SHARP CORNERS:
URBAN OPERATIONS
AT CENTURY'S END
Roger J. Spiller
U.S. Army Command and General Staff College Press
Fort Leavenworth, Kansas
Table of Contents
Part One. On Urban Operations and the Urban Environment
Part Two. Under Fire: Urban Operations in Perspective
Part Three. Metropolis, or Modern Urban Conflict
Part Four. Theory to Practice: Implications for DTLOMS
Appendix. Catalog of Urban Battles
Introduction
This study was directed by the Commanding General, US Army Training and Doctrine Command, in the summer of 1999. NATO operations against Yugoslavia had just begun. Notwithstanding official announcements that ground forces would not be needed for the time being, expectations ran high that ground troops would ultimately have to be employed. The precise nature of the operations they would be called on to perform could not be foreseen, and consequently neither the size nor the precise character of the forces to be committed could be decided at the time. The range of possibilities was enough to give any commander or operational planner headaches: American ground forces could be engaged in direct combat within or beyond the province of Kosovo, then the focal point of NATO operations, against conventional forces or their surrogates. US troops could also be employed as an element of a peacekeeping operation confined to the province itself, or perhaps beyond, or any gradation of commitment between these extremes. No one with official responsibility could envision a scenario without ground troops of any sort.
Only one assumption could be made with any sort of confidence: once ground forces were introduced, a significant part of their duties would be performed not in the open countryside but in areas that could to some degree be characterized as urban. Some such areas might be very small, no more than a village perhaps, with a population numbering in the tens. Some might be towns with only a few thousand inhabitants. Others might be much larger municipalities, with populations running to the tens of thousands. The question naturally arose: to what degree was the US Army prepared for this mission, ill-defined as it was at that particular time?
Some of these questions have since been answered. NATO's air campaign forced the Yugoslavian Army from Kosovo and opened the way for the deployment of a multinational force to reestablish civic order in that province. NATO ground forces have not been challenged seriously so far. But Kosovo is hardly peaceful. Hatreds, both ancient and recent, threaten the stability of the region for the foreseeable future. It is likely that many of Kosovo's problems will be played out in the villages, towns, and cities of the province, but no one knows how or when these will be resolved. History is yet to have its say.
The deployment of ground forces into Kosovo is only the latest in an ever-growing list of contingency operations conducted by the United States and other leading nations in recent years. Some commentators have made the dubious claim that this kind of undertaking has become more frequent since the end of the Cold War, but it is more probable that the overriding burdens of the Cold War obscured what was under those circumstances a minor class of military operation. Contingency operations then made a smaller claim on the public’s attention, even while they kept America’s armed forces gainfully employed. The record shows that the United States conducted more than 250 contingency operations around the world between 1945 and 1976, not including the Korean and Vietnam Wars. In 40 percent of these operations, the US commitment took the form of ground forces, usually in less than division strength. More to the point of this study, however, most of those operations were conducted in urban areas.
So, an argument could easily be made that US armed forces, and the Army in particular, have a considerable body of experience in conducting limited operations in urban areas, some of it very recent indeed. Of the most important American operations since the end of the Vietnam War—Grenada, Beirut, Panama, the Persian Gulf War, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Haiti, Somalia, and now Kosovo—only the Gulf War could be said to have been carried out beyond the confines of an urban area, and even in this case, Kuwait City and the bombing of Baghdad were an important element of the larger campaign.
A collection of operational experiences does not, by itself, guarantee that an army will learn from them, and this returns us to the question of the Army's readiness to undertake the urban missions of the future. These experiences, as well as the experiences of other armies, have contributed to an impressively large body of professional military literature. This literature includes historical case studies, technical and topical studies, studies on the employment of specific weapons and weapons systems, and the tactics to be employed by particular branches both singly and in combination with one another. A comprehensive bibliography of these materials would be several inches thick. If only weight and utility were synonymous.
Such a compilation would contain the US Army's own Field Manual 90-10, Military Operations in Urbanized Terrain, last issued in 1979. When I began this study, a revision of FM 90-10 was already under way. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had assigned joint doctrinal proponency for urban operations to the Marine Corps, whose task was to formulate a doctrinal concept that would form the basis for a new Joint manual, for which the Army would serve as the technical review authority. By no means, then, should the present study be seen as the Army's main effort at coming to terms with the contemporary shape of urban operations.
Given the great variety and scope of these initiatives within and beyond the Army, and the body of knowledge that has been created already, one might well ask why this study is required? What could be left to study?
The answer to these questions lies partly in the guidance for this study. First of all, the intended audience for this paper is the Army as a whole. To a certain degree, the subject of urban warfare has come to be seen, justly or not, as an unwelcome distraction from the real business of an army, a relatively minor class of military problem that can be solved best by the application of time-honored tactical principles or by means of technological superiority. This view implies that not the whole Army, but only certain parts of it, need consider the unique challenges of modern urban conflict in its many forms. Under the circumstances, this approach hardly prepares the Army as a whole for the demands of a military future that promises a continuation of the trend towards urban operations witnessed in the immediate past. Ignoring these demands, or relegating them to small cadres of specialists, is not a viable course of action.
So, first of all, this paper aims at reviving interest in urban conflict and restoring the subject to the place it deserves in any modern army, and most particularly our own.
Another, equally important aspect of the guidance was that this investigation should address the challenge of what has come to be called, rather misleadingly, "the asymmetric threat," by which term is meant adversaries whose capabilities cannot hope to mimic our own. These antagonists harbor intentions and define their successes in ways that differ significantly from those of orthodox armed forces whose strategic and operational values derive from long traditions. The challenge thus posed to modern armed forces has not been adequately addressed.
