Room Three: Global Highways
Paris, France
The photographs at left date to 1862, taken by Charles Marville to document the “renovation of Paris” undertaken by Georges-Eugéne Haussmann and Napoleon III between 1853 and 1870.
Haussmann's projects in nineteenth century Paris qualify as the prototypical example of a government displacing poor and/or working-class residents in favor of infrastructure designed for middle- and upper-class residents. Indeed, a sizable body of historical work argues that the twentieth century urban renewal in the United States found its inspiration in “Haussmann’s bulldozer.”[1] In nineteenth century Paris, as in twentieth century New Orleans, Rio de Janeiro, and Johannesburg new forms of transportation presaged changes in the cityscape. These changes remade ancien regime Paris into a modern city but the benefits of the transformation accrued mostly to the middle- and upper-classes and not at all to the poor and working-class. Whereas the new boulevards provided smooth and scenic transportation for the middle-class and the wealthy, the “demolition of old houses in the central and western quarters...expelled the poor and concentrated them in the neglected eastern quarters and suburbs.”[2] With no plans for how to accommodate displaced residents, Paris faced a major housing shortage that lasted well into the 1860s.[3]
Haussmann targeted working class neighborhoods La Chapelle and the Goutte d’Or as sites for not just new roadways but also paths for nationally-linked railways and local streetcar lines. Whereas planners in New Orleans and Rio de Janeiro pointed to the mobility revolution wrought by widespread automobile use, Haussmann used the addition of two major railway stations in the north and east of the city during the 1840s to justify his plans to “[rebuild] the center of the capital south of the rail stations…in grandiose fashion, with wide boulevards connecting the rail stations with spectacular icons of bourgeois urbanism such as the Opéra Garnier and the Place de la République.”[4] In fact, some residents who had been displaced by railroad construction during the 1840s had settled in La Chapelle only to be forced out again when Haussmann decreed the widening of the Boulevard de la Chapelle.[5] Ironically, Pinkney argues that the urban renovations were a boon to workers, especially in the building trades. From economic data suggesting improved employment conditions to popular caricatures of workers lamenting the dismissal of Hausmann in 1870, Pinkney insists that workers had more cause to acquiesce in their own displacement than to oppose it.
[1] Brahinsky, “Race and the City,” 149; Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity; Kostof, “His majesty the pick: the aesthetics of demolition” in Celik, Z., Favro, D. G. and Ingersoll, R.
(eds) Streets: critical perspectives on public space (Berkeley: University of California Press), 9–22.
[2] David H. Pinkney, Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), 8.
[3] Pinkney, Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris, 6, 8, 165, and 173.
[4] Newman, Landscapes of Discontent, 12-13.
[5] Pinkney, Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris, 165-166.
Avenida Presidente Vargas, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
The Cidade Nova neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro gave birth to the sounds of samba and the modern Carnival tradition. Throughout this history, parallels to Claiborne Avenue abound. The relationships between the jazz and rhythm-n-blues musical traditions of the Claiborne Avenue neighborhoods and Carnival traditions in New Orleans have much in common with the samba traditions and Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. Both cities have significant populations of African descended peoples whose cultural practices have come to symbolize the cities themselves and who were given little opportunity to express their opinions on the impending infrastructure projects. The consequent appearance of community acquiescence/non-resistance to the highway projects in both cities masked the negative impact on musical and Carnival traditions, the dispersal of cohesive social groups and cultural organizations, and loss of architectural landmarks where commercial life flourished.
