32

CITY AS
POLITICAL FORM
FOUR ARCHETYPES OF
URBAN TRANSFORMATION
Pier Vittorio Aureli focuses on the category of archetype as an
alternative to the idea of type. Four examples the axial streets
of Renaissance Rome, the 17th-century Parisian place, the 19th-
century independent block in Berlin and the 20th-century
Viennese superblock are explored here to describe the emergence
of modern urban forms that explicitly embody power relations.
Pier Vittorio Aureli
The city is the most explicit index of power relationships.
Walls, squares and streets are not only meant to support
the functioning of the city, but they also form an extensive
governmental apparatus. Without proposing a cause-and-effect
relationship between form and politics, the intention here is to
trace the political origin of quintessential city projects within
the history of the modern city. The aim is to test the political
instrumentality of architectural form. For this reason, instead of
focusing on the city at large, the focus will be on paradigmatic
architectural archetypes. The category of archetype that will be
advocated here will not be the way Carl G Jung dened it, as a
universal contentless form, nor as innate pattern of behaviour.
1

Instead, following Giorgio Agamben, the idea of archetype as
example will be proposed: neither a specic nor a general form,
but a singular formal event that serves to dene the possibility
of a milieu of forms.
2
Following such denition an archetype
could be Jeremy Benthams Panopticon (1785) whose form
was interpreted by Michel Foucault not only as the model for
that type of surveillance, but as an example through which it is
possible to dene a particular paradigm of spatial governance.
3

The category of archetype is advanced here as an alternative
to the idea of type. If type traditionally indicates the idea that
regulates the development of a group of forms (and for this
reason is irreducible to any particular form), archetype offers the
possibility of addressing a found singular form as a denition for
a possible group of forms. In architecture, an archetype is thus
a paradigmatic form through which it is possible to illuminate a
particular critical passage in the development of the city.
In the following notes, the political form of the modern
city will be dened by addressing four archetypes: the papal
axial streets of 16th-century Rome, the Parisian plce of the
17th century, the independent building block in 19th-century
Berlin and the 20th-century Viennese superblock. The sequence
of these four archetypes attempts to synthetically describe the
emergence of modern urban forms that embodied specic power
relationships within the city, especially those related to the
rise of economic accumulation and management as a response
to particular conicts in the city. The aim of this essay is to
attempt a short and concise outline of a political history of the
modern city, and the way its ethos, made of urban management
on the one hand and conict on the other, was embodied and
represented by the use of certain architectural forms. The
argument is that while the changes of the city can be thought of
as the evolution of urban types, its realisation can only happen
within a political state of exceptions, in which the exemplarity
of specic and singular forms plays a leading role in resetting
the urban condition. The essay counters the current mainstream
of evolutionary and empirical research on the city that portrays
urban space as an evolutionary and self-organising organism.
Against this idea, the city emerges as a locus of a permanent
political conict of which architectural form is one of the most
extreme and radical manifestations.
33 333
Axial Rule in Renaissance Rome
The reinvention of Rome as the capital of Christianity between
the 14th and 16th centuries can be considered as one of the
most antagonistic processes of urban transformation in the
Western world. This was mainly due to two specic conditions
of the city: its complex topography and geography, and its
idiosyncratic political regime. Unlike any other major medieval
city in Europe, the major symbolic and power centres in Rome
the Capitol, the Cathedral of St John and the Vatican were
not located in the city centre, but at the city margins.
4
This
geography contributed to make the city centre an unresolved
multipolar eld of forces contested by the different powers
represented by these centres. The political regime consisted of a
non-dynastic monarchy where each pope was elected at a very
old age in order to prevent too long a span of his reign, meaning
he had only a very short time in which to implement reforms
and to leave his legacy on the city form. The extreme political
discontinuity between successive papacies meant popes efforts
most often did not follow on from one another, and at best had
contrasting aims. These extreme conditions resonated within a
chaotic urban form made of an archipelago of clusters, each of
them dominated by competing clans or dynasties.