Behind this guidance lies the suspicion that weaker adversaries in the future would choose as their preferred battleground the vast urban agglomerations of the world. In writings on historical and contemporary urban operations, one often sees that armies have long had an aversion to operating in the urban environment. This is an old and well-founded tradition. Unconventional adversaries often have been able to capitalize upon this aversion, but it is by no means certain that the advantage is constantly on their side. No fighting force is ever permitted to indulge its operational preferences with impunity. War and lesser forms of conflict do not organize themselves for anyone's benefit.
We know that in times past, armies have been defeated as much by their own shortcomings as by the actions of their enemies. These armies were so reluctant to make critical changes in their time-honored habits that they offered their enemies a vulnerability to exploit. A disjuncture between the habits of modern armies and those of their less conventional adversaries may be growing wider, creating a gap so wide that it cannot be bridged even by the most heroic ingenuity. The ability and willingness to envision and then to enact new ways of fighting may be the most dangerous asymmetry of all in the world of modern conflict.
Modern professional soldiers have learned by long and hard trial that war can no longer be thought of merely as an event, fought out without reference to its larger context. The concept of war as a strategic phenomenon with discernible parts we now call campaigns is well fixed in professional military literature. Since the emergence of the operational art in the early 1980s, the US Army's doctrines, tactics, techniques, and procedures have been attuned to this broader conception of war. But, we know, the Army's most recent thinking on urban conflict is represented by an ancient field manual, outdating by several years the principles by which we now conceive, plan, and guide our current operations. The question of how, precisely, urban conflict fits within the operational art is a question still waiting for an answer, and one, it is hoped, to which this study will contribute.
Like Gaul, the study is made of three parts.
The first part is based on the assumption that in order to take a city apart one must first know how to put it together. A substantial literature on urban design, planning, and management has never been exploited in a study of urban warfare, though a flash of common sense would tell us that these subjects are highly interrelated.
The second part attempts to place urban warfare into some perspective. No end of confusion has arisen over the years because of a failure to distinguish what is truly new from what is merely unfamiliar. Aspects of urban life, design, and urban fighting, thought by some observers to be precedent shattering, most often turn out to have been several hundred, if not thousands, of years old. If nothing else, simply knowing that others have faced the same problem has a calming effect, but when those others have found a solution, then the effect is educational.
The last part of this study attempts to fuse what has been discussed in the first two parts and suggests how we might make a fresh start at understanding a very difficult form of war in the future. That there are urban operations, perhaps outright urban war in our future, there is no doubt. The only question is when, and what can we do about it now?
Roger J. Spiller
Fort Leavenworth, Kansas
On Urban Operations and the Urban Environment
Defining Urban Operations
This study investigates the nature and conduct of modern urban operations. As a distinct type of military action, urban operations may well be the most influential form of conflict in the future. For some, urban operations are already the preferred form of military action. Others are very likely to discover the advantages of operating in this particular way in the future. If these trends continue, it means that the conduct of modern war is about to turn a sharp corner, away from its customary forms, toward different, less well-understood modes of action. If experience is any guide, this turning will not be dramatic; it will be composed of a thousand minor events, accruing so gradually that it evades notice. The sharp corners will be clear only in retrospect. For the moment, therefore, the question becomes: what can be known now about this mode of operation, and how should that knowledge affect our thinking?
It is significant that no generally agreed upon definition yet exists for these sorts of operation. Here, urban operations are considered broadly; they are all those military operations involving an urban environment.[1] This working definition is used in order to examine how the urban environment influences the conduct of military operations in general, as well as to consider this particular kind of military operation from a longer perspective. A longer perspective is needed just now, when military professionals everywhere are beginning to think seriously about urban operations for the first time in several years, and when armies are making new calculations about the rightful place that urban operations should occupy in the larger world of defense strategies.
As with any complex subject, first encounters with urban operations are likely to be confusing. A kind of vacuum surrounds the subject. No body of military theory directly addresses this kind of operation. Military doctrines are long out of date. Studies of urban battles generally do not address city fighting in a way that would be useful to a military professional who is trying to understand what makes this form of war unique. Under the circumstances, opinion holds court, unencumbered by fact. The unfamiliar is often mistaken for something new, even though very little about urban operations is new at all.
But urban operations seem new. In fact, today's resurgence of interest is attributed to reasons that would not have sounded new even twenty years ago, namely:
· The performance of conventional forces in recent urban operations.
· A perceived increase in the frequency of such operations.
· A perceived imbalance between the national cost and national benefit of such operations.
· The proliferation of advanced public technology available for military use.
· The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
· Perceived increases in the proliferation and capability of unorthodox, or asymmetric, threats.
· Global and regional population trends.
· Global and regional trends in urbanization.[2]
As an experiment, if one were to deduce from all these concerns a picture of future urban conflict, it would be a dark vision indeed: unorthodox threats, challenging by asymmetric means the professional armed forces of the leading nations, in which the preferred locale of operations is the ever-expanding and volatile urban population and infrastructure of the developing nations.[3] Although most certainly overdrawn, this general appreciation of the operational future stands behind the several different perspectives on urban operations that have appeared lately in defense circles.
One of these perspectives, inevitably, argues that urban operations in the future will be so different as to constitute a wholly new form of military operations. This school of thought implies that experience is of little use and, indeed, that all we know of the history of conflict does not apply in this special case. As with all such arguments, this one has the virtue that no one can say with any certainty whether it is right or wrong.
