Introduction: Cities on Paper: On the Materiality of Paper in Urban Planning

Digital techniques and tools are steadily pushing the visualization, analysis, and design of urban environments into the virtual realm. Yet, despite the ubiquity of geographic information systems as well as computational, algorithmic, and three-dimensional (3D) modeling software that integrate statistical data and quantitative metrics, planners still contend with permits, censuses, plans, notices, field surveys, and drawings: documents that are transcribed or printed on paper. ¹ The immateriality of digital technologies and electronic transactions contrasts with the ongoing physical uses of paper and invites an examination of the meanings and values of the materiality of paper in the history of urban planning.

Drawn plans and maps have long been central to city planning. But the intertwined phenomena of industrialization and urbanization during the long nineteenth century steadily made paper pervasive within the bureaus of the various professions invested in city building and its governance. One product of industrialization—the mass production of paper—went hand in hand with a fundamental catalyst of urbanization—the bureaucratization of state and municipal administrations. This relationship made paper a ubiquitous instrument of building, planning, and urban governance practices, fundamentally altering the ways that architects, engineers, urban planners, landscape architects, and administrators conceived of, built, and publicized urban development campaigns. Because paper offered a material means for the municipal, national, and colonial programs that spearheaded urbanization campaigns to manage development, the production and organization of documents substantiated a fundamental infrastructural project of and for urban planning.

This special section of the Journal of Urban History brings together a collection of five essays that examine the historical role of the medium of paper in the practices of urban planning and urban governance, including cartography, arboriculture, maintenance, and the production and dissemination of expert knowledge, in the United States and Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Tilo Amhoff, Sonja Dümpelmann, Min Kyung Lee, Anna Vallye, and Sean Weiss examine how urban planners, engineers, architects, gardeners, foresters, and administrators marshaled paper documents, such as maps, photographs, diagrams, charts, paperwork, templates, lists, cards, and books. While such artifacts are familiar forms of evidence in urban history, they have traditionally been valuable for the kinds of written, graphic, and pictorial information they convey. The contributors to this group of essays probe what it means to treat the information transcribed on the surface of paper in concert with assessing paper documents as material objects. To consider the historical significance of the materiality of paper documents is to address how they were assembled, organized, reproduced, circulated, distributed, and archived. In making such an inquiry, the contributors cast in sharp relief the complex practices, processes, relationships, and methods of urban planning that cannot be fully explained by the historical study of urban form, spatial analysis, or intellectual history alone. Instead, these historical actions were indelibly marked on paper. In this introduction to these essays, we present recent literature focusing on the materiality of paper and the scholarly inroads that have been made into its implications on the urban realm. It is ultimately our goal to demonstrate the significance and value of the material culture of paper in urban planning linked to the shaping of modern cities.

Two principal issues inform the contributors’ interests in the role of paper in urban planning. The first one concerns the historical evidence assembled in analyses of cities during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As architectural, landscape, and urban historians who all assign an important role to archival research, the contributors to this section routinely handle the paper detritus that burgeoned as part of urban planning and building campaigns. Unlike the historians of earlier periods who devote enormous energy to foraging for that rare paper document to piece together historical evidence, the historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries expend their energy rummaging through volumes of records to extract information. ² Precisely because this overabundance of paper was a function of the bureaucracies that produced, disseminated, and stored it, the methods of analyzing it have recently been called into question and bring us to a second issue concerning the interpretation of these paper documents. Media theorist and cultural historian Ben Kafka underscores an important shift in the researcher’s relationship to such records. As Kafka points out, researchers have traditionally drawn on the information contained in records, thus “looking through paperwork, but [they] seldom paused to look at it.” ³ Kafka is among the scholars who have sounded a call to examine the very materiality of the paper that has traditionally evaded critical scrutiny. The contributors to this special section owe a shared debt to the scholars of media studies, science and technology studies, anthropology, and sociology who have reassessed the significance of paper and whose scholarship is cited and discussed in the group of essays that follow.

On a broader level, this literature has emerged in response to the digitization of virtually every domain of communication. Historian Roger Chartier describes some of its more salient effects on the ordering of writing. He expounds that “the electronic world . . . provides a new technique for inscribing and disseminating the written word, it inspires a new relationship with texts, and it imposes a new form of organization on texts.” ⁴ Responding to these and other changes in the ways that information is handled and communicated, this new corpus of literature shows a keen awareness of the historical media of visual and written communication (whether computer screens, quill pens, or parchment) and of the means of organizing and storing such media (whether data clouds, file cabinets, or scrinia). Kafka’s scholarship is particularly relevant to this special section because he focuses on the explosion of paperwork in the nineteenth century. Other scholars of media studies such as Lisa Gitelman, Markus Krajewski, and Cornelia Vismann are also pertinent. Although they take a more episodic approach to address the changing materiality of communication over longer spans of time, they all touch on the vital role of paper in the nineteenth century when it became industrially produced, leading to its ongoing proliferation during the twentieth century. ⁵ In so doing, these authors notably reevaluate the role of modern state bureaucracies in terms of its paper culture and paperwork’s role in modern governance practices.

