The dual and four-fold development of the city, as above sketched, is by
no means far advanced in most of our present towns or cities, which have
obviously but scanty expression of the ideas shadowed forth for the
modern equivalents of cloister and cathedral, of academe and acropolis.
But this is to say that such towns, however large, populous and rich
according to conventional economic standards, are to that extent small
and poor, indeed too often little better than cities by courtesy. Yet
their further development, upon this [Page: 102] four-fold view of civic
evolution, though in principle the same for each and all, has always
been, and let us hope may always be, in large measure an individual
(because regional) one. For if each human individuality be unique, how
much more must that of every city?
In one concrete case, that of Dunfermline, I have already submitted
definite suggestions towards the realisation of the civic Utopia, and
even architectural designs towards its execution,[13] so that these may
at any rate suffice to show how local study and adaptive design are
needed for each individual city, indeed for every point of it. It is
thus, and thus only, that we can hope to have a city development truly
evolutionary, that is, one utilising the local features, advantages, and
possibilities of place, occupation, and people. Of course, it is needful
to supplement these by the example of other cities; but it is no less
needful to avoid weighting down the local life with replicas of
institutions, however excellent elsewhere, if really irregional here.
With the re-awakening of regional life in our various centres, and of
some comprehension of its conditions among our rulers, they will cease
to establish, say, a school of mines in Piccadilly, or again one of
engineering and the like in South Kensington. The magistrates of
Edinburgh have long abandoned their old attempt to plant mulberries and
naturalise silk culture upon their wind-swept Calton Hill; albeit this
was a comparatively rational endeavour, since a population of Huguenot
refugee silk weavers had actually come upon their hands.
[13] Cf. the writer's "City Development," Edinburgh and Westminster,
1904.
Similarly, it is plain that we must develop Oxford as Oxford, Edinburgh
as Edinburgh, and so on with all other cities, great or small--York or
Winchester, Westminster or London. And so with Chelsea or Hampstead,
with Woolwich or Battersea. Has not the last of these grown from a mere
outlying vestry, like so many others, into a centre of genuine vitality
and interior progress, indeed of ever-widening interest and example; and
all this in half a generation, apparently through the sagacious
leadership--say, rather the devoted, the [Page: 103] impassioned
citizenship--of a single man? And does not his popular park at times
come near giving us a vital indication of the needed modern analogue of
cathedral and forum? Civic development is thus no mere external matter,
either of "Haussmannising" its streets, or of machine-educating its
people; the true progress of the city and its citizenship must alike
grow and flower from within albeit alive and open to every truly
fertilising impulse from without.
Yet since national interests, international industry, commerce,
science, and therefore progress are nowadays and increasingly so
largely one, may we not in conclusion foresee something at least of the
great lines of development which are common to cities, and generalise
these as we are accustomed to do in history? Witness the Classical,
Mediaeval, and Renaissance types to which historic cities
preponderatingly belong, and within which we group their varied
individualities, as after all of comparative detail.
Here then it is time to recall the presentment of ancient, recent and
contemporary evolution already outlined in the part of this paper
previously read (Vol. I, p. 109), dealing with the historic survey of
cities. We have now to face the question, then postponed, indeed left in
interrogation-marks--that of seeking not indeed sharply to define the
future order of things, yet in some measure to discern such elements of
progress as may be already incipient in the existing order, if not yet
largely manifest there. Such elements may be reasonably expected to grow
in the near future, perhaps increasingly, and whatever be their rate of
growth are surely worthy of our attention.
Contemporary science, with its retrospective inquiries into origins in
the past, its everyday observation of the present, is apt practically to
overlook that the highest criterion and achievement of science is not to
decipher the past, nor record the present, not even to interpret both.
It is to foresee: only thus can it subserve action, of which the present
task ever lies towards the future, since it is for this that we have to
provide. Why then should not Comte's famous aphorism--"_Voir pour
prévoir, prévoir pour pourvoir_," become applicable in our civic studies
no less than in the general social and political fields to [Page: 104]
which he applied it? In navigation or engineering, in agriculture or
hygiene, prevision and provision alike are ever increasing; yet these
are no mere combinations of the preliminary sciences and the fundamental
occupations, but obviously contain very large social elements.
It is proverbially safe to prophesy when one knows; and it is but this
safe prediction which we make every day of child or bud, where we can
hardly fail to see the growing man, the coming flower. Yet do not most
people practically forget that even now, in mid-winter, next summer's
leaves are already waiting, nay, that they were conceived nine months
ago? That they thus grow in small, commonly unnoticed beginnings, and
lie in bud for a period twice as long as the summer of their adult and
manifest life, is yet a fact, and one to which the social analogies are
many and worth considering.