On top of everything, the conict between secular and
religious power represented within the city by the polar
contraposition between the Campidoglio and the Vatican gave
to the different forms of conict an acute political dimension
that triggered the church to engage in the management of
the city. It is for this reason that, parallel with the building of
new monuments and the restoration of ancient ones, those
popes who wanted to leave their mark on the citys urban form
engaged with the design of new city streets. This took the
form not only of the opening of new or the completion of old
streets, but also in a diffuse management of urban space. Facing
a situation of extreme backwardness and political uncertainty
due the consequences of the Great Western Schism, and the
exile of popes in Avignon (13781417), Pope Martino V (pope
from 1417 to 1431) instituted the Magistri Viarium, public
administrators who were responsible for the management of
the streets.
5
Their task was not only the physical maintenance
of space in terms of circulation and hygiene, but also to reclaim
political control of this space from the opposing clans that
contended it. It must be considered that in Rome at the time
there were no proper streets and public space was more the
interstice between the different clusters of buildings. Instituting
the Magistri Viarium created the possibility of an organic
totalising space of control that would surpass the local scale of
the building. What is interesting here is that this was organised
not in terms of military control, but through the institution of
a civic body whose power was administrative and managerial
rather than coercive, and thus more adaptable to being diffused
within rather than simply imposed on the city.
The opening and management of new streets was also
directed towards the possibility of making the city a Biblia
Pauperum, an urban text whose message could be accessible to
the pilgrims coming to the Eternal City. Yet the central issue of
the street project was that, like in ancient Rome, representation
and urban management were fused in the same architectural
artefact. In Rome urban circulation acquired this ambivalent
meaning of both ceremonial display and urban control.
The awareness of circulation as a means of power soon
resulted in a precise and archetypical form: the axial street, of
which Donato Bramantes design for Via Giulia (1508) can be
considered the most radical example.
6
The almost 1,000-metre
(3,280-foot) long street that cut through the city fabric running
parallel to the river Tiber (and to Via della Lungara, its twin
street on the other suburban side of the river), was, above all, a
strategic link connecting two important elements of medieval
Rome: the 15th-century Ponte Sisto, the only bridge built after
the fall of the Roman Empire, and the commercial core of the
city inhabited by the emerging class of bankers. The spatiality of
Via Giulia is the direct product of the culture of perspective and
its application in the representation of reality. The evolution of
the science of perspective during the 15th century needs to be
understood not only as a means to represent in a mathematically
correct way the depth of space, but also because its mathematical
implications were a framework within which to reimagine the
reform of urban space according to the universal and abstract
principles of spatial organisation. The unprecedented axial form
of Via Giulia represents the concrete application of this culture to
the real body of the city. The perfect linear geometry of the street
was intended to organise in one spatial gesture not only a proper
circulation space but also a strongly dened interdependence
between public and private space, by making the public space
the perfectly shaped void of the via recta both the access to and
control of the private properties along the street.
Via Giulia, Rome, 1508
The geometrical regularity of the street
offers the possibility of controlling private
property by means of public space. Public
space appears as regular, universal,
efcient and magnicent, and in this way
conceals its vested (and partial) interests.
01
34
Economic Empowerment in the Place Royale, Paris
A similar concern informs the design of another fundamental
archetype of modern city spatiality: the Place Royale (1605,
later known as Place des Vosges) in Paris. If Via Giulia was
meant to be the urban pendant of a gigantic monumental
form the Palazzo dei Tribunali where Pope Julius II
intended to concentrate all the juridical and administrative
functions of the city the Place Royale was conceived as
a monumental space enclosed by a cohesive and quasi-
anonymous residential architecture. This architecture
consisted of a row of apartments with a portico on the
ground oor. The portico was the circulation space for the
silk workshop that, according to the original project for the
square, was to be located on the ground oor.
