Sennett on the development of the city

 The street 

We would expect a large trading city like medieval Paris to have well-made roads to move goods through the city. Along the banks of the Seine River they existed; from 1000 to 1200, these banks were lined with stone walls so that trade on the river could be moved more efficiently. But inland, the growth of the city did not create a system of roads easily accommodating transport. “Roads were in a poor state,” Le Goff notes; “there was a limited number of carts and waggons, which were expensive, and useful vehicles were absent’; even the lowly wheelbarrow did not appear on Parisian streets until the end of the Middle Ages. The Roman city, with its beautifully engineered roads bedded deep into the earth, was a construction miracle of the past. 

The messy form as well as sorry physical condition of the medieval street resulted from the very processes of growth. The roads of one commune had seldom been laid out to join those of a neighboring commune, since its boundaries were originally the end of a smaller, villagelike settlement turning inward. Nor were the bourgs laid out to connect to other bourgs. The chaotic shape of the streets also arose from the use the owners made of the land they controlled. 

Most pieces of land in a cité or bourg were leased, or the building rights on them sold, to individuals. These diverse builders had the right to construct as they saw fit on the land owned by a large instituion like the Crown or the Church; moreover, the various parts of a single building, on different floors or the same floor, might be owned and developed by different persons. “There was,” says the urbanist Jacques Heers, “a veritable colonization of building land within the city of in its immediate environs.” Rarely did the landholder attempt to influence the builder in terms of urban design; indeed, on a purely economic level only in exceptional cases could the King or Bishop seize a building or force its owner to sell to someone else. In Paris, King or Bishop invoked “eminent domain” mostly to add to a palace or a church. 

Only medieval cities which had been founded in Roman times were likely to have a street plan or an overall design, and the Roman grids had, save in a very few cities like Trier and Milan, been cracked by the growth process into disconnected bits and pieces. Neither King nor Bishop nor bourgeois had an image of how the city as a whole should look. “The cramped, fragmented nature of the public sphere reflected, in the very topography of the city, the weakness, lack of resources, and limited ambitions of the state,” claims one historian. Builders put up whatever they could get away with; neighbors fought each other’s constructions with lawsuits, and often more brutally with hired gangs of thugs who ripped down a neighbor’s work. From this aggression came the Parisian urban fabric, “mazes of twisting, tiny streets, impasses, and courts; squares were small, and there were few broad vistas or buildings set back from the street; traffic was always clogged.”° 

Medieval Cairo and medieval Paris formed a telling contrast, though to the modern eye they might have seemed equally jumbled. The Koran lays down precise instructions for the placement of doors and the spatial relationship of doors to windows. In medieval Cairo, land owned by a Muslim had to be built according to these instructions, which were enforced by charitable foundations in the city. Such buildings, moreover, had to relate in form to one another, had to be aware of one another; one could not, for instance, block a neighbor’s door. Religion decreed contextual architecture, though the context was not one of linear streets. The buildings of medieval Paris were under no such divine—or royal, or noble—command to take account of one another. Each was fenestrated and floored according the single owner’s will; it was common for builders to block access to other buildings with impunity. 

The space of the Parisian medieval street was no more and no less than the space which remained after buildings had been constructed. Before the great Renaissance palaces arose in the Marais, for instance, this swampy settlement on the Right Bank had streets which suddenly narrowed so that a single person could barely pass berween buildings that different owners had built out to the edge of the lot lines. The abbeys and the King’s quarter had more serviceable streets, since the owner was also the builder, though even in the episcopal district around Notre-Dame different orders pushed into the street according to their own desires, and to test the limits of their privileges. 

The street bore the imprint of aggressive assertion, then, it was the space left over after people asserted their rights and powers. The street was no garden, no coenobitic place created by common labor. If the street lacked those qualities of place, however, it did possess certain visual features which made it function well as an economic space. These features could be read on its walls. 

In the non-ceremonial and poorer districts of ancient Greece and Rome, the wall related to the street as a solid barrier. The medieval urban economy made the street wall permeable. In the Parisian district of leather workers on the Right Bank, for example, the windows of each shop displayed goods to people walking in the streets through an innovation in window architecture: the windows had wooden shutters that folded down to serve as counters. The first building with windows known to be designed in this fashion dates from the early 1100s. Using the walls in this way, the merchants focused on the display of their goods, to make people on the street aware a shop contained something worth looking at inside as well. The buyer walking the street looked to the walls, their surfaces now active economic zones. 