Although this body of literature builds on Max Weber’s classic interpretation of bureaucracies and Michel Foucault’s examination of state institutions to show how paperwork contributes to the shaping of power relations, it also diverges from these earlier accounts in significant ways. Recent studies challenge Weber’s conception of paperwork as a neutral manifestation of bureaucratic rationality and instead shed a light on its instrumentality. These studies demonstrate both how paperwork reifies bureaucratic practices and how its sheer quantity renders such practices unmanageable. This reassessment derives from work in science and technology studies, especially Bruno Latour’s writing on the agency of objects—paper or otherwise. Latour calls such objects “mediators” that have the capacity to “transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or elements they are supposed to carry.” ⁶ For Latour, the agency of mediators does not necessarily rest in the single object but rather in hybrid relationships between them and other human actors, thereby casting a network of relations. In his ethnographic method, Latour follows files as they are transformed into administrative actions and he demonstrates how the materiality of documents shapes processes, actions, and ultimately our social lives. ⁷ Scholars debate the implications of Latour’s theories and question whether agency is contained in the objects themselves or in the social and psychological impulses behind their use. ⁸ Nevertheless, the privileged position assigned to mediators has compelled a reappraisal of Michel Foucault’s emphasis on discourse as the central way of understanding the expansion of disciplinary society and its palpable grip over human life. This new corpus of scholarship has not abandoned the study of discourse in the analysis of power relations, however; rather, it examines the words and images on the page in a dynamic relationship with the page itself.

Scholars of the urban realm have recently shown the study of paper’s materiality to be a productive mode of inquiry. ⁹ Recent theories of materiality have brought it to bear on analyses of the fairly mundane practices of paper pushing that are also vital to making, governing, and maintaining cities—particularly in the context of the more recent past. Matthew Hull’s Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan is a touchstone publication on the materiality of paper in the urban environment. As an anthropologist, Hull provides an ethnographic account of the uses of paperwork within the Pakistani urban bureaucracy in Islamabad. ¹⁰ Although Hull’s study begins with the capital’s creation in the 1960s, he principally examines uses of paper during the past two decades. Hull probes the ways in which administrators and everyday people implement paper documents to navigate the urban bureaucracy at multiple scales, ranging from the city’s master plan and land expropriation to the construction of unauthorized mosques. From a different perspective, Robert Beauregard’s Planning Matter: Acting with Things examines paper documents, such as maps, drawings, and photographs, among the array of objects used by planning professionals. ¹¹ Written from the vantage of planning theory, Beauregard’s assessment unfolds in episodic chapters that introduce the theory to the planning discipline. Although Hull and Beauregard offer exemplarily approaches for conceptualizing paper in urban planning practices and although they both touch on historical case studies, the significance of paper itself as a locus of historical meaning is less of a priority for them.

While this recent literature has made paper a topical issue in the study of cities, a number of scholars working outside of this theoretical framework have already highlighted its importance and describe some of the fundamental implications of paperwork in relation to city building. Barbara Shapiro Comte has rigorously studied the “paper-driven bureaucracy” of Parisian architectural culture and the endless parade of construction drawings and paperwork that played regulatory and legal roles in state building campaigns during the nineteenth century. ¹² “Nothing was improvised,” she writes, “a hierarchy of functionaries imposed a four-phased system of checks and balances . . . driven by a regimented sequence of drawings, segregated into conceptual and functional divisions, according to chronology, responsibility, and expertise.” ¹³ As Amhoff and Lee underscore in their essays on urban cartography in Berlin and Paris, respectively, maps attained a similar regulatory and legal status as part of urban planning practices. Photographs played a comparable regulatory role in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Paris when buildings slated for expropriation were systematically photographed and placed in the expropriation files held by the municipal administration. ¹⁴ In these instances, paper images served a privileged role in the expanding bureaucracies of architecture and urban planning to record, regulate, and administer urban planning.