7
The square
itself is thus an empty space carved within the fabric of the
city. Its extreme regularity, its lack of outstanding monumental
features, the sense of calm evoked by the endless fenestrations
and the repetition of a few decorative elements, realised the
political desire to overcome any specic symbolic identity.
This desire for a generic architecture can be linked to
Henri IVs impetus to overcome the extreme religious conicts
that were characteristic of France towards the end of the
16th century. The formal genericness, the emphasis on space
over the monumentality of architecture, can be seen as an
anticipation of the biopolitical techniques of urban management
implied in the theories of the raison dtat in which power is
no longer identied in the symbolic and plastic gure of the
sovereign, but is distributed throughout the whole social body of
the city. In this respect it is interesting to note that although the
square was intended for royal gatherings and representations, its
planning was guided by the requirement to gain income from
the rental of apartments on the upper oors and the commercial
activities in the workshops on the ground oor. Instead of a
monumental architecture, the pragmatic monarchy of Henry IV
assumed the economic management of the city in the form of
production workshops and houses for rent. The economic raison
dtre of the city thus becomes the very source of the squares
architectural grammar.
As in the case of Via Giulia, it is evident how the evolution
of an urban type depends not only on use, but also on the
political instrumentality of the most immanent conditions of
the city, such as circulation, the relationship between public and
private space, economic regime, and organisation of production.
For this reason the neat form of the Place Royale can be seen
as the urban space that inaugurated an architecture of the city
made of distances, voids and repetitions of the same architectural
elements, and thus able to be the exible framework for the
citys development and its consequent (often unpredictable)
economic transformations. While the architecture of Via Giulia
resulted in the contrast between the overall layout of the street
and the individuality of the buildings along it, in the Place
Royale the individuality of the architecture is totally absorbed
in the uniformity of the space. In this sense, the empty space
of the Place Royale, its uniformity, its regularity, represents
precisely the ubiquity and the innity of the space, and not
only the image but also the substance of power within the city.
Space is here a framed void: the mere potentiality of social and
economic relationships, the possibility of circulation, and thus of
empowering the state per via economica.
The Place Royale, Paris, 160512
Engraving after Claude Chastillon, 1677.
The Place Royale was built by Henry IV
starting in 1605 and was completed in
1612. According to the original project,
the ground oor of the buildings around
the square was intended to host a silk
workshop. The square fused economic
necessity and ceremonial representation
within one simple space.
02
The formal genericness,
the emphasis on space
over the monumentality of
architecture, can be seen
as an anticipation of the
biopolitical techniques of
urban management implied
in the theories of the raison
dtat in which power is
no longer identied in the
symbolic and plastic gure
of the sovereign, but is
distributed throughout the
whole social body of the city.
35
Bourgeois Berlin and the Independent Building Block
An alternative to this type of urban form that characterised
the development of the European city between the 17th
and 18th centuries is Karl Friedrich Schinkels incremental
masterplanning of Berlin between the 1820s and 1841. If
16th-century Rome and 17th-century Paris were developed
through the opening of regular spaces within the medieval
fabric of the city, Schinkel returns to the archetype of the
isolated building block as the primary element of the city.
Examples of this are his most important buildings in Berlin,
such as the Neue Wache (New Guard House, 1816), the Altes
Museum (182330) and the Bauakademie (18326). All were
intended by the Prussian architect not only as objects per
se, but also as strategic stepping stones for a punctual urban
reform of the city. Indeed, the pavilion-like appearance of
these buildings implies a space characterised no longer by the
cohesive spatiality of the Baroque city where all the buildings
are rigidly aligned along the streets and squares, but by the free
and unpredictable association of the buildings themselves.
Historians such as Fritz Neumeyer have interpreted such
urban forms as implied in Schinkels pavillionaire architecture
as the spatial rendering of the emerging bourgeois ethos of
19th-century Berlin.
