Building Regulations and Urban Form, 1200-1900

Terry R. Slater, Sandra M.G. Pinto, Terry R. Slater, Sandra M.G. Pinto

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780367882037
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317170945
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Towns are complicated places. It is therefore not surprising that from the beginnings of urban development, towns and town life have been regulated. Whether the basis of regulation was imposed or agreed, ultimately it was necessary to have a law-based system to ensure that disagreements could be arbitrated upon and rules obeyed. The literature on urban regulation is dispersed about a large number of academic specialisms. However, for the most part, the interest in urban regulation is peripheral to some other core study and, consequently, there are few texts which bring these detailed studies together. This book provides perspectives across the period between the high medieval and the end of the nineteenth century, and across a geographical breadth of European countries from Scandinavia to the southern fringes of the Mediterranean and from Turkey to Portugal. It also looks at the way in which urban regulation was transferred and adapted to the colonial empires of two of those nations.

1
Building regulations and urban form

An introduction

Terry R. Slater and Sandra M. G. Pinto

Towns are complicated places. They are complicated socially, culturally, and economically, and they consequently have complicated plans and built forms. It is therefore not surprising that from the beginnings of urban development, towns and town life have been regulated. In some societies that regulation has been ‘top-down’, based on royal authority, whilst in others it has been culturally based, with townspeople agreeing on what was necessary to ensure neighbourly living. Whether the basis of regulation was imposed or agreed, ultimately it was necessary to have a law-based system to ensure that disagreements could be arbitrated upon and rules obeyed. Such courts could have jurisdiction at national, regional, urban, or neigh-bourhood scales.

We need to distinguish carefully the difference between urban regulation and planning. Planning is almost always ‘top-down’ and concerns the establishment of a framework for an urban area, including any, or all, of its streets, public buildings, plot patterns, building types, services (water supply and sewage disposal for example), and market spaces. It is usually conceived two-dimensionally and can be recorded on a flat plan. Its scale can range from a plan for a whole town, down to that for a small neighbourhood. Town planning is usually thought of as originating in the late nineteenth century as a necessary accompaniment to the processes of industrialization. In addition, planning can also concern itself with the distribution of land uses, the density of occupation, and a myriad other details of urban living depending on the level of bureaucracy acceptable in a particular society.¹ Since this book is concerned with the period 1200–1900 CE, it might be thought that planning has little to do with this period and authors can necessarily focus their attention on urban regulation. However, this would be a mistake. We have known from the earliest histories of the town-planning movement, written to give academic respectability to a new profession in the early twentieth century, that town planning can be recognized in almost every historical period.² Research in the post-World-War-II period has emphasized through very detailed studies, that this is indeed so.³ It has also shown that these earlier phases of town planning necessarily required some level of regulatory control to ensure their success. Some of the chapters that follow therefore make some reference to these phases of earlier town planning and it forms a substantive part of several chapters including Abrahamse and Rutte’s Chapter 7 where developments in late-medieval Elburg, in the Netherlands, forms the exemplar. Indeed, the whole book can be read as an extended case study of developments that led to modern urban planning.

Whereas town planning has an extensive literature regarding its origins in western societies and the story is reasonably well-known, the same cannot be said for urban regulation. There is, in fact, a substantial and substantive literature concerning urban regulation, but it is a literature that is dispersed about a large number of academic specialisms. It impinges upon the interests of legal historians, the history of religions, urban environmental history, the history of public health, architecture and building history, planning history, cartographic and art history, historical geography, and urban administration, to name but a few. However, for the most part, the interest in urban regulation is peripheral to some other core study and, consequently, there are few books which bring these detailed studies together. Neither do such studies bring material together from a wide historical and geographical perspective. We do not claim that this is that book, since a multiplicity of authors brings a multiplicity of approaches to the subject. However, we do hope that the book provides a breadth of perspectives across the period between the high medieval and the end of the nineteenth century, and across a large number of the countries of Europe from Scandinavia to the southern fringes of the Mediterranean and from Turkey to Portugal, a geographical breadth that also looks at the way in which urban regulation was transferred and adapted to the colonial empires of two of those European nations (Chapters 10 and 11).