While recognising, then, the immense importance of the historic element
of our heritage, renaissance and mediaeval, classic and earlier;
recognising also the predominance of contemporary forces and ideas,
industrial and liberal, imperial and bureaucratic, financial and
journalistic, can we not seek also, hidden under all these leaves, for
those of the still-but-developing bud, which next season must be so much
more important than they are to day? It is a commonplace, yet mainly of
educational meetings, to note that the next generation is now at school;
but how seldom do we recognise its pioneers, albeit already among our
own contemporaries? At any rate we may see here and there that their
leaven is already at work.
In this respect, cities greatly differ--one is far more initiative than
another. In the previous paper (vol. I, p. 109), we saw how individuals,
edifices, institutions, might represent all past phases; these,
therefore, often predominate in different cities sufficiently to give
its essential stamp. Why then should we not make a further survey and
seek to see something of the cities of the future; though we may have to
look for these in quarters where at first sight there may seem as yet
scanty promise of flower?
[Page: 105] To recall an instance employed above, probably every member
of this Society is old enough to remember incredulous questionings of
whether any good thing could come out of Battersea. Again, how few, even
in America, much less than in Europe, a few years ago, forsaw the rapid
growth of those culture-elements in St. Louis, of which the recent
World-Exposition will not have been the only outcome?
Only a few years earlier, it was Chicago which, for New England no less
than for the Old World, seemed but the byword of a hopelessly
materialised community. So Birmingham or Glasgow has won its present
high position among cities in comparatively recent times; so it may now
be the turn of older cities, once far more eminent, like Newcastle or
Dundee, to overtake and in turn, perhaps, outstrip them. But all this is
still too general and needs further definition; let us attempt this,
therefore, somewhat more fully, in the concrete case of Glasgow.
Q--GLASGOW AS TYPICAL OF CIVIC TRANSITION--FROM "PALEOTECHNIC" TO
"NEOTECHNIC"
My own appreciation of the significance of Glasgow was first really
awakened over twenty years ago by William Morris, who in his vivid way
pointed out to me how, despite the traditional culture--superiority of
Edinburgh, Glasgow was not only the Scottish capital, but, in his view,
in real progressiveness the leading and initiative city of the whole
United Kingdom. And this for him was not merely or mainly in its
municipal enterprise, then merely in its infancy--although he expressed
this development in the phrase "In London, people talked socialism
without living it; but in Glasgow, they were socialists without knowing
it!" Despite all the ugliness which had so repelled Ruskin, the squalor
which moved Matthew Arnold to the fiercest scorn in all his writings,
Morris's appreciation arose from his craftsman's knowledge and respect
for supreme craftsmanship. The great ships building upon the Clyde were
for him "the greatest achievement of [Page: 106] humanity since the days
of the cathedral-builders," nay, for him actually surpassing these,
since calling forth an even more complex combination and "co-operation
of all the material arts and sciences" into a mighty and organic whole;
and correspondingly of all their respective workers also, this being for
him of the very essence of his social ideal.
For these reasons he insisted, to my then surprise that the social
reorganisation he then so ardently hoped for "was coming faster upon the
Clyde than upon the Thames": he explained as for him the one main reason
for his then discouragement as to the progress of London that there East
and West, North and South, are not only too remote each from the other,
but in their occupations all much too specialised--there to finance,
there to manufactures, or here to leisure, and so on; while on the Clyde
industrial organisation and social progress could not but develop
together, through the very nature of the essential and working unity of
the ship.
