The Chinese character for city is the same as wall. All city building in ancient China began with construction of a
defensive wall, usually made with rammed earth.
Construction of a wall against uncivilized hordes (which later became Great)
began as early as 221 BCE, but only between 1567 and 1570 was it reinforced and faced
with bricks.
Human alliances developed into
communities, with a mission to defend against the lawlessness of the wild
lands. Utopian visions categorize nature
as a place of beauty and fecundity, overlooking the practical matter of hazards
found in the wild. Communities found it
difficult to compete for food and safety without modifying the untamed lands,
clearing the forests, leveling lands for terraces to plant and build, and
altering natural watercourses to irrigate and drain grounds for their own
purposes. For centuries, humans built
city walls to exclude beasts and safeguard property.
We made enclosures to control what
we wrested from nature, and to defy our enemies access to the wealth we kept close:
home, garden, and store-room. In cities,
this need was magnified to keep the entire population safe, and distinguish the
people who belong from the outsiders. Only within
city walls could places of civil discourse and representation exist, for trade
and commerce with other citizens.
In the fields and forests beyond
the walls, freed from the regimentation of the ordered city, were places of
assembly for other matters: religion, music, dance, sacrifice, and
feasting. Beyond the walls of ancient
cities lay a permanent margin of agriculture necessary for supplying food to
the city, visited daily by those who harvested the crops and orchards. When trouble came, the safety of the citadel
was never far away.
In The Laws, Plato confronts
the concept of city walls as the primary means of achieving safety. “How ridiculous of us to be sending out our
young men annually into the country to dig and to trench, and to keep off the
enemy by fortifications, under the idea that they are not to be allowed to set
foot in our territory, and then, that we should surround ourselves with a wall,
which, in the first place, is by no means conducive to the health of cities,
and is also apt to produce a certain effeminacy in the minds of the
inhabitants, inviting men to run thither instead of repelling their enemies,
and leading them to imagine that their safety is due not to their keeping guard
day and night, but that when they are protected by walls and gates, then they
may sleep in safety; as if they were not meant to labour, and did not know that
true repose comes from labour, and that disgraceful indolence and a careless
temper of mind is only the renewal of trouble.”[i]
Walls are an expedient answer to
the failure of diplomacy. In Berlin, Belfast, and Bethlehem, walls filled
the gaps within discourse and cooperation.
These are not walls that enclose people within a space for protection
from without; these are walls that divide a populace in two, cleaving the
city. This creates a vacuum at the borderline,
with definite and consequential barriers to infrastructure, circulation, and
visibility. Walls form obstacles to
attraction and growth, shaping certain areas as geographic “backwaters” within
the city and creating uninhabited places where troubles mount and dead ends
strike the options from our journeys.
At first, barbed wire fencing
established the border in Berlin, but East Germans found ways through the
“Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart.”
Concrete wall segments were fabricated, 3-1/2’ wide by 12’ high, and
incorporated into the field of conflict, sometimes linking hastily abandoned
buildings. But as the Berlin Wall was
fortified, East German authorities evacuated apartments adjacent to the wall; other
buildings had their windows boarded and blocked. Rubble filled the no man’s land between the
Berlin Wall and the hinterland (east) wall.
Continuous sewer pipes beneath the wall were used as escape tunnels,
until they too were interrupted with steel grates. The West Berlin subway system abandoned transit
stops on the East Berlin side of the wall,
resulting in “ghost platforms.” But the
most reductive change was the clearing of “death strips” 20 meters wide or
more. All that was left were streets for
border patrols, land mines, and watchtowers; historic apartments and homes,
some 300 years old, were destroyed, along with vegetation and trees. What was left was sand, intended to clearly
mark the passage of any wayward citizen attempting escape. The wall stood from 1961 to 1989, the visible symbol of twenty-eight years of division.
<image: watchtowers at walls, Berlin above, Bethlehem
below>
Re-unification did not happen
overnight, or without compromise. “To
commemorate the origin of Potsdamer Platz, the Senate called upon the
architects to reestablish the destroyed Baroque 19th century ground
plan of the area, which had been characterized by a sequence of streets and
public squares and a building height limit of thirtyfive meters. As to the
protected Hotel Esplanade and Weinhaus
Huth, that bore memories of the "legendary" first third of the 20th
century, both buildings had to be restored and integrated into the new
projects…. All companies were requested to respect the line of the Berlin Wall,
that crossed all premises, in their development plans.”[ii] There remains a foundation pattern on
the ground with brass plaques and a change in material crossing many public
squares, the leitmotif of the joined city weaving across Berlin today. The empty landscape of conflict has not
completely filled in. Hundreds of watchtowers were demolished, but five of the hostile monuments are still extant
– enough to speak loudly of the fear and anger.
Enough to inspire the next generation, in Bethlehem.
Rather than blockades, walls at contested boundaries must be replaced by seams, re-convening their
importance as lines of exchange.
Bachelard writes, “Outside and inside are both intimate – they are
always ready to be reversed, to exchange their hostility.”[iii] Restoring the view from one “side” to the
other, re-establishing continuity of infrastructure between political divisions,
investing in fluid streets and public spaces, mixing activities and ages,
ethnic and religious populations, will assist the recovery of cities in
conflict. A wall will never broker peace.
Historically, city walls controlled
access in order to make money and demonstrate the sinecure of security, but
not necessarily to keep out undesirables.
They established privilege, but not isolation or even protection. The
articulated gatehouses, elevated walkways, and watchtowers were there to create
a demonstration of force, not the actual exercise of force. City walls promoted commerce, which is why
they were interrupted at every location that might provide income: ports,
markets, and inns.
With the development of modern
weapons and aerial assaults, city walls became useless for defense. At the same time, cities were expanding to
make way for their growing population, with wide boulevards for new markets and
more housing. The wall became an
obstacle not from the outside, but to growth from the inside. They had to come down in order to
re-establish trade beyond their borders, to extend their city’s control, and to
comfortably house their people.
It is futile to wall
away a city to make it safe. The danger
is from within – human weakness compromises the most secure citadel wall. Eventually, the world beyond the wall can no
longer be kept at bay; isolation is not
as useful as foreign policy. Graffiti on
the Berlin Wall read, “Irgendwann fallt
jede Mauer” (Eventually every wall falls).
Now, even the graffiti is gone.
[i]
Plato, The Laws, Book VI.
[ii]
The Politics of History and Memory at Berlin’s
“New Potsdamer Platz”
Sybille Frank, Technical
University Darmstadt.
Presented at 6th annual ICOMOS, Annapolis, Maryland,
February 24-26, 2003.
[iii]
Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 218
