Down with the walls! The politics of place in Spanish and German urban extension planning, 1848-1914

By 1914, commercial and other photographers were beginning to produce stunning images of the built environment across Europe, including in Spain and Germany. In Madrid, Jaime Murillo Rubiera and Mario Fernández Albarés had started to photograph aspects of the unfolding extension to the city, which began in 1860 and progressed rapidly after 1875. Away from the capital in Barcelona, Joan Martí and Antoni Esplugas captured the dramatic improvements to the cityscape that began with defortification in 1854 and the adoption of an extension plan in 1860. In particular, Esplugas presented unmistakable images of progress in the form of long boulevards disappearing into the distance (Figure 1). A similar enthusiasm for the changing urban landscape was also evident in Germany. In Berlin, Hermann Rückwardt captured the capital’s straight streets and modern buildings laid out according to the extension plan of 1862, and F. Albert Schwartz photographed contrasting historical façades along Berlin’s growing street network. Indeed by the turn of the century, Germans in other cities such as Munich and Cologne were scaling new heights to photograph growing urban landscapes. The modern cityscapes captured by Spanish and German photographers were the result of ambitious extension plans implemented across Europe between 1848 and 1914. Historians have written at length about these post-1848 extension plans, foregrounding the expressly logistical considerations of planners in shaping space. That is, we have produced investigations into the practical considerations of drafting urban plans, designing new apartment blocks, and building municipal facilities. Such research has yielded valuable insights into the processes of legal and administrative reform needed to expand cities, as well as the effects extension planning had on processes and motion, including the separation of social classes in the city, the relative distribution of public amenities, and the emergence of housing reform movements. But as photographs of the new cityscape often suggest – by the way they invest the built environment with a sense of feeling – extension planning involved more than just a physical transformation of space. As many contemporaries put it, extension planning profoundly affected idioms of place. New streets and architectures altered personal experiences of the city, arousing emotions of great pride in, and at other times concern over the changing character of the urban landscape. In exploring extension planning in Spain and Germany from 1848 to 1914, this essay aims to illuminate the shifting interpretations of the urban environment that accompanied this activity. The comparison rests on the fact that during this period, engineers in both Spain and Germany readily sought to “catch up” to models of urban development seen mainly in France. The extensions in Madrid (1860) and Berlin (1862) were, for example, deeply influenced by contemporaneous rationalization projects undertaken by Georges-Eugène Haussmann in Paris.