At the opposite end of the argument, one hears that urban operations really are quite simple and are only a subclass of tactics. Urban operations demand hard, specialized training but little professional preparation. Some relatively simple technological advancements may prove useful, but there is "no silver bullet" where urban operations are concerned. As in the past, only expert soldiering will do. As evidence, one need only point to the many operations of this kind conducted by the United States and other nations in the half century since the Second World War. All that is needed now, so the argument goes, is to take account of lessons learned but forgotten along the way.[4]
Somewhere between these two perspectives lies a third, still in its infancy, but benefiting from enthusiasms created by the so-called "Military Technical Revolution." This view argues that technology has the power to render a difficult problem manageable. Perhaps not a single "silver bullet" but a combination of silver bullets will do. This argument holds a certain appeal by appearing to assuage official anxieties over friendly casualties; indeed, it hints at the possibility that death and destruction can be quarantined by precise means. There is reason to believe that this school of thought is winning more and more converts.[5]
Finally, no effort is required to find the traditional school of thought on urban operations. Indeed, most professional soldiers from the last several centuries would recognize the majority view in the leading armies today: it states that cities are no fit place for armies. Wars are never won in cities, and quite a few have been lost in them. Armies surrender every advantage they possess when they enter a city, and from the moment armies cross the line between landscape and cityscape, the environment itself turns against them. In war, cities are usually an annoyance and certainly a distraction from the main effort. Avoid them at all costs, or quarantine them from the rest of the war if they are unavoidable.[6]
So conventional wisdom makes a strong case for urban operations as a different and inferior kind of military action—so different as to constitute a different type of operation altogether. Of course, it is this particular environment, first of all, that works such a dominating influence over operations. An urban environment may turn otherwise routine operations into operations that are anything but routine. The most important feature of urban operations is that they are urban. That is why the first step to understanding them is to understand the unique environment in which they occur.
The Natural Environment and the Nature of the Urban Environment
The natural environment is an army's natural habitat. It is where an army is conceived, designed, equipped, and trained for optimum performance; where, given a choice, its commanders and soldiers will choose to function. Modern professional armies now divide the natural environment into five general kinds: the arctic, mountains, jungles, deserts, and woodlands.[7] There is general agreement among military professionals that each of these environments requires specific fighting doctrines, organizational adjustments, specially adapted arms and equipment, and specific training. Each of these environments makes particular demands upon soldiers and their commanders, but they are demands that can be analyzed and understood, anticipated, answered by planning, and capitalized upon in execution. Modern armies have learned that ignoring or minimizing the environmental context of their operations can be dangerous. Each of these natural environments has the power to defeat an unprepared army as surely as any enemy.
As physically different as these environments are from one another, they are alike in one respect from a military point of view. Before the armies arrive and operations commence, the pace of change in these environments appears to be relatively static (relatively, always, as combat engineers trying to bridge a recently flooded river might well attest). The interaction between a natural environment and a military force is usually limited and temporary, although military history records the most prodigious feats of military engineering when a general decided that nature was working against him. When General Grant attempted to circumvent the Mississippi River during the Vicksburg campaign, he followed in the footsteps of the Persian King Cyrus, who diverted the Euphrates River so that his warriors might wade into Babylon rather than assault its walls.[8] But even these military operations did not change the fundamental character of the landscape. Obviously, the natural environment can be changed, and vastly. But an army's purpose lies in another direction.
Once an army's mission brings it into contact with an urban environment, that army is best served by understanding these surroundings as well as any other place where it might act. At first glance, this rule seems theoretically desirable but practically impossible. Urban areas, so vastly different from one another and so individually complex, seem beyond the reach of a general, practical view that can be of use to a commander and his soldiers. One could say the same about mountains, but cities, like mountains, share certain common features—features that could play a critical role in any military operation. What are those common features?
The urban environment is, first of all, a human environment. That makes it different from all other forms of environment. An urban environment is not defined by its structures or systems but by the people who compose it. Philosophers once speculated that the earliest settlements arose "naturally," as if humans were guided into a place by some invisible structural law—a speculation for which no evidence exists. The earliest settlements known to history were not "natural" at all; they were established by human purpose and will.[9] Jericho, of biblical fame, is reckoned to be ten thousand years old, but its ruins show it to have been meant for defense as well as trade and worship. The nature, shape, and functions of any urban environment, regardless of time or place, are determined, in the final analysis, by those who create it and sustain it. What all this means is that the urban environment reacts and interacts with an army in a way that no natural environment could.
Because the urban environment is defined by a variety of human beings doing different work, it is a highly dynamic environment. Any human collective of any size, megalopolis or village, lives in a constant state of human and material motion. Anyone who stands at an intersection on a modern city street is struck first by its dynamism—the scale and pace of activity—but a closer look will show that this action is orderly. Not only is the intersection designed for its purpose, but people use it in a particular way. In return for their cooperation, the traffic moves, and they have a good chance of crossing the intersection in one piece. This social and material order—urban cohesion on a grand as well as a microscopic scale— enables a city to work as a city.[10]
Urban cohesion has often figured importantly in war and conflict. Soldiers throughout history have struggled against cities' power to resist, to withstand sieges lasting months or years, or to absorb the punishment of entire armies fighting within their precincts. Of course, the human quality that makes cities so resilient under stress can also be a source of vulnerability. Being chiefly human, cities can be killed. The final destruction of Carthage in 146 B. C. has come to stand for all cities killed by war. The Roman senators demanded the obliteration of Carthage when their legions finally took it after years of fighting. Ninety percent of the population had been killed or starved to death. The survivors were sold into slavery. The buildings were pulled down. The barren ground was sown with salt, but this was merely a gratuitous insult. Without Carthagenians, the Roman senators knew, there would be no Carthage.[11]
Cities are, after all, built to function in peace.[12] Once established, cities operate at a certain pace and rhythm unique to themselves, depending on the vitality of their social and material cohesion. Furthermore, the process by which a city lives is not a degenerative but a regenerative one. Left to their own devices, cities do not decline. They persist.[13] But it is also true that, at some point, equally unique to a given city, a city's adaptive power can be overwhelmed, its cohesion disrupted. Natural disasters, industrial disasters, civil disorder, military conflict, or outright war—any or all of these can test a city's common systems and functions. At some point, the city begins to disorganize itself. The machinery of the essential and the commonplace—civil order, power, distribution of food and water, transport, medical care, communications—grinds toward an eventual halt. Then, the city in extremis becomes a different entity altogether—a place now hostile to its original reason for existence.
