Technology and Culture

Cities, Railways, Modernities: London, Paris, and the Nineteenth Century By Carlos López Galviz. New York: Routledge, 2019. Pp. xvi + 310.

In 1846, City Solicitor Charles Pearson submitted to Parliament an ambitious "Plan of Suburban Residences for London Mechanics," part of a proposed solution to "overcrowded" streets and "overcrammed" residences in the city's slums. Pearson conceived the suburb as a starburst of forty roads radiating out from a railway station hub that would have fed directly into a central railway terminus in the City. Neither the suburb nor the terminus was ever built, although a subsequent Pearson design would eventually result in the world's first underground railway. Carlos López Galviz discusses both plans in detail in Cities, Railways, Modernities, one of many examples contrasting what was not built in London and Paris with what was, the single modernity that dominates histories of nineteenth-century urbanism versus the multiple modernities that were in fact in play. López Galviz argues that the "past futures" imagined in plans such as Pearson's not only "fed into a significant body of work around the future of the two cities" (p. 12). Read against the grain of the future that did result, planning debates in these cities pose an ongoing "challenge to existing practices" and also "reverse" the conventional understanding of London's development as "piecemeal" and Paris's as an "icon … of modern town planning" (pp. 12–13). Just as Pearson's irradiating star looks more like Parisian geometry than London chaos, López Galviz suggests, so also unrealized plans for Paris suggest more often a political impasse between city and national powers than Prefect Georges-Eugène Haussmann's well-oiled Second-Empire machine.

The book's five chapters include an introduction, conclusion, and three detailed studies, each structured by a pair of concepts held in tension—circulation and improvement (ch. 2); lines and circles (ch. 3); and steam and light (ch. 4)—and each including a brief introduction and conclusion around paired sections on London and Paris. The chapters are roughly chronological: development of mainline railways during the first half of the century; development of intra-city railway transport during the second half; and development of electric traction, particularly in the London Tube and Paris Métropolitain, around the turn of the century. López Galviz is especially concerned with how measures for better housing and transport for the urban poor, often conjoined in theory with the need for better circulation, gave way in practice—especially in Paris—only to the latter. He deploys the spatial contrast of line and circle as varied ways to understand the approach to urban transport, in particular why neither London nor Paris, unlike many European and American cities, ever built a central railway [End Page 626] station. And he explores the different uses to which steam engines and electric traction proved most suited, the debates that arose around the topic, and the ways in which they did and did not share railway systems and imaginative space in London and Paris.

The historical material has been carefully researched in archives and in the large bodies of existing scholarship on urban history, cultural history, transport history, infrastructure studies, and modernity studies. The bulk of the book is devoted to detailed presentation of plans for transport development, planning debates, and the various publics invoked and served by those debates. Chapter 4 is especially impressive in its detailed presentation of the process of transport planning and the ways the potentialities and constraints of new and existing technologies interacted with that essentially political process. Cities, Railways, Modernities provides a strong overview of both more and less familiar material and amply demonstrates its thesis that a London/Paris comparison means far more than a "top-down" vs. "bottom-up" dichotomy. It is salutary to be reminded that any account of history as it did happen cannot be told without reckoning with the materiality, at any point in time...