The medieval courtyard became tied in the same way to the economic activity of the street. The courtyard  Served as a showroom as well as a workroom its entrance gradually enlarged so that people passing by could see what was happening within. Even in very grand palaces in the Marais district as late as the 16th century the ground floor Courtyard was planned as a bee hive of shops producing and selling to the general public as well as provisioning the noble household above. 

The development of this porous economic street space encouraged a change in street time. The ancient city depended on daylight; trade in medieval Paris extended the hours of the street. People went into the streets to shop before or after they had finished their own labors; the dusk as well as dawn became hours of consumption, the bakery at dawn, for instance, and the butcher shop late at night, after the butcher had purchased, prepared, and roasted his meats during the day. The counter stayed down and the courtyard stayed unlocked as long as there were people in the street. 

These streets whose buildings arose from the aggressive assertion of rights, whose porous surfaces and volumes encouraged economic competition, were also famously violent. Modern experiences of urban street crime give us no way to imagine the viciousness which ruled the medieval street. But this medieval street violence was not also what we might logically deduce, a simple consequence of economics. 

Violence in the street was aimed far more frequently at persons rather than property. In 1405—06 (when the first reliable crime figures are available for Paris), 54 percent of the cases that came before the criminal courts of Paris concerned “passionate crimes,” while 6 percent arose from robberies; in the decade from 1411 to 1420, 76 percent of the cases were about impulsive violence against persons, 7 percent concerned thefts.’ One explanation for this lay in the nearly universal practice among merchants of hiring guards; indeed, the very wealthy maintained little private armies to protect their mansions. There were municipal police in Paris from 1160 onward, but their numbers were small, and their duties consisted mostly in guarding public officials when they travelled through the city. 

The crime statistics from the High and late Middle Ages are far too crude for us to know who was attacked, whether family and friends or strangers on the street. It is a plausible inference, from the existence of so many hired guards and soldiers among the affluent classes, that most of the violence practiced by poor people was directed at other poor people. We do know, however, one of the main causes of such attacks; it was drink. 

Drinking was linked to about 35 percent of the murders or grave violent attacks in the Touraine, largely a rural region of France. In Paris the correlation was even higher, for drinking occurred not only at home, where a drunk could go to sleep, but in the public cellars \ wine shops which lined the streets of the city.8 Groups of people got drunk together and then late at night erupted into the street, picking fights. 

The need to drink had a compelling origin: it came from the need for bodily heat. In this northern city, wine warmed people’s bodies in buildings that lacked effective heating; the fireplace set against a reflecting wall, with a flue leading to an external chimney, made its appearance only in the fifteenth century. Prior to this, open braziers or fires built directly on the floor provided a building’s heat, and the smoke of these fires kept people from settling too close. Moreover, the heat was quickly dissipated, as few ordinary urban buildings had windows sheathed with glass. Wine served also as a narcotic that dulled pain. Like heroin or cocaine in modern cities, fortified wine created a drug culture in the Middle Ages, particularly in the public cellars and wine shops. 

To be sure, street violence could take a political turn, in Paris as jn other medieval cities. “Urban revolts were born, were propagated, and were aggravated in the street.”” These revolts had impersonal causes, such as corrupt officials charged with distributing grain. But jn Paris the constables of both King and Bishop suppressed these uprisings quickly; most lasted for only a few hours, at most a few days. The usual physical violence people experienced on the street was unpredictable—an unprovoked knife thrust, a fist in one’s stomach by a man who lurched by, blind drunk. We need to imagine, then, a street marked by different but discontinuous forms of aggression: purposeful economic competition and impulsive non-economic violence. 

Verbal violence did play an important role in economic competition, if it rarely translated into violent action. People came to houses to threaten, without restraint and in the most gory detail, the person or the families of debtors. Some historians believe the very violence of this language served as a kind of emotional discharge, permitting competitors to act aggressively without in fact coming to blows. Be that as it may, the political and ecclesiastical powers ruling the city made little effort to punish sellers who threatened to punch or stab buyers who resisted concluding a sale, or who harassed other sellers in the street. 

The low levels of property crime signalled that an effective but peculiar order reigned in urban space. It might have been invisible to the contemporary resident of Cairo, whose trading followed the overt dictates of religion. Beyond injunctions against usury and stealing, neither the Old nor the New Testament offered much guidance about how to behave economically. And perhaps this was why John of Salisbury also could not make sense of economic behavior. Competition was not choleric, in the sense the Ars medica described choler, the violent choler of the fighting soldier. It bore little resemblance to the sanguine civic command of the ruler, none to the phlegmatic considerations of the scholar. Competition certainly was not melancholic, nor nurturing. Just who was this economic creature became a little more evident in the organization of fairs and markets, spaces subject to more overt civic control than the streets.