To appreciate how cities behave in war, we first have to see how they behave at rest, so to speak.
The Natural History of Cities
Cities form such a common backdrop of modern life everywhere that we rarely if ever see them in an analytical light. That, we can leave to urban planners, architects, civil engineers, and other experts. They make it possible for the rest of us to be at ease in the city, to function in that environment without quite understanding it.
The commander whose force is about to become entangled with a city has no such option. He must be able to understand the city from a military point of view—quite a different view from that taken by a resident or even an urbanologist. Seen as a military problem, an elevated expressway curving through a central urban core district (as one does in Houston) is a problem different in kind from the one considered by the planner who designed it. Seen as a military problem in 1945, Berlin's beautiful central park, the Tiergarten, posed an obstacle that required the attention of an entire Soviet army. In short, the commander must be prepared to "read" the city before him just as he would read a pastoral scene that could become a Somme. Knowing about cities in general, how their structures relate to their functions, and appreciating how those functions change under different circumstances are good first steps toward developing this professional skill.
In the urbanized world of the present, it is difficult to imagine a time when cities did not dominate human life as they do now. Once, cities were rare, and they were small. Ancient cities seldom had more than a few thousand inhabitants. Very important cities—Baghdad, Aleppo, Nineva, Ur—covered fewer than a thousand acres. A very few, truly exceptional cities—the world cities of their time—began to appear in the third millennium B. C.[14] When the Greek historian Herodotus gave us his description of fifth century Babylon, the city was already 2,400 years old, much besieged and much captured. East of Babylon, in the great river valleys of the Indus and the Hwang-Ho, cities as great as anywhere grew up: Mohenjo-Daro, Delhi, Nanjing, Canton, Beijing. The few great cities of the ancient Mediterranean were smaller—Constantinople, Alexandria, Athens—but still could count several hundred thousand people within their walls.[15] At the height of its classical growth in the fourth century B. C., Athens was said to have contained at least 200,000 people of all classes and kinds from their known world. Already the Greeks had coined the word megalopolis, but the city given this name had a population only one-fifth as large as Athens itself. To the Athenians, their own city was metropolis—the mother city.
Metropolis is a term that ought not be taken too literally, however: cities have assumed any number of shapes, so many that only the most general typologies are possible. In general, cities are built to meet the requirements of the place and day. Societies in which religious or secular power is highly concentrated seem to have a particular fondness for the radial design—all roads leading to and from the center of power, as if the power is magnified by the flow of social activity. Baghdad was designed by the Abbasid caliph a-Mansur in 762 A.D. to be a round city, with his palace as the epicenter, enclosed by walls. These were protected by his army's barracks, also protected by a wall, which was itself surrounded by residential quarters protected by a third circuit of walls. The whole city was to have a radius of two miles. Beyond the outer walls were the bazaars. If the city actually conformed to al-Mansur's plans, it did not do so for long. Within a century, its population had reached a million. By one estimate, it was the largest city in the world during that period.[16] By then, Baghdad had come to resemble any number of other medinas, whose designs have often been characterized as "irregular."
