MODERN CITIES

Evening Post, Volume LXXXVII, Issue 4, 6 January 1914, Page 15

MODERN CITIES

CIVIC GOVERNMENT THE GRANDEUR OF LEADING WORLD CENTRES. Some interesting articles have been published in the Sydney Morning Herald, written by Mr. J. D. Fitzgerald, on the world's great cities. The ■writer ' states that in recalling his impressions the most vivid recollection is of one feature which must strike every visitor to London, New York, Paris, Berlin, Budapest, Rome, Milan, Vienna —namely, the grandeur of modern cities. It may be that some people are gifted — or, as many may think, cursed — with the "municipal imagination," and to these memory will always recall the vision of some splendid street or avenue ; some noble group of buildings, so appropriately placed that its perfections are completely brought out ; some civic decoration. like a statuary group, or a public fountain ; some fine squar« or public place j some example of a beautiful plan fitted to a picturesque site. Again the trained civic mind will hark about to some practical feature of city management like the scientific docking arrangements of Hamburg, Antwerp/ or New York ; the perfection in street making and cleansing in the borough 'of Westminster ; the rapidity and efficiency ,of underground passenger comimtnication. in New York, London, and faris. Again, it will recall, as a feature of_ modern civic government, almost entirely unknown to Australians, the blending of utility and beautification which are found in the planning of docks, river fronts, and railway terminals, so that ,the exigencies of commerce shall not, of necessity, destroy all civic adornment. Let us consider the question of railway terminals for a^ few moments. These are treated as the most important feature of the city plan in Germany and Switzerland, and to some extent in Italy and France; and in that development of conscious and purposeful city beautification which wo find in modern Europe the "land portal," 'or terminal station^ is invariably a noble building, which gives upon an open space or garden. In Sydney an attempt has been made in this ""direction} and when the terminal building is completed, opening as it does on to a lovely little park, we shall have something to be proud of — a city portal second to none ; tTo realise this, one has to recall his impressions of the Grand Central Station in New York; the Gare cl' Orleans in Paris, the Central Station at Frankfort-on-Maine (whioh cost £2,000,000, in a city of 400,000 inhabitants), the beautiful terminal at Zurich (with a monument to the engineer of the great St. Gothard tunnel in the square), the Dresden terminal, and the splendid approach through the Avenue de Eleyser to the magnificent domed railway terminal in Antwerp. In this, as in other spheres, boatlty and utility go hand in hand. In Australia it is only quite recently that we have a state of the public mind which applauds proposals for civic beautification, instead of _ condemning them ac "Utopian" and "impractical." /The- line of reform in Australia must oe in the direction of rooting^ out a fixed' and hitherto unalterable idea in the minds of many — happily not all — of th© men engaged in civic work, that good kerbing and guttering is tne " be all and the erid all Oi municipal statesmanship. There are grand possibilities before us ; we must realise them. WONDERFUL IMPROVEMENTS. Really, when one sees _ the great achievements of European cities, one realises the narrow outlook in the colonies, where politics are supposed to present the highest possibilities of human action, and where municipal work" is despised. In Europe, however, every city has a noble inheritance from the past. The magnificent minds of the citizens of the medieval towns is shown in \ their noble monuments, just as their statesmanship left its mark on the world in the history of the Hanse towns and the Italia^ city republics. For, after all, the builders' of the marvellous cathedrals of Europe. — of the Duomo at Milan, St. Peter's (Rome), of Ulm, York, and Cologne minsters; of Notre Dame, Rouen, and London Westminster, of the great city halls of Brussels and Laeken, Louvain, and Ghent-r-were the citizens. These are municipal works, expressions of the civic sense of the inhabitants of the great lives of humanity. Would it bo an inept comparison to place the work of the modern civic bodies, representing the^ communal spirit of to-day — the modernisation of Paris, Vienna, London, Rome, and Naples— their conquests over disease and death by sanitation, the sweeping out of narrow streets and the planning of noble thoroughfares, giving light, air, furnishing leafage and ornament, increasing the charms of city life — the .grim fight of the German cities to stamp out poverty and preventable disease — 'to place such works, as these, although not so picturesque or so plain to the eye, on a level with the civic mai'vels of the Cathedral builders? One can recall with a keen sense of pleasure the wonderful city improvements, such as the treatment of the old fortified zones, the creation of the Ringstrasse in Vienna, Corporation-street, Birmingham, the ' Andrassy-avenue improvement in Budapest, Kingsway, London, the Boulevard Anspach in Brussels, and the Champs Elysees, Paris. These are but a few of the wonders of modern European city improvements. The 4 placing of great public buildings, their^ beauty, the magnificence of their interior and exterior decoration, all these are the works of civic statesmen, possessed of imagination and inspiration in excelsis. Who can withhold admiration from the successive piles of noble architecture in the Vienna Ringstrasse ; buildings decorated with sculptured groups, standing on the Ring-street, and separated from each other by Beautiful park spaces, adorned with Statuary, gardens, and fountains? Of course, no Australian city could be expected to hay© so noble a civic centre as the Cathedral-square in Milan, with it's central Duomo, which, flanked by the new Victor Emanuel Galleria, and by the ancient Palace of the Dukes, is so grand a monument of medieval citizenship. The cathedral, "the wonder of Gothic Italy," ao it has been called, is Very fitly the centre of all civic life of a great metropolis. To the Duomo all the trams converge, and from the Duomo all the trams start. This square the citizens of Milan have by inheritance j but in another place there is ample evidence of their own taste and enterprise in their treatment of the old castle of the Sforzas. For centuries this stronghold was a cruel menace to the citizens— "for ages execrated, desecrated, and at the samo time hallowed, by the suffering of political martyrs," is to-day a gallery of art and antiquities, bounded on one side by a crescent of splendid modern buildings, and on the other giving a fine p.iblic garden, the central path of which yads to Cagnola's Arch of Peace, a > oLJo barrier interposed, through which the wayfarer must pass before he enters the wide Simplon road. In the municipal gardens the paths are called after the world's poets—Shakespeare, Byron, Goethe, Schiller, Dante, Petrarch— a, beautiful idea. This is a jingle instance ; it could be multiplied '

