THE EVOLUTIONOF URBAN ARTIFACTS
THE HOUSING PROBLEMS
Further evidence of Engels’s position on the
relationship between socioeconomics and the city is
provided by his discourse on the problem of
housing. Here the position is unequivocal. To focus
on the problem of housing in order to resolve the
social problem is in his view7 an error; housing is a
technical problem that may or may not be resolved
on the basis of a particular site, but it is not a
characteristic of the working class. In this way
Engels confirms what we have suggested above,
that the problem of the large city precedes the
industrial period. Rewrites, “. . . [The] shortage of
houses is not something peculiar to the present; it
is not even one of the sufferings peculiar to the
modern proletariat in contradistinction to all
earlier oppressed classes. On the contrary, all the
oppressed classes in all periods suffered more or
less uniformly from it. . ,” It is well known by now
that the problem of housing in ancient Rome, as
soon as the city attained the dimensions of a large
metropolis with all the problems inherent to it ,
was no less serious than it is in today’s cities. Living
conditions were desperate, and the descriptions
|hat have come down to us from the classical
writers show how this problem was foremost and
fundamental; it appeared as such in the urban
polities from Julies Caesar to Augustus down to
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the late days of the empire. Problems of this typo
also persisted throughout the middle Ages; the
vision that the romantics give us of the medieval
city completely contradicts the reality. From
documents, descriptions, and what still remains of
the Gothic the Housing Problem cities, it is evident
that the living conditions of the oppressed classes
in these cities were among the sorriest in the
history of mankind. In this sense the history of
Paris together with the entire subject of the
urban way of life of the metropolitan French
proletariat is paradigmatic. This way of t life was
one of the characteristic and decisive elements of
the Revolution, and it’s persisted up until the time
of Haussmann’s plan. In this sense, Haussmann’s
demolitions, however else one may judge them,
represented progress; those, who are disturbed by
his tearing down of the nineteenth-century city
always- ' forget that it nonetheless represents an
affirmation, even if demagogical and single-minded,
of the spirit of the Enlightenment, and that the
conditions of life within the Gothic districts of the
old cities represented something that was
objectively impossible and indisputably had to be
changed. But the moralistic tendency implicit or
explicit in the positions of scholars like Bernoulli
and Hegemann did not prevent them from arriving
THE EVOLUTIONOF URBAN ARTIFACTS
THE HOUSING PROBLEMS
at a scientific vision of the city. No one who has
been seriously occupied with urban science has
failed to note how the most important conclusions
have always emerged from the work of scholars
who devoted themselves exclusively to one city:
Paris, London, and Berlin are indissolubly linked for
the scholar with the names of Poete, Rasmussen,
and Hegemann. In these studies, so different in
many respects, the relationship between general
law's and the specific elements of the city is
delineated in exemplary fashion. It is worth
remarking that if for every branch of scientific
thought the monograph affords a larger vista on
its specific object, in the case of urban science it
indubitably presents advantages because somehow,
related as the city is to the concept of a work of
art, the monograph addresses the total element
which is peculiar to the city and which otherwise
risks becoming ossified or opaque or even lost
entirely in a more general treatment. In this sense,
one of the virtues of Bernoulli’s work is that he
never loses sight of the relationship with urban
artifacts. He refers every general statement back
to a specific urban artifact, and despite this never
entirely becomes a historian, as happens even in
the most convincing parts of Lewis Mumford’s
work. Bernoulli saw the city as a constructed mass,
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in his own definition, where every element has its
particularity and its differentiation within the
overall plan. The subject of the relationship
between the land and its buildings almost
surpasses the economic relationship in scope, and
perhaps for this reason it has never been
formulated completely. In the polemics of the
theoreticians of the Modern Movement, the
treatment of the residential district as a single
unit recalls the theories of earlier historians on
large building complexes; it is significant how' in
seeking a historical foundation for their urban
polemic the modernists turned to the great
theoreticians of the Renaissance, especially to
Leonardo da Vinci and his plan for a city containing
a system of subterranean roads and canals for
transporting cargo and servicing basement levels,
with a network of streets for pedestrian traffic at
the level of the ground floor of the houses.
Following Leonardo’s project, in a canonical
succession thatwould be worth studying for its
genealogical clarity, comes the project of the
Adam brothers for the Adelphi residential district
in London. The Adelphi district was located south
of the Strand between the City of London and
Westminster, and the Adam brothers obtained the
right to build from the Duke of St. Alban, the
THE EVOLUTIONOF URBAN ARTIFACTS
THE HOUSING PROBLEMS

owner of the land. The district was sufficiently architecture was both sign and event, and was
large to contain a building complex in which a based on an order superior to that of function.
system of superimposed roadways could be built This is precisely the case with the great Milan
whose} lower streets would connect with the banks hospital, which is certainly not unrelated to
of the Thames. These are the terms in which the Leonardo’s meditations, and whose constitutive
Adelphi project was presented. But is it only presence in the city has not changed in its
important in these terms? And can Leonardo’s importance even today. Two and a half centuries
project be seen as something other than a unique later the Adam brothers found it possible to
proposal of a remarkable scale and a strongly construct a whole part of the city, an actual urban
rationalizing impulse? In Bernoulli’s view, artifact, despite all the real difficulties of this
Leonardo’s project was not entirely in the realm of undertaking. But maybe such a work is not so
some of the other highly ambitious statements of exceptional; rather it indicates that a great
the Renaissance—those which made the city into a primary element could originate, perhaps in an
supreme work of art at the limits of nature, exceptional way, from a response to the problem of
engineering, painting, and politics. Leonardo’s housing.
project was quite different from such ideal
schemes because it was already in the city, a real
city with its presumed relationships, as real as the
piazzas of Bellini and the Venetian painters. It was
connected to an actual experience of the city, and
gave concrete form to the Milan of Lodovico il
Moro, just as the great hospital there that
translated the designs of Filarete was a concrete
form, as the canals, the dams, and the new streets
were concrete forms. No city was so much
constructed in its totality as that of the
Renaissance; I have already emphasized how this

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