As a city form, the medina can be found from the Indus to the Atlantic. Rules and customs guiding the shape of Islamic medinas were taken from the Qur'an and related traditions. They perpetuated the vision of the medina as a private place in which the family had sovereignty and took precedence over public functions. The primary structure in such towns is the neighborhood—the hara in Cairo and Damascus, the hawma in Algiers. The residences making up the neighborhoods show a blank, unadorned face to the streets outside and instead open inward upon a court. To those unaccustomed to such a place, housing might seem to have developed without reference to public mobility, but it would be more correct to say that the reference is different. It was possible for a street to be captured over time by the gradual encroachment of neighborhoods. Houses might extend themselves like a bridge over a street; one or both ends of a street might be given iron gates to be closed at night, or one end might be blocked completely, to prevent through traffic. One authority estimates that in Ottoman-era Cairo and Aleppo nearly 50 percent of the streets were dead-ends. Even so, streets were to obey certain forms themselves. One form in particular, derived from an aphorism of the Prophet, required that a street be wide enough for two working camels to pass—seven cubits. This rule was often honored in the breach. Secondary and tertiary streets were dark, narrow, winding, and, in original form, unhealthy in the extreme and vulnerable to fire. But medinas are not merely jumbled residences and neighborhoods. The mosque and the market, or souk, always have central places in the town where major thoroughfares can be joined to them, radiating outward, toward the countryside. The old medinas look disorganized because their form is irregular. But that is not the same as saying that medinas are irrational and therefore cannot be understood by virtue of their designs. Far from it.[17]
If there is a universal form for cities, it must be the grid, lines of streets at right angles to one another, a design urban planners call "orthogonal." Evidence of towns designed along the pattern of a grid can be found in all periods and places: the grid belongs to no one and to everyone. Often stigmatized as unimaginative, it is the most adaptable of any organized urban form. Grids can form the core of cities that guard mountain defiles, anchor seaports, and occupy hillsides or hilltops, as well as any topography in between. A grid can take over, in effect, from a city whose original radial design was appropriate for a particular location that it has outgrown. A city designed as a grid can be artless and authoritarian, but so can any other design. Designs do not determine the character of a given city. They reflect it.[18]
Whatever the early city's design, a wall was likely to protect it. City walls seem to be as old as cities. The oldest known city, ten thousand-year-old Jericho, was enclosed by a huge stone wall. Babylon's famous wall, with its hundred gates, was said to run eleven miles in all. A little later, about 1200 B. C., the Thebans had their hundred-gate wall as well, while in China, at Soochow about 430 B. C., walls enclosed more than a thousand hectares. By 700 A. D., China had seen one of the greatest city walls ever built at Chang'an, enclosing a thirty-square-mile area, along with one million inhabitants.[19]
Walls served more than a simple defensive purpose. As Lewis Mumford has observed, the city wall "made almost compulsory" the unification of "functions that had heretofore been scattered and unorganized"—"shrine, spring, village, market, stronghold.”[20] Walls also served notice to those who wished to enter that one had to fit his conduct to customs and laws within. Market towns found walls to be useful control points for the collection of tariffs regulating trade and traders. Larger municipalities would specifically define the range of their authority by the circuit of their wall. Paris' own "tax wall" persisted well into the modern age. As for the military advantages conferred by walls, walled cities seemed to attract conquerers as much as deter them. Isfahan's experience, with its twelve miles of walls, was not unusual: in 1387, Tamerlane took it and slaughtered all 70,000 of its residents.[21] The same fate befell walled cities the world over.
The Greek cities had created colonial miniatures of themselves since the ninth century B. C. Metropolis was less a term of endearment than a practical description. Each of the Athenian colonies had an agora, or public market, just as in the original. These agorae were divided into trading circles, or cycloi, in which certain goods were marketed. The fish market, for instance, was the icthyopolis. Watching over the whole was the shrine to the gods, the acropolis, which always found commanding ground and, when the situation warranted, could be employed as a citadel. The situation often warranted.[22]
In some way, all cities performed (and still perform) one or more specific functions: habitats, monuments to religious or secular power, trade, defense, safety. How localities attended to these functions varied according to immediate circumstances, but the functions themselves attracted people away from the solitude of the countryside to the cities. It was the magnetic effect of cities that Aristotle wanted us to appreciate when he wrote that "men come together in the city to live; they remain there in order to live the good life."[23]
Rome followed Athens' example famously, ruthlessly, successfully for a time. The city began its life very deliberately when, in the third century B. C., King Servius laid out a rectangle of one thousand acres and arranged for it to be enclosed with a wall wide enough at the top for two chariots abreast. The whole was quartered by two avenues, laid on the north-south and east-west axes. Before Rome's imperial career was over, it would seed more than 5,000 towns throughout the Mediterranean to Asia Minor. The Roman "New Towns" were built according to the standard of the Metropolis, a pattern specified as 2,400 feet long by 1,600 feet wide, that would not contain more than 50,000 inhabitants. Later on, the bivouacs of the Legions used exactly this design, and some of the towns settled by the Romans really began as little more than temporary military camps. Although the Romans hoped their New Towns would be as disciplined as legionary bivouacs, never were rules violated more lustily.[24]
Indeed, the idea that the plan for a town, once laid down, would be followed faithfully, then and evermore, has been a persistent one throughout history, and one just as persistently violated. Most cities, regardless of the intent or plan or vision at origin, are best viewed as the product of successive plans, overlaid on one another, or stitched together across an obliging landscape (or an altered landscape, as the case may be). They grow by accretion, phases that are the urban equivalent of a geologist's sedimentary layers or a botanist's tree rings. This process can be seen in Cairo's history. Invading Muslim armies established a camp, Fustat, in 641 on the east bank of the Nile. A century later, Fustat fell to the Abbasids, who established a new camp, El Askar, slightly to the northeast. Another century later, a rebellious local governor ordered a new headquarters built north of El Askar, which he would call al-Qata. In 967, yet another invasion occurred, this time by radicals from the west who put up another walled town still farther north that would celebrate their success. This town they would call "The Victorious," or al-Qahira. This chain of closely related settlements was finally bound together when, after 1169, the area was reconquered and a citadel was built immediately to the east. Fustat, El Askar, al-Qata, and al-Qahira eventually merged to become Cairo.[25]
Rome occupies a special place in the history of cities: it was the first to reach a population of one million. This, it likely did in the year 100 A. D. To the east, other cities were certainly on their way to a million people: Chang'an, in China, probably reached a million by the eighth century A. D.; Baghdad may have had a million inhabitants when the Mongols sacked it in 1258.[26] When a city approached this magnitude, how to accommodate growth became a preoccupying question. Since the challenge was progressive, not merely episodic, there was no final solution, only a series of adjustments, each of which sustained equilibrium for one moment more, until the next challenge. Six centuries after the Servian Walls laid down the outline of Rome's ambitions, the city had far outgrown its original limits. The new Aurelian wall went up in 274 A. D. to protect an area more than three times that of the original, but even then the total area of Rome, beyond and within the new walls, was nearly five thousand acres.[27] Of course, the character of these adjustments was determined by local needs. An outsider might be shocked by the solution of the moment, but the solution would not be his to judge. Universal standards tend to be misleading in such questions.
