Table of Contents
Summary
This project investigates urban reconstruction in Western Europe after the First World War. Based on a study of four cities destroyed by military operations in France and Belgium (Dinant, Lens, Reims, Ypres), it will produce an urban history of the transition from war to peace.
A comparative and transnational endeavour, this project will approach inter-war Europe as a case-study in urban resilience. It will demonstrate that the recovery of devastated cities was a profoundly unequal process. During and after the conflict, urban resilience depended on each city’s capacity to leverage its symbolic, political, and economic capital. Their recovery was also predicated on the mobilization of local, national, and transnational resources and actors.
The project’s public engagement programme will encourage a historical and interdisciplinary reflection on the urban legacies of contemporary conflicts, as many cities in Ukraine and the Middle East for instance, now once again face the challenges of reconstruction.
Originality
The 1914 invasion of Belgium and France brought to light the civilian dimensions of the Great War and its characteristic ‘totalizing logic’ (John Horne). But the experience of those 4 million people who fled their homes before the German army arrived only to return to the ruins of the battlefield has been neglected. Both the historiography and the collective memory of the First World War have concurred in consigning them to the margins. The history of the post-war stabilization of Western Europe has been mainly written from diplomatic, financial, and economic perspectives. Although it entailed not only the reconstitution of the devastated areas, but also involved the rebuilding of the lives of those who had fled the combat zones, this scholarship focuses on the role of states, financial institutions, and international organizations. The return and urban resettlement of refugees and veterans has been overlooked as a result. By contrast, this project will emphasize the active role that local populations played in the reconstruction of their cities. From the schooling of children to the reconstitution of local markets and industries, through the resumption of public services, reconstruction concerned every aspect of their lives and of the urban fabric, including the resumption of associational life.
Moreover, while the reconstitution of the French countryside has been meticulously researched, urban reconstruction has been studied mainly from a local viewpoint by local historians, archivists and museum curators. Scholarship from the fields of geography, architecture, urban planning and heritage studies have often studied it from the technical perspective of the professional practitioner.
This project’s three objectives underline the originality of a history of reconstruction conceived as a case-study in urban resilience. Originally employed by ecologists (C.S. Holling), resilience is now a contested but central concept for urbanists and social scientists concerned with environmental and security risks. This project will thus draw on current interdisciplinary reflections to study urban recovery after 1918. It aims to explain a city’s capacity to withstand and recover from a shock as severe as industrial warfare in 1914-18.
Objectives
The study of four cities – Lens and Reims in France; Dinant and Ypres in Belgium – will provide the foundation of our comparative analysis. Our case-studies allow for the careful management and analysis of the richness and volume of the extant source material, and they also give access to the full gamut of relevant experiences. The common experience of industrial warfare of these cities and their respective symbolic significance underline their comparability and suitability to a transnational analysis. Their individual characteristics also allow us to study the reconstitution of a wide range of economic, cultural, and political functions performed by cities.
This approach will introduce a high degree of granularity to this comparative study. It will challenge the narrative of reconstruction trumpeted by national governments from the mid-1920s onwards, as a story of linear progress towards complete recovery. Urban reconstruction was an uneven, contested process which revealed profound inequalities within and across nation-states. The degree of destruction and social dislocation suffered by these cities exemplified the urban aftermath of industrial warfare. But they enjoyed unequal levels of political, financial, and symbolic capital which determine their resilience.
This project posits that their individual trajectories of recovery were predicated on their capacity to mobilize national authorities, to rely on transnational networks of urban experts, or to tap into the financial resources offered by philanthropic initiatives at the national and international levels.
The project will pursue three specific objectives:
1. A social history of reconstruction
It sets out to explain how urban communities overcame the upheavals of war to re-establish social ties torn asunder by the conflict. The material reconstruction and the reassertion of communal identities and relations were not merely concomitant but entwined processes. Rebuilding infrastructures and restoring local economies were not just material challenges, for they provided the framework for the reconstitution of social relations, of political life, and for the reintegration of refugees and combatants. The historiography’s emphasis on the role of states and international institutions has unwittingly reinforced the vision of these populations as passive beneficiaries of relief operations. However, the reconstruction saw urban populations reassert their social agency and political identities after the conflict had redefined existing notions of citizenship. National legislations providing for the reconstruction thus created new categories within the citizenry, echoing the post-war emergence of “human rights” in the international arena. Finally, the devastated regions of Belgium and France also had to deal with the divisive legacy of foreign occupation.
