Breathe In: The Public City

Abstract

The 19th-century metropolis was a public city. This is not implied in a normative sense or as a mark of nostalgia. Rather, the city was comprised fundamentally of people. This was the century when millions of workers and immigrants headed for the city to work, live and enjoy metropolitan freedoms. It was the presence, labour and creative practices of millions of ordinary people (some with extraordinary pasts) that made London, New York and Paris the great metropolises they became during this century. In response to this intense centripetal pressure, the 19th-century metropolis was characterised by implosion and concentration. Housing was for most city dwellers a continual problem — it was cramped, decrepit and expensive and always on the brink of being demolished as part of a public works or public sanitation programme. Work was plentiful, although in times of economic crisis casual pools of labour could be forced into starvation, destitution or imprisonment, such was the tyrannical rule of the free market. The urban cultures of the 19th-century, which sprang from the diverse publics who occupied the city, were vivid. For the most part the masses revelled in being at the heart of the city (and the centre of the empire). London, New York and Paris became urban palimpsests that have been rewritten many times over in the subsequent periods covered within this book.