With the imperial metropolis fast becoming the megalopolis after 100 A. D., Rome is for many the embodiment of imperial decadence, seeing in the ultimate "fall" of Rome larger "lessons" for civilization. What is much clearer, however, is that urban problems that seem of more recent vintage can be found very early in Rome, beginning with the problem of overcrowding and the Roman solution for it. Although the common Roman dwelling in the countryside was a one-family house, congestion in the central districts became a real problem as early as the third century B. C. Four hundred years later, less than 20 percent of the whole population lived in their own houses; one estimate shows that of the million inhabitants, 821,000 lived in tenements as many as six precarious stories high, the notorious insula. One century after that, there were 46,602 insulae on record, but only 1,700 or so single-family houses.[28] Significantly, these insulae, death-defying as they were, would set the limit for vertical city building until the invention of the elevator 1,500 years later.
Any given settlement, accommodating demands of growth, will pass a point at which self-sustainment is no longer possible. This point might best signify a town's transition to city, for while towns or villages may provide for themselves, cities must depend upon surrounding, lesser towns.[29] Cities never exist in a vacuum but only as part of a wider network of settlement. Cities have always grown outward, and even the earliest cities give evidence that, whatever their original boundaries, there were always settlements to be found at the fringe or just beyond.[30] In this respect, at least, Rome was quite typical. When the Romans used the word suburbium, it described a trading area surrounding the city equal to about one day's travel in any direction.[31] And, of course, the traffic between city and countryside was just as important to one as to the other, but at a certain stage, a local exchange was insufficient. A city requiring more than 200,000 tons of grain a year to feed itself, as Rome did, is too large to be sustained by any area less than imperial in scope. Just as clearly, the exchange was hardly equal. At some point, the megalopolis became parasitopolis, drawing more from its sustaining environment than it returned.
How, why, and when this early experience of urban gigantism began to decline has been a matter of argument since the event. What is not subject to dispute, however, is that beginning in the middle of the fourth century A. D., that decline did begin to tell upon Rome. By the ninth century, the city of a million had declined to a population of only 17,000 residents. Thereafter, its rate of growth lagged far behind that of other, newer cities. By the eighteenth century, Rome still had only about 50,000 inhabitants. For 1,600 years, no city in the west would equal Rome at its ancient best.[32]
Questions of Scale
When Rome was largest, global population growth was, of course, neither steady nor uniformly distributed. Some 64 percent of the world's people could then be found in Asia. Standing then at about 300 million people, surges in growth in one locale were offset by disease, famine, and other hardships elsewhere.[33] Over the course of sixteen centuries, disasters of truly monumental proportions recorded by history did not appreciably affect population growth over the longer term. In one four-year period during the fourteenth century, the famous Black Death epidemic, killed nearly one-fourth of Europe's entire population, and lesser but still horrendous epidemics were common well into the eighteenth century. Wars were never so effective at taking lives as disease, but the Thirty Years' War in the first half of the seventeenth century was shockingly bloodthirsty even by the standards of the age. Estimates are that upwards of 20 percent of Germany's population was consumed by the war. However, none of these demographic disasters was sufficiently powerful to reverse population growth. Between 1100 and 1500, the number of towns in Europe alone doubled, usually in association with the rise of centralized, royal power.[34] In any case, one generation's growth was more than sufficient to fill in the losses from war and plague. By 1750, the world's population had doubled after 1,600 years: it stood at 600 million.[35] But this was a truly historic moment when a population surge of unprecedented magnitude was about to begin.[36] Little more than half a century later, in 1804, the world's population reached its first billion.
London inaugurated the era of the megalopolis, becoming in 1801 the first western city since Rome to reach a population of one million. Then, only fifty years later, London added a second million. One century after London first broke Rome's old record, eleven such cities had grown up: Paris, Berlin, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Vienna, Tokyo, and Calcutta.[37] Today, depending on whether one counts immediate or surrounding administrative divisions, there are probably more than two hundred cities in the world whose population easily exceeds one million citizens.[38]
Sir Peter Hall, the leading urbanologist and planner, believes it was not until after 1800 that cities "became big enough and complex enough to present real problems of urban organization."[39] When a city outruns its capacity to provide for itself, it has also attained a new stage of complexity. This is the point at which questions such as the competition between population and space take on a different complexion altogether. The point of complexity is a qualitative, not a quantitative point, not simply the difference between one fire station and several fire stations—to take a mundane example. Several fire stations raise the question of equitable placement, or appropriate placement—which? The frequency of fires in a given urban area could just as easily be considered a social as well as a practical observation. One fire station requires only a volunteer company. With several fire stations, one begins to think about a permanent organization, with all the calculations and other details of management that would entail. Suddenly, a simple matter is elevated to a public matter. Reaching a point of complexity means not merely that there are more moving parts but that the moving parts move differently.[40]
A city's outer limits, for instance, had long been defined by how far a worker could commute on foot for one hour from the city's central districts, where most day work was to be found.[41] But when a city's growth made this impracticable, the alternatives were less and less conducive to civic—and also to public—health. The density of a city's core population would rise to alarming levels—alarming, especially, to those who saw in crowded cities every dangerous habit and sentiment ever cultivated by man since the Fall. Cities had always made an attractive stage for moralizing, but the cities of the Victorian age gave self-appointed promoters of right conduct more ammunition than they could have ever wanted.[42] One contemporary critic of urban life helpfully satired genteel attitudes toward cities and those who mostly populated them, attitudes that seem to have changed little since he isolated them in 1899. The given wisdom of the time consisted of six indictments: those born in the city dominate the poorest parts of the city; city-born make up most of the lower social classes; city-born make up a disproportionately large percentage of "degenerates, criminals, lunatics, and suicides”; cities in general have a low "rate of natural increase" and a high rate of "deficient" births; and therefore, the "city-class" is "incapable of self perpetuation"; notwithstanding all this, there are just as many country-born as city-born in a given city, meaning, of course, that the better half is oppressed by the worst half of a city's population.[43]
No nineteenth-century cities were better demonstrations of the complexities of scale than London and Paris. Neither city could effectively absorb its rapid growth. Workers still had to live close to their work. The destitute and the poorest workers lived on top of one another in tenements that would have fitted perfectly in ancient Rome. London's 1851 census showed 2.8 million people living within 116 square miles. Within the concentrated slum areas of central London, whole families existed in rooms of eighty square feet. As might be expected in an area that produced 20,000 tons of horse manure each year, London had no effective municipal or sewer system, and so disease was rampant. Between 1831 and 1841, death rates in London actually rose by 50 percent. Life expectancy in ancient Rome had been reckoned at thirty-five years of age; in London in 1841, life expectancy overall was thirty-seven years of age, and lower still in slum areas.[44] Complexity and progress do not always go hand in hand.