2. An urban history of the transition from war to peace
This project sets out to analyse the processes of cultural and political demobilization which governed the transition to peace. Reconstruction, remembrance, and renewal appear indissociable, as the experience of war violence and invasion, of exile and occupation, determined visions of the post-war urban and national communities. The challenges of material reconstruction were indeed construed within a broader political and cultural narrative which lent its significance to the way in which Allied nations came to terms with the war experience and its legacy. Central to the initial phase of social mobilization in 1914, the fate of ‘martyr towns’ played a key role in the remobilization effort of 1916-17. Their reconstruction proved all the more challenging than it took place when belligerent societies wished to discontinue wartime exertions. Yet, it required maintaining and redirecting the momentum of mobilization. To do so, local, national and transnational efforts drew on the wartime rhetoric of sacrifice and solidarity. Within and across Allied nations, remembrance and mourning formed the problematic nexus of demobilization and reconstruction. The adoption of ruined cities by British towns was but one example of the transnational covenant of mourning and remembrance that the reconstruction sealed.
3. A history of urban resilience and recovery
A historical study of urban resilience, this project will strive to reconcile the materiality and discursivity of the process of reconstruction. It will study the rebuilding of urban structures as well as the socio-political and cultural dynamics underpinning the recovery of urban communities. This innovative history of the urban aftermath of war will pursue a critical and sustained engagement with interdisciplinary approaches to urban resilience. It will also place the activities of architects, planners, and decision-makers into their national and international contexts and trace the intellectual history of urban planning and policymaking back to the experience of war and exile. The project will thus highlight the critical role of transnational networks in the transformation of urban expertise in the interwar years.
Methodology
This project will combine the methods of transnational history with new perspectives in urban history and urban studies.
This comparative and transnational history of reconstruction will reveal the long-underestimated circulation of representations, people and funds as well as the international networks of sociability that contributed to the stabilization of Europe after 1918. Such networks operated both within and across national and imperial boundaries.
The project will indeed explore three types of transnationalism (Clavin): caritative, municipal, and urbanist. The “caritative transnationalism” corresponds to the work of pre-existent organizations like the Red Cross and to wartime philanthropic initiatives which continued their work after the Armistice. Private initiatives like that of Anne Morgan in New York City directly drew on class as well as on urban sociability, while the British Catholic Women’s League relied on faith to sustain the “mothering” of ruined churches. Gendered discourses also played a role in framing the activities of many such organizations. “Municipal transnationalism” refers to the exchanges established by local authorities across national boundaries, prefiguring twinning and other developments which prospered after WWII. Finally, the “urbanist transnationalism” – embodied by international networks of urban planners and reformers – shaped the intellectual and technical history of urban reconstruction. The project will thus contribute to the study of expertise, technocracy, and social reform in the first half of the twentieth century.
The project will mobilize a wide range of primary sources, drawn from local, national, institutional, and private archives in Belgium, France, Switzerland, the USA, and the UK.
Administrative and institutional sources will be used to document the activities of local and national authorities and their interactions with urban populations, civil society organizations, and urban and humanitarian experts. The press, as well as private archives and those of voluntary organizations, will document the contributions and responses to reconstruction of urban communities. Iconographic representations produced during and after the conflict will be scrutinized alongside public and private discourses to analyse the symbolic significance of the reconstruction. Belgian, French, and British archives hold rich and voluminous material illustrating the mobilization of national and transnational networks of expert urbanists.
The exploitation of US-based archival collections is essential to document the role of international relief operations (e.g. Commission for Relief in Belgium), of US-based philanthropists (e.g. Ann Morgan), of key urban planners (e.g. G.B. Ford), and of humanitarian organizations (e.g. Rockefeller Foundation). Swiss collections finally provide a valuable view of urban reconstruction through the lens of organizations affiliated to the international Red Cross movement or to the League of Nations.