In Rio de Janeiro, Carnival and samba have shaped the growth and development of the city; in New Orleans, the same is true of Carnival and jazz. Today, samba and Carnival are virtually synonymous in the Brazilian imagination. Jazz and Mardi Gras celebrations occupy a similar space in the construction of the New Orleans imaginary in the United States. Samba arrived in Brazil with Angolans enslaved by Portuguese colonists during the 1700s but the music did not become inextricable from Brazilian celebrations of Carnival until the early 1900s. The music fermented in neighborhoods around the Praça Onze, the public square through which Getulio Vargas chose to carve the avenue bearing his name. When the song “Pelo telefone” [“On the telephone”], performed by Donga, an Afro-Brazilian musician, achieved national popularity, it inspired the establishment of “samba schools.” These schools made Carnival a competitive endeavor with samba songs and dance as the chosen equipment and the Praça Onze served as the primary site of competition.[1]
The Avenida Presidente Vargas disrupted the community activities of the Cidade Nova neighborhood and the Praça Onze. The neighborhood arose originally as a “new city” to house the Portuguese imperial administration upon its move from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro in 1808. While the imperial court did not last, the neighborhood quickly became a favored site for workers servicing nearby industry and the rapidly expanding urban core. The transformation of the Cidade Nova area from a rural swamp into the modern manifestation of Brazilian national identity began during the 1850s. Then, a handful of buildings dotted the banks of the newly dug Mangue Canal, also known as the Canal de l’Atterrado for the street it paralleled. At the start of the twentieth century, during the mayoral the administration of Pereira Passos (1902-1906), the federal government funded the renovation of the Avenida do Mangue and the Praça Onze de Junho.[2] The infrastructure improvements of the Passos era failed to solve the problem of stagnation in the Mangue Canal, lending to a growing image of the area as unhealthy and undesirable. A red-light district arose in the Cidade Nova around the same time, cementing the image of the neighborhood as a haven for the lower classes.[3] The relationship between the rise of samba and the entrenchment of prostitution in the Cidade Nova echoes the near-contemporary rise in popularity of jazz and its close association with the New Orleans red-light district.[4] The French urban planner Alfred Agache wrote a master plan for Rio de Janeiro, published in 1930. Agache, the functional Brazilian equivalent to the American Robert Moses, implemented his plans during the presidency of Getúlio Vargas himself. While Claiborne Avenue honored the memory of the long-dead first American governor of Louisiana Territory W.C.C. Claiborne, the remaking of the Mangue-Atterrado thoroughfare into the Avenida Presidente Vargas, therefore, proceeded under the hand of its namesake.
Prior to the construction of the Avenida Presidente Vargas during the 1930s-1940s, the Cidade Nova neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro was home to poor and middle-class Afro-Brazilian and Jewish communities. Conceived as an extension of the Avenida Mangue, the Avenida Presidente Vargas dramatically reshaped the neighborhood and the built environment of the Cidade Nova.[5] The Praça Onze de Junho square served as a center of community life in the Cidade Nova, hosting samba competitions during Carnival. Lines of towering palm trees along Canal do Mangue provided a promenade to residents of Pequena África [Little Africa] as Cidade Nova was known.[6] Historian Bruno Carvalho’s account of urban development in Rio de Janeiro asks, “What does it mean when a city’s most oppressed inhabitants are also its most visible? And how do those exploited under a slave-based system leave a deep and irrevocable imprint on dominant cultural practices?” Carvalho argues that the spatial confinement of the poor in Rio de Janeiro led directly to the rise of samba in popularity not just among the descendants of the enslaved but also among twentieth-century immigrants and others who had been born and raised in the city.[7] In Rio de Janeiro as in New Orleans, the dominant groups of society exploited the economic and cultural labor of the “oppressed inhabitants” and made the products of their labor representative of the nation or city itself.
[1] Carvalho, Porous City, ch. 5; Marc A. Hertzman, Making Samba: A New History of Race and Music in Brazil.
[2] “Avenida Presidente Vargas,” in The Rio de Janeiro Reader: History, Culture, Politics, edited by Daryle Williams, Amy Chazkel, and Paulo Knauss de Mendonça (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 208.
[3] Carvalho, Porous City, 77.
[4] Al Rose, Storyville; Alecia P. Long, Great Southern Babylon.
[5] “Avenida Presidente Vargas,” in The Rio de Janeiro Reader: History, Culture, Politics, edited by Daryle Williams, Amy Chazkel, and Paulo Knauss de Mendonça (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 208.
[6] “A Fond Farewell to Praça Onze,” in The Rio de Janeiro Reader: History, Culture, Politics, edited by Daryle Williams, Amy Chazkel, and Paulo Knauss de Mendonça (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 205.
[7] Bruno Carvalho, Porous City: A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), xiii.