8
According to Neumeyer, Schinkels
archetype of the building-as-individual can be understood as
the architectural analogue of the free bourgeoisie initiative
no longer constrained by the social and political rigidity of
Baroque absolutism. In this sense it is important to consider
that Berlins urban form was strongly dened by the application
of the Polizeiwissenschaft, the apparatus of political and
social control developed through a sophisticated regime of
urban policing.
9
The tenets of such a regime consisted in
the ubiquitous internal control of the city through pervasive
economic and social legislation in which power was completely
identied in the principle of economic and social utility.
Within such a liberal framework where control is exercised by
the production of situated freedoms rather than by imposition
of a strict social order, the city is no longer a rigid setting for
the representation of power, but a exible and incremental
accumulation of always changing urban situations. The
multiplicity of urban space that forms between Schinkels
isolated blocks can thus be interpreted not only as the analogue
of the bourgeois liberal initiative, but also as the topographical
product of the regime that governed such an initiative. The
urban incrementalism implied in Schinkels archetype of
the isolated block can be interpreted as the product of an
urban ethos in which the growth of the city requires a certain
openness of the city space. For this reason the spatial openness
that has always been emphasised in Schinkels approach to
the city can be seen as the ultimate liberal tactic in which
topographic exibility and dissolution of rigid masterplanning
becomes the ultimate form of urban governance.
Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Bauakademie,
Berlin, 18326
Photograph from Schinkels Sammlung
Architektonischer Entwrfe of 1837.
03
The urban incrementalism implied in Schinkels archetype of the isolated
block can be interpreted as the product of an urban ethos in which the
growth of the city requires a certain openness of the city space.
36 366 33666666
Closure and Obstruction: The Viennese Superblock
The tradition of urban form illustrated so far can be summarised
as the progressive prevalence of space over form. The archetypes
that we have seen share the common denominator of being the
result of politics via urban management rather than of explicit
political representation. As we have seen, the emphasis on urban
management nds its spatial analogue in a city where exibility
and openness towards urban development is the raison dtre of
the city archetypes. It is not by chance that the legacy of such
a tradition will nd its logical conclusion in the emergence of
social housing for the workers.
As is well known, the discipline of urbanism emerged from
the crisis brought about by industrial development, but the
heart of such a crisis is precisely capitalisms attempt to tame
and control the labour force needed for its own development.
Such control consisted of the evolution of rational criteria
for city planning where rationality is the reduction of urban
form to the principles of utility and social control. A decisive
counterarchetype to this tradition (and in this discourse to the
tradition of urban form illustrated so far) is the development of
the Gemeindebauten in Vienna, the social housing superblocks
built by the Social Democratic Party between 1923 and 1934.
10
The fundamental archetype of such development is the rather
introverted urban form of the Hof: the monumental courtyard
of the historic city. Rather than the rational forms of the
Siedlungen (prewar housing estates) in Berlin, or the tradition
of the Garden City, the Viennese municipality revisited the
monumentality of the Hof in order to counter the principle of
utility and control implied in the typologies of mass dwelling.
Moreover, they decided to locate the superblocks within the
historic city in close proximity to its strategic points, such as the
metro stations, bridges and important trafc routes, rather than
to expand the periphery. Within this framework, the closed
forms of the superblocks countered the managerial workings of
the city by opposing its ows and networks with the obstructive
closure of its introverted space.
04
Karl Ehn, Karl-Marx-Hof, Vienna,
192730
View of the courtyard showing the
communal services such as the
kindergarten and gardens. Closure and self-
sufciency are monumentalised against the
openness and innity of the bourgeois city.
The archetype of the closed
monumental courtyard clearly separated
from the city but fully accessible by the
community of workers that inhabited
each superblock introduced a type of
space that is neither public nor private.
37 377777 337777
Notes
1. See Carl Gustav Jung, The Archetypes and Collective
Unconscious, trans Gerhard Adler and RFC Full, Princeton
University Press (New York), 2nd edn, 1981.