These uses of paper gained additional value in light of paper’s qualities of reproducibility and mobility. Although it is beyond the scope of this collection of essays, it is important to note the relationship between the circulation of paper documents and urban development campaigns in the colonial context. Latour anticipated such a connection in his description of the French explorer La Pérouse and his mission to the Pacific to bring “a better map” back Louis XVI. When La Pérouse arrived at the island of Sakhalin, he found that local inhabitants were well versed in geography and they drew a map of the island in the sand. La Pérouse, however, was charged with bringing a paper map back to the king to demonstrate “who was right and wrong about whether Sakhalin was an island, who will own this and that part of the world, and along which routes the next ships should sail.” ¹⁵ As Latour underscores, these endeavors all required paper: what he calls an “an immutable mobile.” ¹⁶ The need to record and transmit information on paper would also be a hallmark of centralized colonial administrations and extended to their urban development campaigns. Whether it was the French in North Africa, the British on the Subcontinent, or the Dutch in Indonesia, colonizers sustained spatial control and dominance through the use of bureaucratic procedures that were justified as rational and scientific. Accordingly, scholarly attention to urban informality speaks to the ways in which many urban dwellers are denied spatial and social rights based on their exclusion from these bureaucratic processes formed by and through documents such as housing titles, work contracts, and identification papers. ¹⁷ The production and movement of these paper documents underscore the government institutions that accorded them authority and that simultaneously were reinforced by their circulation.

Despite the fundamental relevance of paper documents among administrators, architects, engineers, contractors, and builders, paper’s qualities of reproducibility and mobility also meant that the very medium encouraged the distribution of text and image among wider audiences, placing urban planning documents under the purview of multiple publics. As Paul Dobraszczyk shows, technical representations, especially the contract drawings and specifications that were initially created to facilitate communication between civil engineers and contractors to build London’s drainage system, were also useful as publicity materials. According to Dobraszczyk, civil engineers “must gain the confidence and cooperation of a host of diverse audiences if they are to have any chance of successfully transforming their designs into artifacts.” ¹⁸ For Dobraszczyk, civil engineers routinely forge “alliances” and this tendency also hastened the public transmission of such documents to garner popular support for the project. Claude Baillargeon explores a parallel phenomenon in relation to the photographic practices of civil engineers in the second half of the nineteenth century. ¹⁹ Baillargeon examines the “network of exchange” that emerged at libraries, archives, and world’s fairs, as construction photographs circulated internationally to facilitate the transfer of expert knowledge among civil engineers and the wider public.

For the very same reasons that paper was able to transmit professional knowledge to multiple audiences, it has also contributed to the public’s participation in crafting the urban realm. Kevin D. Murphy and Sally O’Driscoll use the expression “ephemeral intervention” to describe the fleeting uses of images—on paper and otherwise—in urban public spaces. ²⁰ While their investigation focuses on “political demonstrations and politically engaged art practices,” it is not wholly irrelevant to the analysis of urban planning. As Dümpelmann discusses in her following essay, beginning in the 1970s, West Berliners protested against poor street tree care and they printed and circulated “newsletters, Xeroxed leaflets, and pamphlets on recycled paper” to ameliorate street tree upkeep as part of civic responsibility.

Although paper contributed to participatory practices in the shaping of cities, more often its use in urban planning raises questions concerning bureaucratic authority. With the proliferation of paper came increasing needs to store the paperwork and the nineteenth century witnessed the burgeoning of institutional bodies such as archives and libraries that facilitated the storage of all kinds of paperwork. However, paper was not only confined to these spaces. All governmental agencies became responsible for distributing, sorting, tracking, and storing the documentation that became the basis for their public work. As Latour traces in his study of France’s Conseil d’État, a law begins with a written claim conveying an original complaint that becomes part of a file to potentially become law. This path of transformation is materialized in and through paper and also includes “stamps, elastic bands, paperclips, and other office paraphernalia which are the indispensable tools of cases.” ²¹ The paperwork and its paraphernalia are kept on desks and stored on shelves, and transported on carts through corridors, requiring an infrastructure and precise building layouts to accommodate them. ²² Sometimes, these documents become part of the public domain, and the determination of what is made publicly accessible is a matter not only of state security and privacy but also of physical access. These institutional bodies control the proliferation and dissemination of these papers, posing questions about power relations between the state and individuals.

Those individuals—scholars included—who want to review public affairs must often navigate numerous obstacles that include gaining an expertise in the methods and categories of administration as well as in finding and traveling to the appropriate depository. Although many institutions are steadily placing archival documents online, the digital format of these documents often lack fundamental information. For example, the traces of the material handling of the documents, such as hand-written annotations or timestamps, are frequently undecipherable. Furthermore, the organization of the paperwork in particular filing systems is often lost. These issues return us to the matter of archival research and its ongoing pertinence for understanding urban history through the lens of the materiality of paper documents.

Engaging with the issues raised in this introduction, the contributors to this group of essays examine how the production, distribution, and use of paper historically conditioned and mediated urban planning and governance practices in the United States and Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors scrupulously dissect the materiality of paper documents in concert with their visual and semantic registers to demonstrate the historical agency of paper in the practices of urban planning. In so doing, they address a series of interrelated questions. What were the social, political, economic, epistemological, and ontological values of the paper materialities that became and continue to be the basis of urban planning? Accordingly, if paper was the surface for building cities and for communication among the officials who were charged with their administration, what were the implications of such a thorough mediation of urban space? How did the materiality of paper and the subsequent modes of representation it engendered shape urban space? How did planning documents arise in concert with archival systems based in paperwork? Finally, how did paper generate and aggregate new urban forms and practices, and offer opportunities for opposition?