Londoners visiting Paris in the midnineteenth century gasped, however, at what they considered uninhabitable congestion. During Baron Haussman's famous reconstruction of Paris at midcentury, the city was increasing its population from 1.3 million in 1850 to almost 2 million by 1870, reaching densities of 1,000 people per hundred acres in the central arondissements. Of course, the newest arrivals, always the poorest, were blamed. They were miserable by an act of will. Disease, crime, poverty, gang warfare, spasms of insurrectionary and near-insurrectionary violence: all this was in the nature of what one veteran Parisian called "the new barbarians."[45] None of this would have been unfamiliar to a nineteenth-century New Yorker, except that toward the end of the century, the poor in that city were the new immigrants who crowded onto the Lower East Side at a density of 260,000 per square mile (for a few blocks here, density ran as high as 1,700 per acre).[46]
Very likely, people have struggled to get out of cities as long as they have struggled to get in them. So the interaction between the city and its periphery would seem to be a straightforward one in which pressures on the city proper are relieved by its suburbs. But the demographic explosion after 1800 posed unprecedented burdens on the cities, and the way cities responded was by no means uniform.
Little could be done—was done—by any of these overburdened cities until a wholly new factor was introduced into the city environment. Long-standing ratios of urban time and space were to be turned on their head by the advent of public transportation systems. But the effects had to be within everyone's grasp, not merely that of the privileged classes, who in any case had never been constrained by the old systems. London began its first steps toward mass transportation in the 1840s and had a working system by 1863—the world's first.[47] But despite the innovation of "workmen's trains," which ran cheapest, earliest, and latest each day, a full generation would pass before day workers could afford to live very far from their work. The suburbs in England and America (and those who built them) profited by their access to these systems to become bastions of middle glass gentility, and they have so remained. Elsewhere, cities related to their suburbs quite differently. The continental elites, as a rule, refused to be tempted out of their cities. Once Paris was "renewed" by Baron Haussmann's reforms, rents in central Paris ran so high that workers were forced to abandon their slums for dense shantytowns at the edge of the city's limits. In Vienna, the creation of an industrial belt beyond the new Ringstrasse served the same purpose, if more humanely, of leaving the central city to the fashionable classes. Before long, more than thirty working class districts attached themselves to the industrial belt.[48]
The old ratios of urban time and space were to be redrawn on another plane as well: the vertical. The builder's art had not really advanced upward since antiquity. Real physical limits kept buildings below seven or eight stories at most; five stories was everywhere typical, from ancient Rome to modern Paris and London and New York.[49] City skylines were flat, punctuated if at all by spires, minarets, victory monuments, or some ornamental structure not encumbered by habitual, practical use. Just as a city's outer limits had been set by how far a worker was likely to commute by foot, a similar limit seems to have influenced building heights: why build tall buildings anyway if people would not climb that far? Compounded with this social preference, the real risk of collapse or fire made tall buildings both unprofitable and undesirable. Thus, two changes were required, with progress in the one depending materially upon progress in the other. From the middle of the nineteenth century onward, and in America at first, the art of taller buildings and the art of the elevator advanced symbiotically. By 1900, the century of the skyscraper had arrived.[50]
For quite some time, all cities had been forced to apply themselves chiefly to sustaining urban mobility.[51] Reforms in public transportation during the nineteenth century had enabled the urban machine to run at a higher speed, volume, and distance. Momentous as these developments were, what followed worked new differences in how urbanites interacted with their world. The immediate agent of this change was the automobile, and the city that embraced this change most enthusiastically—and successfully—was Los Angeles. Municipal boosters in L. A. liked to depict their city as poised on the threshold of the future. By creating "the first mass motorized city on the planet," L. A. lived up to its billing.[52]
Los Angeles enjoyed several advantages that escaped older, eastern cities, not least of which was that it was small and relatively underdeveloped when the automobile made its debut. Like other rising American cities, L. A. had invested in public transportation; interurban rail lines connected several smaller communities with L. A.'s central business district. By the 1920s, all suburban roads led to L. A. in a radial network reaching as far out as thirty miles. And since developers would not risk building houses more than four blocks from a streetcar line, these lines were punctuated by bubbles of development and an occasional smaller community. In other words, Los Angeles was already a polycentric urban area ready-made for the automobile age.[53]
Aristotle's ancient dictum on cities was about to be revised: people collected in cities, not so much to be together as to make the better life that being together had made possible. Once cars enabled one to make a good life without contributing to urban congestion, Los Angelenos had a new choice to make: how far to live from one's place of work. Freedom of movement expanded greatly when one was not bound by the limited patterns and schedules of public transport systems. In effect, the automobile made it possible to construct one's own city, without reference to the city's organization.[54] If one desired, one could make a different city every day. Traditional points of reference, old calculations of time and space, no longer counted. Even before World War II, downtown L. A. began to decline; growth followed the suburbs. The rest of the United States seems to have followed L. A., as no doubt its early boosters would have wished: by 1990, more of the population of the United States was found in suburbs than in urban and rural areas combined.[55]
