The Tropical Utopia Khartoum E-Book

Marina d'Errico

• Herausgeber: Terra Ferma Edizioni
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

An ideal city to be rebuilt from scratch where two rivers flow into one another to give birth to the great Nile. An elite team of designers. The progressive utopia of urban planners and doctors between the 19th and 20th centuries, coming to grips with the demographic explosion and with the white man’s civilizing mission. These are a few of the elements that come into play in the British reconstruction of Khartoum in the late 19th-century, after a series of bloody defeats and difficult victories. All the necessary and sufficient conditions for the drafting of a state-of-the art project are met. Instead, it so happens that the plan presents a number of ambiguities intersecting on various levels: the existence of a secret protocol, rooted in a complex military conundrum; the difficult search for a diplomatic balancing act in the British scramble for Africa, between the Berlin Conference and WWI; Victorian England’s rock-steady belief in its own values; the complex cultural and ideological background of the episode’s protagonists. The present essay addresses the combination of all these factors, which, while distancing Khartoum from its idealised image, give an almost fictional quality to its history.

Leseprobe

sgresénde 26

layout of the cover

Fabien Laze

cover

Fabien Laze, Maison marocaine, 1993

translation

Daniela Almansi

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ISBN 978-88-6322-275-3

Foreword

Lionello Puppi

It is only partly coincidental that Marina d’Errico’s beautiful essay on the chronology, intents and modalities of Khartoum’s urban history from the Ottoman matrix to the Anglo-Egyptian reorganisation via the so-called revolution of the Dervishes, covering eight decades from the 1820s to the end of the 19th century, should appear in the aftermath of an exhibition of the Milan Triennale (28 December 2014), curated by Brenno Albrecht and titled Africa – Big Change Big Chance. On the one hand, one of the most original and interesting aspects of the exhibition was – as noted by Maurizio Giuffré – the exploration of the “problematic connotation taken on by the values and aesthetics of modernity in conjunction with the social and economic complexity of the continent’s different geographic areas”, and in particular of the immense and decidedly “other” Sub-Saharan area known as al-Sudan in the Arabic expression, or “Black Africa”. On the other hand, the question takes on a kind of relevance that transcends the dimensions of the pretext. We are prompted to question the real nature and aims of the concept of modernity, which leads to an additional question, namely that of the actual beneficiaries, for all the undeniable big change, of the big chance.

Let us take up Salvatore Setti’s insightful synthesis, included in the recently published Se Venezia muore (Einaudi, Torino 2014, pp. 20 e 22): modernity is a response to strong demographic growth (such as the one undergone by Europe between the 19th and 20th centuries), and is aimed at achieving “social welfare” through food, education, literacy, medical advances, and growing consumption. However, despite the “Mutual interpenetration of houses and factories, industry and city”, can we also say that this condition was achieved by feeding a self-awareness of one’s identity based on historical memory, which provided every single citizen with the necessary roots and affiliation to orient and turn their professional and life experiences into something manageable? In other words, can modernity be equated with a megalopolis-generating mechanism, based on the “multiplication of underground tunnels, satellite towns, urban highways and other disorienting mechanisms […], a machine for the production of goods and consumption, in which each human is the gear of a gigantic apparatus, the worker bee of a tireless beehive”, on the model of Bo Xilai’s Chongqing, an “urban forest” where rational urbanization policies have led to a population growth from six hundred thousand in 1930 to thirty-two millions today?

Over the last decades – and especially after the decolonisation and reorganisation of the continent’s geography into independent states – Africa too has known an impressive demographic growth, which has led to increasingly overcrowded cities. The urban population has grown from 4% to 38% of the overall population. By 2050, when the world population will have reached 9 billion, the people living in Africa will be 2 billion. And with the vertiginous growth and development of new urban agglomerations, small historical settlements formerly devoted to the export of special goods (mostly slaves) lost their former function and started attracting desperate, destitute and starving crowds from inside the continent. Suffice it to mention the cases of Lourenço Marquez (today’s Maputo), Kinshasa and Lagos, presented by Platform 4 at the festival Documenta 11 [2000] in Kassel: boundless shanty towns with no access to sanitation, health care or electricity, suffocating the larvae of urban centres inherited from the colonial era. Maurizio Giuffré, still commenting on the above-mentioned Milan Triennale in light of Jacques Véron’s La globalizzazione del mondo (Il Mulino, Bologna 2008), rightfully noted that the theoretical and concrete experience of the city generated by European and Asian civilisations is unknown in African cultures (I am still referring to the sub-Saharan area of al-Sudan), where there is no opposition between cities and countryside. Even the so-called cities celebrated by Arab and Portuguese travellers as illustrations of the flourishing of great empires in Mali, Ghana and Zimbabwe were actually constellations of villages connected by paved roads and enclosed within large and majestic earthy walls, as if to underscore the image of an anthropic territory that was deeply, and I would even say irreversibly, rural. Thus, for lack of efficient hands-on mediations, “the rural and informal lifestyle practiced in the villages” (Giuffré) could not fail to persist and penetrate the urban fabric (so to say) of the slums and shanty towns, to the detriment of infrastructures aimed at an autonomous and profitable exploitation of the subsoil and of the manufacturing and financial activities.

