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By Root 1633 0

of rural life had a direct and dramatic effect on the political character of the arrival city. If its residents arrived only when thrust out of their villages by rural food emergencies, then immediately suffered from the food-price shocks and urban unemployment resulting from those emergencies, then they tended to take action. To the revolutionaries of the time, this action was often mistaken for something else. This is vividly evident in Karl Marx’s self-exculpatory masterpiece The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in which he attempts to explain why the 1848 uprisings in Paris had failed to turn into the permanent socialist transformation he had predicted. He places the blame squarely on the peasants and the rural-born residents of the Parisian arrival city. The latter he dismisses as a consciousness-lacking lumpenproletariat, unable to understand their political place the way a city-born worker could. Much like the novelists of the time, he had failed to notice that the village arrival, not the urban worker, had become the driving force in society.15

THE GREAT AGE OF THE EUROPEAN ARRIVAL CITY

By the middle of the nineteenth century, Europe’s cities had become unrecognizable to those monarchs and planners who had attempted to give them shape, order, walls, and boulevards. All of that grandeur had been swamped and rendered minuscule amid the great arrival cities that choked their inner quarters and engorged their outskirts, turning the official districts and their monumental buildings into mere asterisks.

The elegant plan of Berlin, laid out in the eighteenth century in neat grids of boulevards by the planners of the Hohenzollern court, was quickly overwhelmed by the rural tides, its planners humiliated by an unmanageable pace of population growth—a leap from 197,000 people in 1816 to 431,000 in 1841, and then twice as many again in 1871, and almost two million at the dawn of the First World War. The German countryside was cleared of peasants in the nineteenth century, following England’s enclosures by almost a century at an even more rapid pace. With the exception of a few monumental quarters in the very center, it seemed as if Berlin was all arrival city: In 1885, 81 percent of men employed in food supply, 83.5 percent of builders, and over 85 percent of those in transport had been born in villages. They had all moved, by choice or force, into a city that found itself unable to broaden its physical expanse, forcing a huge number of people into a limited area. By the last quarter of the century, Berlin was the most densely populated city in the world.

The arrival city in Berlin was based on a grim form of tenement housing erected at great speed to fill accommodation needs around the edges of Vienna, Warsaw, Prague, and St. Petersburg. Such buildings were, and still are, known as Mietskasernen, described by the architectural historian Joseph Rykwert as grim human warehouses: “block-size buildings, often five to seven stories high, with several interior courtyards to act as light-wells, though they were usually too narrow to admit much light … As their name implied, they were built to maximize rents, even if their exteriors were often stuccoed and moulded to maintain the more or less civilized patination of city streets.”16

If the arrival cities of central Europe were packing impossible numbers of people into airless, inhumane vertical stacks within a dense, depressing grid, those of western Europe and England, far larger in scale, often seemed to evade order and reason altogether, throwing people into endless, seemingly arbitrary rows of shacks that barely qualified as housing, stretching across fields on the edge of town, filling derelict and unused properties near the mills and factories just outside the center.

Although the squalor of the arrival cities of London and Paris attracted literary fame, the most startling of all might have been the vast expanse of shantytown housing that overtook Barcelona. This was an urban emergency on an impossible scale, for Catalonia, unlike any other place on the Iberian