What did cities look like 400 years ago?

[brickell]

You guys know more about this than me, but weren't cities pretty much functionally the same up until to the industrial revolution. Wouldn't museum cities like Venice, Toledo (Spain), Dubrovnik (Croatia) be recognizable to the 400 year old traveler?

[muppet]

Many, many cities were periodically destroyed by fire and war every century, the ones that survive intact today are truly lucky.

[bnk]

Originally Posted by RobertWalpole

London -- just before the Great Fire of 1666.


http://libwiki.mcmaster.ca/geog3ur3/...donBridge.jpeg

Now you see this is what I am talking about. London around circa 1590-1666. That shit is kool.

[bnk]

Originally Posted by muppet

Many, many cities were periodically destroyed by fire and war every century, the ones that survive intact today are truly lucky.

BS those that survive are not lucky at all. It is all location.

Is London lucky to survive intact today because they or are lucky? Did Chicago die in the great fire in the past cent............

Luck has little to do with modern sucess stories. London on the Themes, Chicago on the Lake, NYC on the Hudson has little to do with luck. All of these said alpha [+] global cities would have been rebuilt upon their base regardless of their past difficulties.

[Metranite]

Originally Posted by dave8721

A typical scene from Miami circa 1600:

Yeah, except the woman would be sunbathing on a pristine beach while the man is carving up a freshly caught Manatee for dinner and the children would be building sandhuts.

Edit: Hurricanes wouldn't have been deadly at all. Just run inland a few miles and hide in a bush.

[hauntedheadnc]

Originally Posted by bnk

BS those that survive are not lucky at all. It is all location.

Is London lucky to survive intact today because they or are lucky? Did Chicago die in the great fire in the past cent............

Luck has little to do with modern sucess stories. London on the Themes, Chicago on the Lake, NYC on the Hudson has little to do with luck. All of these said alpha [+] global cities would have been rebuilt upon their base regardless of their past difficulties.

I believe that what he meant was that the cities whose historic cores survive intact are lucky. Most old cities have had war or fire sweeping through so often that most of their old building stock is gone. Look at Tokyo -- an alpha global city if there ever was one -- which has next to no historic architecture left, considering that the city has been flattened by war, fire, and earthquakes on several occasions. Look at London, which lost vast numbers of old building to the Blitz, and which was almost entirely rebuilt after the fire of 1666.

Compare them to Venice which, as someone already pointed out, would likely be recognizable to someone from 400 years ago who saw what it looks like today.

[hudkina]

That's one thing I find funny about people who talk about the age difference between European and North American cities. London may have been founded nearly two thousand years ago, but the vast majority of the city has only been built in the last 250 years. Sure, you'll find plenty of architecture going as far back as the Roman era, but the truth is that cities like London and New York and Montreal aren't all that much "older" than each other on a relative scale. The idea that the London of the first century has any similarity to the London of today is as laughable as the idea that the New York of the 17th century is anything like the New York of today.

New York hit its stride in the 1830's and 40's when the Erie Canal rendered it the United States' primary port. While there is plenty of architectural highlights from the preceding centuries, the vast majority of what is standing today was developed after that point. The same is true for London about 100 years earlier. London hit its stried in the mid-18th century during the expansion of the British Empire. Like New York, you'll find plenty of architecture from the preceding centuries, but the vast majority of London was developed after that period.

[ardecila]

Originally Posted by brickell

You guys know more about this than me, but weren't cities pretty much functionally the same up until to the industrial revolution. Wouldn't museum cities like Venice, Toledo (Spain), Dubrovnik (Croatia) be recognizable to the 400 year old traveler?

Not sure about that. The concept of the walled city, and the need for defense, dictated a lot of the urban patterns in Europe and the Middle East for centuries. But walls are expensive to build and the area within can only be so dense.

People started to settle outside the walls, exchanging safety for space. Luckily for them, the whole need for walls started to fade away after military technology rendered them obsolete. All this happened before the Industrial Revolution, which of course re-made cities to accommodate the large land areas required by factories, warehouses, canals, and railroads.

Venice had no room to expand, so it was locked in stasis. All of its growth had to occur on the mainland, so there was little incentive for the original city to change. I can't speak for Toledo or Dubrovnik - perhaps they didn't have the geographical advantages or natural resources that pushed other cities to industrialize? If so, then both cities probably endured centuries of crushing poverty until the modern rise of historic preservation and tourism revived their economies.

[Jeeper]

Actual photo of Kigali, circa 1602


source

Ok so maybe not, but this is how it looked.