Sophiatown, Johannesburg, South Africa
The Sophiatown neighborhood of Johannesburg, South Africa has a similar historical narrative to the neighborhoods around Claiborne Avenue and the Avenida Presidente Vargas. As Sophiatown has been segregated as a matter of official policy since its inception, the residents of the neighborhood have fought difficult battles against displacement and removal throughout the twentieth century. Sophiatown arose originally as a middle-class suburb fully integrated into the expanding city of Johannesburg. The official imposition of apartheid policy in 1948 only worsened the situation. When the government officially segregated Johannesburg according to race, they initially designated Sophiatown a black enclave but eventually demolished the area altogether. Since the dismantling of apartheid, the neighborhood has once again become synonymous with black South African culture.[1] The sociologist Benjamin Bradlow argues that, in the South African context, “Apartheid was not only a racial ideology. It was also a spatial planning ideology.”[2] The example of Sophiatown demonstrates the impact of overtly apartheid spatial policy on the subjugated residents of the neighborhood. The processes of urban renewal, population displacement, and community resilience seen already in New Orleans, Paris, and Rio de Janeiro appear once again in the history of Johannesburg.
The history of the Western Areas of Johannesburg is fraught with issues of race, colonialism, and capitalism. In Johannesburg, the logic of apartheid led to the creation of “a wealthy, white core of business and residential activity, with peripheral black dormitory townships.”[3] Thomas Patrick Chapman shows the early development of the Sophiatown, Western Native Township, and other forcibly black neighborhoods in western Johannesburg. In Sophiatown, especially, the need for a subjugated labor force near to the city center caused white “Joburgers” to allow mostly unchecked development in certain proscribed neighborhoods. As the density and population of these areas increased, so too did their reputation as “hotbeds” of anti-apartheid sentiment. After municipal authorities had had enough, they razed Sophiatown and the Western Native Township (WNT) and replaced it with planned developments, government-built housing, and infrastructure. The poor planning of these areas has caused its own problems. The Johannesburg city council only established the WNT “on the former sewerage works and dumping site,” for instance, only after “an outbreak of influenza in one of the inner-city African ghettoes.”[4]
Residents of Sophiatown responded with music. Taking inspiration from the American jazz music born and refined in the neighborhoods around Claiborne Avenue, musicians like Hugh Masekela, Miriam Makeba, and Abdullah Ibrahim formulated a distinctive sound called tsaba-tsaba.[5] Tsaba-tsaba “had the spirit of Africa in it,” as contemporaries noted.[6] Because urban infrastructure for white Johannesburgers took precedence over the needs of black residents, “the most talented African men and women from all walks of life – in spite of the hardships they had to encounter – came from Sophiatown. The best musicians, scholars, educationists [sic], singers, artists, doctors, lawyers, clergymen.”[7] Residents of Sophiatown and other townships throughout South Africa, like the oft-displaced inhabitants of Claiborne Avenue and the Cidade Nova, forged a tight community with music at its heart.
[1] Nathasha Erlank, “Routes to Sophiatown” African Studies 74, no. 1 (April 2015): 26-50.
[2] Benjamin Bradlow, “A Democratic Infrastructure for Johannesburg,” The Nature of Cities, https://www.thenatureofcities.com/2015/10/23/a-democratic-infrastructure-for-johannesburg/. Accessed January 8, 2021.
[3] Benjamin Bradlow, “A Democratic Infrastructure for Johannesburg,” The Nature of Cities, https://www.thenatureofcities.com/2015/10/23/a-democratic-infrastructure-for-johannesburg/. Accessed January 8, 2021.
[4] Thomas Patrick Chapman, “Spatial Justice and the Western Areas of Johannesburg,” African Studies 74, no. 1, (April 2015): 81, doi: 10.1080/00020184.2014.998059
[5] Katerina Markelova, “When jazz fever gripped the townships,” UNESCO Courier 2020-4, https://en.unesco.org/courier/2020-4/when-jazz-fever-gripped-townships. Accessed February 26, 2012. South African History Online: Towards a People’s History, “Music and culture as forms of resistance,” https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/music-and-culture-forms-resistance. Accessed February 12, 2021.
[6] Markelova, “When jazz fever gripped the townships”; South African History Online: Towards a People’s History, “Music and culture as forms of resistance.”
[7] Owen Crankshaw, “Class, Race and Residence in Black Johannesburg, 1923–1970” Journal of Historical Sociology 18, no. 4, (December 2005): 381, quoting M. Tlali, Muriel at Metropolitan (Ravan Press, Johannesburg, 1975), 70, cited in Hart and Pirie, “The Sight and Soul of Sophiatown,” 39.