Urban regulation in earlier societies

A few scholars have been concerned to uncover the nature of the societal characteristics of urban regulation within particular religious groups and to try to understand the way in which faith determined ways of neighbourly living in towns. Thus, Alan Webber has provided several papers on the way in which Jewish urban society was regulated in the Talmudic period (c. 200 CE – c. 500 CE) in terms of building regulations. He shows how they derived from a much earlier oral tradition, such as the injunction to provide a parapet to the roof of a house to prevent bloodshed by people falling from an unguarded roof (Deuteronomy 22.8). The Talmudic regulations were especially well-developed in terms of protecting the public street from obstruction by builders and householders; laying down detailed regulations concerning the thickness of walls and the ways in which party walls were to be built; in regulating the construction of underground pits or cellars near a neighbour’s property; restricting noxious uses liable to impinge on a neigh-bour’s comfort; and restricting new building extensions and window positions likely to affect a neighbour’s sense of privacy.⁴ Many of these restrictive regulations were to reappear in later societal contexts, as later chapters will show, but it is important to note here, that they were developed from the law derived from the principles of the faith and could ultimately be enforced by a wronged neighbour in Jewish courts.

There has been rather more written about regulations derived from Islamic law, especially in the last forty years. Much of the earlier literature on Islamic cities was written by French scholars imbued with the cultural prejudices of the colonial era in North Africa and the Middle East. Comparisons were therefore made with Classical city models, the foundation stones of western planning history, and Islamic cities were found wanting and unintelligible in their difference. Research since the 1960s has shown that an understanding of Islamic law is fundamental to understanding the physical form of towns and cities in the Arabic-Islamic world stretching from the Iberian Peninsula to Damascus and beyond.⁵ The legal framework and its physical manifestation in urban space has been summarized by architectural historian Besim Selim Hakim.⁶ He has also used this material to demonstrate that the legal framework has been operative from the beginnings of Islam in the seventh century through to the present and that it could form the basis of a more humane planning system for today. Not surprisingly, Islamic legal historians have also been prominent in this recent revision of our understanding of the Islamic city discovering, as they searched archives in the major cities of Islam, a series of Islamic law texts covering the four Sunni schools of law – Mālikī, Ḥanafī, Shāfiʿī and Ḥanbalī (Chapter 2).⁷ Though the Islamic and Judaic law books have not been directly compared, they bear a remarkable similarity to one another for the perhaps very obvious reason that they are concerned with urban buildings and forms in a similar geographical, climatic, and cultural region.

The Islamic laws, like the Judaic, have at their core the principle of ‘neighbourliness’. Matters that bring neighbours into conflict, where they cannot be resolved by initial negotiation, are judged by the Islamic courts according to the precedents built up over the centuries which were based on initial judgements or sayings of the Prophet. The law books therefore have much to say on walls (especially boundary and party walls) and the doors and windows in those walls; on courtyards and roofs; on wells, water channels and drains; on trees within courtyards which might impinge on a neighbour; and on matters of privacy and overlooking (Chapter 2). Wider matters, overseen by the muḥtasib, included the morphology of streets and culs-de-sac; measurements; the markets and public places; the city walls; and the moral conduct of city dwellers. He was also responsible for regulating the fināʾ, a band on each side of the public street which could be legitimately used by residents in front of their property provided it did not prevent passage along the street. The fināʾ extended vertically as well as horizontally, so householders could build galleries or projecting windows, or even a room that crossed the street to the property opposite, provided that a fully laden camel and its rider could pass unimpeded below.⁸ Another important agent was the qāsim who oversaw the sub-division of properties between heirs. Sub-divisions were often plotted out on paper (hence the Islamic concern with matters of measurement, geometry, and algebra from early medieval times). The underlying principles of division were that it should not lead to damage and that each heir should be able to use his share freely and independently. Thus, wells, baths, water basins, fountains, doors, cantilevered structures, and the like were not divisible; alleys, courtyards, and toilets might be used in common, and rooms and floors, and roofs could be divided, hence the multi-occupation of different floors of buildings as time passed.

All this forms the background to several chapters in this book. In Chapter 2, Muhamad looks in detail at a small part of one of these Islamic law books, the fourteenth-century Tunis Book compiled by Ibn al-Rāmī (d. 1334 CE). Muhamad takes three sections of this compilation to discuss the way in which judges worked out the practical means of implementing the ideals of Sunni Islamic society in an urban context. He uses the sections on ‘the prevention of harm’, ‘the wall’, and ‘streets and utilities’ to unravel the complexities and subtleties of these fourteenth-century law books and demonstrates the way in which, as society changed in a myriad small ways, so the lawyers adapted the regulations within the law books to meet these new situations.

In Chapter 3, Pinto’s examination of building activity in medieval Lisbon shows that the Islamic law codes still formed the basis of regulation, even when the Moors had been expelled from the country, and that the concepts of privacy and non-overlooking held sway until much later. Portuguese (and Spanish) administrators bore titles which clearly derived from Moorish predecessors and their administrative and practical duties were similar. There are few medieval Portuguese documents which refer to building regulations, but one survives from the fourteenth century for Lisbon and this forms the basis of Pinto’s analysis.