Since Morris's day, a local art movement, of which he knew little, has
risen to eminence, a foreign critic would say to pre-eminence, in this
country at least. Since Ruskin's savage response to a Glasgow invitation
to lecture--"first burn your city, and cleanse your river,"--a new
generation of architects and hygienists have not a little transformed
the one, and vigorous measures have been taken towards the purification
of the other. That the city and university pre-eminently associated
with the invention of the steam-engine, and consequently with the advent
of the industrial revolution throughout the world, should, a century
later, have produced a scarcely less pre-eminent leader of applied
science towards the command of electricity is thus no isolated
coincidence. And as political economy, which is ever the theory
corresponding to our phase of industrial practice, and there some of
its foremost pioneers, and later its classical exponent, Adam Smith
himself, so once more there are signs at least of a corresponding wave
of theoretic progress. Students of primitive civilisation and industry
have now long familiarised us with their reinterpretation of what was
long known as the stone age, into two very distinct [Page: 107] periods,
the earlier characterised by few and rough implements, roughly used by a
rude people, the second by more varied tools, of better shape, and finer
edge, often of exquisite material and polish. We know that these were
wielded more skilfully, by a people of higher type, better bred and
better nourished; and that these, albeit of less hunting and militant
life, but of pacific agricultural skill, prevailed in every way in the
struggle for existence; thanks thus not only to more advanced arts, but
probably above all to the higher status of woman. This distinction of
Paleolithic and Neolithic ages and men, has long passed into the
terminology of sociological science, and even into current speech: is it
too much then, similarly, to focus the largely analogous progress which
is so observable in what we have been wont to generalise too crudely as
the modern Industrial Age? All are agreed that the discoveries and
inventions of this extraordinary period of history constitute an epoch
of material advance only paralleled, if at all, in magnitude and
significance by those of prehistory with its shadowy Promethean figures.
Our own advance from a lower industrial civilisation towards a higher
thus no less demands definite characterisation, and this may be broadly
expressed as from an earlier or _Paleotechnic_ phase, towards a later or
more advanced _Neotechnic_ one. If definition be needed, this may be
broadly given as from a comparatively crude and wasteful technic age,
characterised by coal, steam, and cheap machine products, and a
corresponding _quantitative_ ideal of "progress of wealth and
population"--towards a finer civilisation, characterised by the wider
command, yet greater economy of natural energies, by the predominance of
electricity, and by the increasing victory of an ideal of qualitative
progress, expressed in terms of skill and art, of hygiene and education,
of social polity, etc.
The Neotechnic phase, though itself as yet far from completely replacing
the paleotechnic order which is still quantitatively predominant in most
of our cities, begins itself to show signs of a higher stage of
progress, as in the co-ordination of the many industries required for
the building of a ship, or in the yet more recent developments which
begin to renew for us the conception of the worthy construction of a
city. As [Page: 108] the former period may be characterised by the
predominance of the relatively unskilled workman and of the skilled, so
this next incipient age by the development of the chief workman proper,
the literal _architectos_ or architect; and by his companion the rustic
improver, gardener and forester, farmer, irrigator, and their
correspondingly evolving types of civil engineer.
To this phase then the term _Geotechnic_ may fairly be applied. Into its
corresponding theoretic and ideal developments we need not here enter,
beyond noting that these are similarly of synthetic character; on the
concrete side the sciences unifying as geography, and on their more
abstract side as the classification and philosophy of the
sciences,--while both abstract and concrete movements of thought are
becoming more and more thoroughly evolutionary in character.
But evolutionary theories, especially as they rise towards
comprehensiveness, cannot permanently content themselves with origins,
or with classifications merely, nor with concentrating on nature rather
than on man. Nature furnishes after all but the stage for evolution in
its highest terms; of this man himself is the hero; so that thus our
Geotechnic phase, Synthetic age (call it what we will) in its turn gives
birth to a further advance--that concerned with human evolution, above
all subordinating all things to him; whereas in all these preceding
industrial phases, even if decreasingly, "things are in the saddle and
ride mankind." This age, now definitely evolutionist in policy, as the
geotechnic was in theory and in environment we may term the _Eugenic_.
For its theory, still less advanced, the term _Eupsychic_ may complete
our proposed nomenclature.
Thus then our conception of the opening future may be increasingly
defined, since all these apparently predicted phases are already
incipient among us, and are thus really matters of observed fact, of
social embryology let us say; in short, of city development.
In summary, then, the diagram of the former instalment of this paper
(vol. 1, p. 109)
ANCIENT ||
Primitive | Matriarchal | Patriarchal ||
RECENT ||
Greek and Roman | Mediaeval | Renaissance ||
CONTEMPORARY ||
Revolution | Empire | Finance ||
INCIPIENT
? ? ?
[Page: 109] has thus its interrogations filled up. Omitting the
left-hand half, that generalised as Ancient and Recent in the above
diagram, so as to give more space to the Contemporary and Incipient
phases, these now stand as follows:--
CONTEMPORARY || INCIPIENT
Revolution | Revolution | Empire ||Neotechnic | Geotechnic | Eugenic
To elaborate this farther would, of course, exceed my present limits;
but I may be permitted to say that long use of this schematic outline,
especially of course in more developed forms, has satisfied me of its
usefulness alike in the study of current events and in the practical
work of education and city betterment. I venture then to recommend it to
others as worth trial.