by citing the changes in every progressive city in Europe. It would be difficult for those in the colonial municipal councils who take the narrow "kerb and gutter" view of their tasks, to realise the civic and historical significance of that architectural wonder, the Town Hall of Louvain, which is considered the finest example of Gothic architecture extant. Louvain has only 41,000 inhabitants, even to-day ; yet the citizens have undertaken and continue the task of filling the niches in the walls left by the designer with statues to the number of 282 ; and this civic task has been going on since 1848. Every square and open space of Berlin, Paris, Vienna, London, New York, Rome, Naples, and Milan is adorned with a fountain, a monument, a group of sculpture, or a column. ' Most of these are inheritances from the past, but many of them are of yesterday, and some even of to-day. The latter are not always admirable— M>ne must admit that.' One may read the history of each city in its .monuments ; gauge its artistic_ evolution by the treatment it gives its parks, public buildings, and monuments ; ana appraise the business capacity of its citizens by the city services., A MODERN CITY. I have, I feai^ feebly, attempted all through these articles to indicate to the reader the most important features pi all this splendid achievement. That is, the wonderful height which the communal spirit has reached ; the extraordinary development of a higher civic sense and civic conscience; the pride of the citizen in the city, the recognition by the citizen that the city is the home of the race, and that no effort and no expenditure must be spared to make it a beautiful as well as a highly organised and splendidly efficient instrument of civilisation. A modern city is the finest example of successful^ co-operation, of acquiescence •by the citizen in rules _of conduct and of financial imposts which raise citizenship to a higher plane. A modern city is a supertype of " enlightened selfishness," which works for the twofold object of raising the status of the citizen and aiding him in the jgymggle to improve his individual lot. I^^?he city made our fortune, and we are trying to make the city's fortune," is a phrase^ used in Sydney by Sir Robert Anderson in describing the civic policy of the merchant princes of Belfast. The cities of Europe are altering the condi 1 tion of life of the poor, and humanising the environment of^ the workers ; they are sedulously striving for the advancement of the commercial interests of their traders, and the nation behind them — for every city is a market, a fair, a Nijni Novgorod, for the surrounding country, and some perform this function for whole States and nations. The government of a modern city is the highest expression of human capacity for enlightened selfgovernment and co-operative social ddvelopment.