city there is a monumental bridge built with a rounded arch and on it lines of shops selling luxury goods. There are houses now. In the background there is a tournament on a military field, but there is no hint of the military inside Kaifeng. The gate is made of battered walls, like so much of the later Ming architecture, and like the gates of Beijing's imperial palace, the Forbidden city. inside the gates we find collections of courtyard houses behind rows of shops, the houses give onto a lane that runs perpendicular to the major street, like the map we saw of Ming Beijing. During the time of the Sung dynasty an attempt was made to organize the people into smaller wards of 110 families, with ten of those being responsible for the collective administrative matters such as taxes and conscription service. This district in the painting might represent one of those units although it is smaller than it would have been in reality. The houses are arranged on side streets, like the strips of courtyard houses we saw in Beijing.The street life is incredibly boisterous, with people eating and laughing and racing about. A canal is to be crossed and the area forms something looking like a plaza-- this is different than the lack of public space we heard about in Chang'an, and in fact it seems that the highly developed merchant society in Kaifeng led to a greater degree of public life than had been known before. The fabric of the city begins to get more monumental now, there are palaces probably for mandarin ministers arranged around voids in the manner of the jian bay system, but on greater properties than the courtyard houses, it is leading up to the imperial palace, reached through a portal and gate, and also a collection of pavilions in space. It is as if the more space that can be left open, rather than the biggest building that can be built, is the highest sign of grandeur. Behind the palace is the garden and here the strict orthogonal order of the composition of buildings starts to break down as an abstract way of mirroring the oblique relationships of nature. Things are positioned to view water, mountains, trees and other natural features. We end our vision of Kaifeng taking tea in lakeside pavilions as the sun sets amid bizarre colors. The looseness of life depicted in the scroll, contradicts the severity of the theory of the Confucian city that will be found in our last example, the new imperial capital of Beijing.
Beijing
The space of Beijing was conceived in terms of a directional ceremony that ultimately pointed to heaven. The city was founded as Dadu, or Khanbalik, the new capital of the Mongolian invaders under the authority of Kublai Khan, grandson of Ghengis Khan. The hordes of nomadic warriors organized under Ghengis Khan carried out proportionately the greatest acts of genocide yet known to humanity, wiping out the two largest cities of the age Baghdad at one extreme and Kaifeng at the other. In the region of northern China where they eventually placed their capital, the Khans slaughtered 11 million people, cutting the population in half. Once order was restored under Kublai Khan the city was built, curiously according to Weng Cheng precedents. In order to gain the confidence of the Chinese, the first Mongolian emperor, adopted the Confucian precedents in architecture and administration, reinstituting the examination system in 1315. From Marco Polo's account we can assume that Dadu was "laid out in squares like a chessboard," and had a long axial street leading to a fortified palace. After the expulsion of the Mongols, the Ming dynasty produced the palace compound we know today beginning in 1421, along the same lines, following a tradition of walls within walls. It is organised in wards for the different peoples gathered in the city, and leads up to a walled inner city in the north for all of the supporting staff and administrators of the empire, inside of which is the Forbidden City, or the Purple city, an area that covers a district of about a mile by a mile and a half. It serves as the emperor's residence, with his court, his concubines, the court eunuchs and special gardens, and as the name suggests is forbidden to most people. It is an architectural demonstration of the order of the political world. The rituals carried out are meant to appease heaven and demonstrate that the order of the world is functioning and everyone is in their place. An artificial mountain was piled up with the earth used to make the moat to terminate the axis. This was to satisfy the geomancy rules of fengshui to interrupt the grand axis. And throughout the palace you will find spirit walls and mirrors and bells on the eaves, all of which are part of the fengshui tradition of thwarting the ill disposed axis. The positive energy is gained by contained spaces like those of a courtyard. The treatment of funeral architecture of the Ming tombs carries over the same rules of composition as the civil architecture. In the southern suburbs of Beijing outside of the walls of the enclosed imperial city, was a special cult site where the emporer would come once a year to make a sacrifice to the heavens. The compound is known as the Tien Tan, the Temple of Heaven, and is made of three major events contained in a wall, round on its northern side to symbolize heaven. The emperor would stay in a buildng to the west known as the hall of abstinance to purify himself the night before the ceremony. He would then go to the round temple of heaven, and to the harvest temple; a final ceremony would be made on the open altar. Each of these monuments carries out a symbolism of a square earth platform supporting a round heaven element. The last of these altars has 360 posts, indicating the 360 degrees of a circle, a methodical depiction of a sacred geometry. Not many people would see the emperor but the day of sacrifice was the only day that they would be aware he was moving through the city, because it was quite rare that an emperor would leave the Forbidden City. The city was laid out in a cosmological fashion in which most men, including the emperor, would find their destiny already prescribed. It is the strictness of this architectural order that perpetuates the Western assumption of a static, cyclical order.
Sources:
Henry Hart, Marco Polo, Venetian Explorer, 1967.
Arthur Wright, "The Cosmolosgy of the Chinese City,"
Jacques Gernet, Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion, trans.,
H,M. Wright, NY, 1962.
Andrew Boyd, Chinese Architecture and Town Planning, Chicago, 1962.
Laurence Liu, Chinese Architecture, NY 1989.
Nancy Steinhardt, Chinese Imperial City Planning, Honolulu, 1990.