2. This denition is an attempt to adapt Giorgio
Agambens discussion of the idea of example as a method
of research. See Giorgio Agamben, The Signature of all
Things, trans Luca di Santo and Kevin Atell, Zone Books
(New York), 2009.
3. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of
the Prison, trans Alan Sheridan, Penguin Books (London),
1977, pp 195228.
4. See Christoph Luitpold Frommel, Architettura alla corte
papale del Rinascimento, Electa (Milan), 2003.
5. Enrico del Re, I Maestri di Strada, in Archivio della
Regia Societa Romana di Storia Patria, XLII, 1920, p 101.
6. On the project and development of Via Giulia, see Luigi
Salerno, Luigi Spezzaferro and Manfredo Tafuri, Via Giulia,
un utopia urbana del Cinquencento, Staderini (Rome),
1972. See also Arnaldo Bruschi, Bramante, Thames &
Hudson (London), 1977.
7. See Hilary Ballon, The Paris of Henry IV:
Architecture and Urbanism, MIT Press (Cambridge,
MA), 1991, pp 57113.
8. Fritz Neumeyer, Space for Reection: Block versus
Pavilion, in Franz Schulze (ed), Mies van der Rohe: Critical
Essays, Museum of Modern Art (New York), 1989, p 196.
9. See Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population,
Palgrave Macmillan (London), 2007.
10. For a comprehensive overview of Red Vienna, see Eve
Balu, The Architecture of the Red Vienna 19191934, MIT
Press (Cambridge, MA), 1999. See also Manfredo Tafuri,
Vienna Rossa, Electa (Milan), 1980.
Text 2011 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images Courtesy of the author
Friedrich Gilly, Perspectival Study with
Landscape, c 1800
This famous drawing anticipates the theme
of the city as made by architectural blocks
freely composed within space. However
it will be precisely such autonomy of
architectural form from the geometric
constraints of the traditional topography
of the city that will allow a more exible,
and thus more efcient, management of
urban space.
As we have seen, the category of public space has developed
as a means to dene, frame and control the access to and the
maintenance of private property and its urban dimension:
landownership. The dened geometry of Via Giulia or the
Place Royale was intended, above all, as the instrumentalisation
of private property for the sake of urban development. In this
case, public space is the binding force, the common interest
that forms and denes the development of private space. It is
for this reason that public space has to remain open, neutral
and universal. The archetype of the closed monumental
courtyard clearly separated from the city but fully accessible
by the community of workers that inhabited each superblock
introduced a type of space that is neither public nor private.
Such space is common and shared by those who live around it.
The proximity of the Hof reects the necessity for the limits
that each community requires in order to manifest itself.
However, the limits of such community are not economic, but
political, motivated by the desire for political emancipation
(and separation) rather than just (economic) upgrading of the
urban condition in the name of social utility.
If the urban openness and rationality implied in
archetypes such as Via Giulia, the Place Royale and Schinkels
self-standing building blocks were intended as a way to
accommodate the economic and administrative conditions of
the city, in the Viennese Gemeindebauten the same conditions
in the form of social housing were turned into an archipelago
of nite monumental forms against, yet within, the very
body of the existing managerial city. In the urban gesture of
the Hof, the city is no longer conceived as an innite space
for development, but as a dialectical arena of conicting
parts (the Hof as the architecture of the proletariat versus the
apartment blocks of the bourgeoisie). Yet this conict is not
left before or beyond the project. In the Gemeindebauten it is
instrumentalised as its very core.
The sense of closeness implicit in the archetype of the Hof
resonates the working classs partiality against the bourgeoisies
general interest. Unlike many archetypes of the modern city,
the Hof was assumed not as a managerial apparatus, but as a
critical challenge to the ubiquity of urban space, and thus as a
political caesura within the innite and totalising apparatus that
is the modern city. 1
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