This group of essays progresses roughly chronologically, beginning in the early nineteenth century and ending in the postwar period in the twentieth century. The first two essays examine the uses of maps in urban planning practices in Paris and Berlin. Although maps are the most traditional form of paper images in urban planning, these essays investigate the uses and challenges of the medium during periods of dramatic state-led modernization campaigns. In the first essay, Min Kyung Lee examines the institutional implementation of maps in Paris during the long nineteenth century. She emphasizes the steady legal incorporation of orthographic mapping, which provided geometric and quantitative representations of cities, mediating planning and urban spatial conditions. Lee exposes deeply held convictions embedded in the documents, which contained the “capacity to describe accurately the terrain and the world.” According to her, “this belief was not located in the image itself but in the institutions created to produce and maintain those plans.” She asserts that French bureaucracy was shaped by the management of these maps, which were agents that in turn gave value to the centralized administration that oversaw Paris’s urban development.

The second essay investigates analogous uses of maps and plans in Berlin’s urban development campaigns in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tilo Amhoff studies maps and plans as media and cultural techniques that served as mechanisms of design, drawing, and regulation. Amhoff distinguishes between maps as devices that record and plans as devices that project. He situates the use of these documents within the profession of Städtebau, or urban design, and considers how different kinds of maps and plans intersected, coordinated, guided, and ultimately regulated urban planning efforts on the urban scales of the building, of the city, and of the region. By closely scrutinizing the maps and plans as material, visual, and discursive artifacts, Amhoff asserts that they were a means to represent, theorize, and organize the future of modern Berlin. Ultimately, he shifts our understanding of maps and plans as merely descriptions and projections of urban form to legal instruments for urban governance of the urban territory.

In the third essay, Sean Weiss explores an enigmatic use of paperwork among the municipal engineers who managed street maintenance in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Paris. With the growth of personal liability in the period, Parisians demanded to be financially compensated for accidents caused by negligent street maintenance. In response, the city charged the same engineers with investigating and advising on the validity of such claims. Weiss examines the paperwork that engineers compiled as part of a case concerning a woman who requested an indemnity after she stepped in a pothole and sprained her leg. As Weiss contends, the engineers assembled the paperwork in the case, especially two photographs, according to the visual and material conventions of bureaucratic rationality to make the administration appear inculpable and defend its decision to deny her claim. Accordingly, Weiss makes an argument about the contested status of paperwork in the administration of street maintenance and urban governance more broadly.

The fourth essay turns to the uses of paper in the context of urban arboriculture, an apropos contribution since tree pulp is the basis of industrially produced paper and conditions its materiality. Sonja Dümpelmann examines a wide variety of paper documents for planting, managing, and preserving street trees in Berlin, from the late nineteenth century through the 1970s. By examining this longer durée, Dümpelmann importantly demonstrates how the universal application of paper led to a multiplicity of uses and meanings that accommodated the “changeable nature und unpredictability” of street trees themselves. Due to the intractable nature of the trees, urban foresters, gardeners, and citizens often engaged multiple forms of paper media to create dynamic and flexible systems for surveying, planning, and recording them. Ultimately, Dümpelmann illuminates how paper mapping and indexing systems anticipated the flexibility associated with the digital tree inventories and management systems that are ubiquitous today.

The final contribution moves beyond of the uses of paper in the processes of urban development to consider paper’s double role as heuristic device and instrument of publicity for urban planners. Anna Vallye turns to the use of graphic diagrams in the work of German-American architect and planner Martin Wagner during the first half of the twentieth century. Vallye shows that Wagner’s visualization of statistical data served to mediate between economic calculations and the physical organization of urban space, on one hand, and to assert the authority of urban planners as these diagrams circulated through publications and exhibitions, on the other hand. Vallye argues that this twin role of data visualization subjected the “physical territory to a paper regime of computation and representation.” She terms this regime “balance-sheet city.” Because Wagner’s career spanned across the Atlantic, Vallye’s essay holds important implications for reconsidering paper’s distinct qualities of reproduction and mobility, as the images she addresses circulated internationally, constructed ideas about cities, and codified expert knowledge.

As these essays demonstrate, paper sparked a wide variety of uses and meanings in urban planning practices and processes. Despite its ubiquity, these authors make a compelling case for analyzing paper media as part of the historical reality of cities. While there are many topics not addressed in this volume, our hope is that the following studies compel further critical discussion on and research into the role that material objects hold over practices of urban planning, as well as in their histories.