Not surprisingly, these law codes were also important in the regulation of Ottoman Istanbul in the eighteenth century as Çokuğraş and Gençer show in Chapter 13. Related published work by Ben-Hamouche is mainly concerned with the activities of the qāsim, the agent in charge of sub-dividing properties in the Ottoman period,⁹ whereas Chapter 13 concentrates on the regulations in eighteenth-century Istanbul promulgated to try to prevent the spread of fire in the city, and those concerned with ensuring good social relationships between the variety of ethnic and religious communities living in Istanbul. Most of the larger North African cities (Algiers, Tunis, Rabat, and the like) were faced with similar problems of ensuring good social relationships between ethnic and religious communities, usually resolved by containing each group into particular urban enclaves.

Christianity, the third great monotheistic faith community, and the one which dominated much of Europe throughout the period with which this book is concerned, did not concern itself with regulating buildings, streets, or town plans in its ecclesiastical courts. These were matters which were essentially secular and therefore the concern of secular, not religious, law. Urban regulation might therefore be expected to derive from Roman origins, since the Christian Church developed, for the most part, within a Roman context in its early years. However, those scholars who have noted this have been quick to say that there was very little Roman law which dealt with buildings and town life. Consequently, Roman cities were beset with problems of frequent fires and collapsing buildings because of poor construction techniques. However, we must be careful of these broad generalities since Lippolis has demonstrated that in late Antiquity there were both laws impacting upon urban construction and plentiful evidence that those laws were attempting to deal with very real problems.¹⁰ First, there was the constant danger of fire, especially in the larger cities such as Rome and Constantinople. To deal with this there were repeated regulatory attempts to enforce minimum distances between domestic buildings. Second, there was the problem of private development, usually of houses and workshops, on public space and within public buildings to the detriment of the civic realm, and third there were regulations concerned to ensure new development did not deprive existing residents of light and air, and views (of the sea for example). Lippolis also provides evidence that urban leaders were at pains to conserve older buildings and prevent their redevelopment or infilling by private development.

Nonetheless, the breakdown of the Roman empire in the west was inevitably followed by a collapse of Roman political structures and of its law. The Roman Church filled the political vacuum to some extent, but Church Canon Law was concerned with solidifying religious orthodoxy, not with building regulations. The academic precision of Roman law was therefore lost, and was not to be recovered until the thirteenth century. It then formed part of legal education in the universities of Europe and, very slowly, some judgements began to show influence from this Roman academic background. Pinto makes brief reference to this in examples from Lisbon in the mid-fifteenth century (Chapter 3) and De ruysscher has provided examples in the Low Countries from the late fifteenth century.¹¹ The arrival of peoples from the north and east into the former Roman territories in the early medieval period brought power structures that were based on military might and tribal allegiancies.¹² The loss of Roman law codes led to the primacy of custom in early medieval law-making. The collective repetition of an action in a regional society made it ‘normal’ and it could be upheld in the courts, whose jurisdiction extended across the space regulated by any one of a range of political intermediaries, from kings and princes at the top of the hierarchy, to urban communities in the middle, and manorial lords at the base. Customary law did not normally concern itself with what took place within private properties but, as towns got larger, court judgements began to intrude on private space by invoking community concern with public safety, especially with fire prevention. Deneweth, in Chapter 6, examines the way in which law makers gradually impinged more and more into the private world of individual properties in Bruges and Antwerp a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Building regulations and urban form: an introduction
• 2 Islamic building regulations: the fourteenth-century Tunis book and its counterparts
• 3 Regulation of private building activity in medieval Lisbon
• 4 Policies and regulations in the forming of Late-Medieval Trogir (Croatia)
• 5 Streets and the Commune: Italy in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance
• 6 Building regulations and urban development in Antwerp and Bruges, 1200–1700
• 7 Building regulations and urban development in Late Medieval Elburg and Early Modern Amsterdam
• 8 Early modern building regulation in England: Midland towns, 1400–1800
• 9 Beautifying the city and improving the streets with building permits: Lyons, 1580–1770
• 10 Risk, (in)security, regulation and architecture in Nouvelle-France
• 11 The politics of health: urban regulation and planning in the Spanish colonies during the eighteenth century
• 12 Regulating the growth of Dublin, 1750–1850
• 13 The development of Ottoman urban regulations: Istanbul, 1700–1900
• 14 Construction regulations in Athens, 1833–64: creating a metropolis
• 15 Building regulations in Livonian towns and their impact on local urban space, 1697–1904
• Index