In other words, who are the beneficiaries of this Big Chance and what is the Big Change necessary to achieve it? Symptomatically (and the exhibition at the Milan Triennale showed it quite clearly), the funding for the “great works” allocated by the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund have always benefited non-local companies and professionals, and never those of the recipient country. This trend complies with the neo-liberal ideology that inspires and governs “the strong powers” of our global world, shaping a notion of modernity that condemns reality to an irreversible and irreparable condition of dependency (how many solutions are aimed at truly local businesses? How many local professionals are involved?), and to the “planet of slums” predicted by Mike Davis.

The models of “ideal cities” (urban utopias characteristic of the Italian Renaissance) were translated into the concrete experience of “planned cities” in the colonies of the New World, and especially in Latin America, as demonstrated by Leonardo Benvolo. This process, however, is essentially foreign to the European colonisation of Sub-Saharan Africa. As a consequence, the area had no access to organised settlements, beside the official buildings of colonial (religious, civilian, military and in some cases diplomatic and consular) authorities. Not to mention the self-segregation of the white “residents” and their facilities, who would have been able to reorganise the village’s labyrinth structure, suggest – or even impose – new possible directions, and adopt – or at least test – new tools against the rampant urbanisation.

Another missed opportunity is the adoption or at least the experimentation of tools against the rampant urbanisation. These tools were designed by Western architectural utopias to address in the best possible manner the priority of planning road networks, “city gardens” and “new towns” – especially after the experience of Pierre L’Enfant for Washington – also in view of an active assimilation and of a modernity considered as a problematic process rather than as the inevitable destiny (the “end of history”) of a monolithic thought.

The case of Addis Abeba is somewhat reminiscent of the tragic abandonment of Grand-Bassam in the late 19th-century: between 1888 and 1889, emperor Menelik and his wife Taytu Betul had developed an inspired – if approximate – plan for the foundation of a modern tropical city, whose disappointing outcomes were mercilessly exposed by Evelyn Waugh. Revived between 1937 and 1938 by Guidi and Valle’s rationalism imbued with Fascist rhetoric, the plan was destined to fail a second time. In this light, Khartoum emerges as an exceptional case: in the course of an experiment which lasted one and a half century, a Muslim city formerly ruled by an Ottoman regime served as a laboratory for the implementation of various Western theories about the “new city”. Such a complex, fascinating and original topic could not fail to stand out in the history of urban planning. However, it still needed a synthesis to articulate the constant dialectic relationship with its specific political and social circumstances. The static conventions and effervescent unrests of the Victorian era certainly informed the thing that presented itself to the Veronese missionary Alessandro Dal Bosco. Forty years after Khartoum’s Islamic foundation, the settlement looked like a city only by virtue of its “size”, and consisted of a “slum” with “neither [apparent] order nor symmetry” to it. Its complicated street network, perceived as a labyrinth, confirmed the impression of a rural and tribal village that the missionary could not comprehend.

Marina d’Errico’s coup de foudre for today’s Khartoum prompted her to retrace its history and to produce a much-needed synthesis on the basis of documentary and architectural evidence. Her meticulous work testifies to her previous training as a researcher in History of Architecture and Urban Planning. After writing a highly original thesis on the notion of comprensorio in the Vajont area in the aftermath of the tragedy, life’s events led Marina d’Errico to set aside her research interests – until the unpredictable but ineluctable occasion offered by Khartoum, which gave her the extraordinary chance to take up and continue a discourse that had been left open. The result is this precious book, which provides a long-awaited synthesis of the history of this city. Marina d’Errico – whom I had the pleasure to count among my most brilliant students – addresses this previous methodological lesson to a non-specialised audience with the aim to familiarise them with the little-known issue of the history and destiny of Sub-Saharan cities under the sign of a modernity that needs to be exposed.

Introduction

What conditions underlie the invention of a capital city? This routine question raised by urban planning historians is particularly relevant in the case of the capital of Sudan.

In the heyday of urban planning in colonial Africa, the British reconstruction of Khartoum after its re-conquest or – depending on the point of view – capture presents an intriguing ambivalence. On the one hand, we have a series of objective elements that came into play in the planning of the city and should clarify its reading. On the other hand, we have a vast and contradictory body of literature where we can find the most disparate interpretations, including outlandish and legendary ones, such as the theory that the city was planned on the model of the Union Jack to scorn the vanquished Sudanese people.