Actually Kigali did not exist. The Rwandan capital is actually an agglomeration of villages that grew into each other. Each hill was it's own village, and their names still exist today as the names of the neighborhood, like Nymirambo, Kacyiru, Gasabo, Kiyovu, Nyarutarama, and on and on. Other neighborhoods are named after what the land they stand on used to be used for. For example, Kicukiro translates from ancient Ikinyarwanda to "Where bodies are burned", and Nyabugogo, which is in a river valley where people bathe and wash their clothes, means "where the water is bad".

[huggkruka]

Someone is making a 3D model of Malmö, Sweden as it looked in 1692:

http://www.malmo1692.se/Eng/index.htm

[Tolbert]

Cologne:


Hamburg:


Berlin:


Munich:



If you want more, just search for "Merian" maps and pictures on Wikimedia...

[RobertWalpole]

Originally Posted by hudkina

That's one thing I find funny about people who talk about the age difference between European and North American cities. London may have been founded nearly two thousand years ago, but the vast majority of the city has only been built in the last 250 years. Sure, you'll find plenty of architecture going as far back as the Roman era, but the truth is that cities like London and New York and Montreal aren't all that much "older" than each other on a relative scale. The idea that the London of the first century has any similarity to the London of today is as laughable as the idea that the New York of the 17th century is anything like the New York of today.

New York hit its stride in the 1830's and 40's when the Erie Canal rendered it the United States' primary port. While there is plenty of architectural highlights from the preceding centuries, the vast majority of what is standing today was developed after that point. The same is true for London about 100 years earlier. London hit its stried in the mid-18th century during the expansion of the British Empire. Like New York, you'll find plenty of architecture from the preceding centuries, but the vast majority of London was developed after that period.

That's true. The overwhelming majority of architecture seen in London today is from the 19th and early 20th Centuries. There is a good deal from the 18th Century. However, due to the Great Fire, there are very few buildings that precede the 17th Century. There are NO Roman buildings. Only portions of a Roman wall exist.

[muppet]

Originally Posted by bnk

BS those that survive are not lucky at all. It is all location.

Is London lucky to survive intact today because they or are lucky? Did Chicago die in the great fire in the past cent............

Luck has little to do with modern sucess stories. London on the Themes, Chicago on the Lake, NYC on the Hudson has little to do with luck. All of these said alpha [+] global cities would have been rebuilt upon their base regardless of their past difficulties.

What are you talking about? Old London was destroyed in 1666 (4/5 of the entire city burned to the ground), Restoration London was wiped out by Victorian 'slum clearances', and the remaining parts of the city that survived either onslaught were bombed flat in the Blitz - the 1/3 of the city that was destroyed during the war also included the oldest heart. Then of course there was the postwar developers ... All in all London through the millennia has been destroyed or heavily damaged about 6x. That's pretty normal for an old city.

Tokyo, Berlin, Warsaw, Moscow, Belgrade, Beijing, Chongqing, Nanjing, Seoul, Lisbon, Archangel'sk, Minsk, Baghdad, even young cities such as Manila and San Francisco all destroyed by war, fire, developers etc. in the last few centuries alone.

[MolsonExport]

^I totally agree, but you forgot NYC and Robert Moses.

[brickell]

Originally Posted by ardecila

Not sure about that. The concept of the walled city, and the need for defense, dictated a lot of the urban patterns in Europe and the Middle East for centuries. But walls are expensive to build and the area within can only be so dense.

I realized this after thinking about on the way home. Military technology and the rise of the nation state were big factors.

Anything else?

[kool maudit]

Originally Posted by hudkina

That's one thing I find funny about people who talk about the age difference between European and North American cities. London may have been founded nearly two thousand years ago, but the vast majority of the city has only been built in the last 250 years. Sure, you'll find plenty of architecture going as far back as the Roman era, but the truth is that cities like London and New York and Montreal aren't all that much "older" than each other on a relative scale.

that's a pretty materialistic view. the long history of a place like london manifests itself in a million subtle ways. you don't need actual streets of actual buildings from AD 800 or whatever. it's a shared memory -- what we used to call a culture.

[Bedhead]

I think the street layout of a city is important in shaping a sense of its age.

Cities with a pre-industrial street layout in their core feel more arcane than cities that were built with wide, healthy nineteenth century boulevards, and they in turn feel different to cities that were built for cars, with lots of 4-6 lane roads and large interchanges.

A city like London is a collection of pre-industrial cities and towns that have grown together, so most neighbourhoods in inner London, at least, are near to a centre that has narrow, twisting streets. I think that's what makes it feel much older than the average age of its building stock.

[rockyi]

Very interesting reading in this thread.

[LanvinHomme]

Mexico City before the Spanish arrived


Mexico City in 1628 after the Spanish settled and starting building Catholic Churches


When I was in elementary school and looked at these maps in the history books I always wondered what the hell had happened to all that water!

[Centropolis]

Mexico City is one of the most bizarre, exotic places in the world to me.