In light of this, it is interesting that suburbs and the way of life they produce attract little serious attention except by land developers and urban specialists. For most Americans, suburbs are so amorphous as to suggest no identifying features at all: political travel writer Robert Kaplan sees only a future marked by "vast suburban blotches separated by empty space."[56] However, it may be useful to think of them more concretely. First, suburbs are not cities themselves, but without cities there would be no suburbs. Today, the world over, cities have seen themselves surrounded by suburbs, whose combined population far outnumbers that of the city proper. The city of Rio de Janiero reported a population of 5.4 million in its most recent census, but the entire metropolitan region counted nearly as much again, 10.3 million people in all, distributed in fourteen different municipalities. Nevertheless, each suburb draws its economic and material and perhaps even spiritual sustenance from the metropolis—not from each other. Second, suburbs are smaller entities than their metropolis; not one of Rio's suburbs begins to approach Rio itself.[57] Third, because suburbs are smaller, they are also simpler, less complex. The complexity factor works in reverse here: there are fewer moving parts and the whole machine performs fewer operations. Finally, suburbs tend toward homogeneity, a certain kind of sameness with cohesive social properties that could be based on ethnicity or religion or economics or even ideology. Suburbs, simply, make it possible for urban populations to redivide and rearrange themselves. In this respect, Potomac, Maryland, Burbank, California, Westport, Connecticut, and Schaumberg, Illinois, are no different from Tokyo's Tama New City, Mexico City's Pedregal, Rio de Janiero's Neves, or Singapore's Johor. Each of these suburbs exists only in reference to the larger city. That reference is the suburb's raison d'etre.
Ten Cities and a Future
In October 1999, the world's population passed six billion. Only a dozen years had been required to add this latest billion, and only thirteen years before that, in 1974, the fourth billion was added. Compared to the great demographic surge beginning in 1750, the acceleration experienced by the world after 1950 was more powerful by several orders of magnitude. If, geologically speaking, 1750 registered 7.0 on the Richter Scale, 1950 was off the scale. By 1965, the growth rate of the global population was 2 percent per year. Five years later, the growth rate began to decline, so that today its stands at 1.31 percent per year, meaning that 1999 will record a global net gain in population amounting to 78 million people. Seen another way, the world's population has roughly doubled in less than forty years, a truly singular record in the history of population growth.
These figures, taken from a recent report by the United Nations are derived from the best available data and can be regarded as authoritative descriptions of recent population trends. These data are also taken as the basis for calculations of future trends—quite a different proposition altogether. Of this year's new additions, for instance, it is estimated that 95 percent will live in less-developed regions, an estimate that seems as tenable as one could expect. In the same way, the UN's report estimates future growth rates and population distribution patterns as much as fifty years hence. By these estimates, the global population will approach 9 billion by the year 2054. Sixty percent of these people will reside in Asia, and Africa's present share of the total will have doubled to 20 percent by then. Europe, on the other hand, will contribute only 7 percent of the grand total, down to only one-third of its share during the heady days at the beginning of the twentieth century. Further, 46 percent of the world population is now urbanized, and by 2006, half of the world's people will live in cities. It is easy to jump to the conclusion, of course, that whatever the global future looks like will be determined mostly in Asia and Africa, and mostly in cities besides.[58]
These quantitative recitations can be impressive, seeming to convey unarguable facts. The possibility that all extrapolations should be regarded as educated guesses, hedged by technical nuance and sensible reservation by those who make them, is too often overlooked. In fact, the most populous regions of the world have not inevitably been the most powerful regions of the world. At the turn of the nineteenth century, while Asia was still being divided up by colonial powers, Asia's share of the global population was roughly the same as projections for the year 2054.[59] It also does not follow from these projections that cities are inherently unstable, that they are hotbeds of unrest, or that in some way they contain clues to the future of humanity in general.
The largest cities of the world defy generalized predictions of disaster. Some of these cities would be considered successful by any standard of measurement. Some would be considered spectacularly unsuccessful but for their unaccountable attraction to more and more inhabitants each year. Somehow, people find reasons to live in these cities too. As a group, however, these cities lend credence to the urbanographer's rule that, however good or bad, cities tend to persist.
The ten largest cities of the world, by the UN's latest count, contain between them more than 162 million people and rank this way, their population given in millions:
Tokyo 28.8
Mexico City 17.8
Sao Paulo 17.5
Bombay (Mumbai) 17.4
New York 16.5
Shanghai 14.0
Los Angeles 13.0
Lagos 12.8
Calcutta 12.7
