The cities of the future that emerged from nothing rarely fulfill the destiny assigned to them by their founders. One of the best known cases is that of Saint Petersburg, the dazzling baroque city devised by Tsar Peter the Great (1672-1725) in order to locate a new capital for his empire on the marshy shore of the Baltic Sea, which was at the same time the flagship of its modernization. The least of it were the thousands of workers who would die trying.
The inspiration for his gigantic project had been found in Amsterdam, perhaps the most vibrant, prosperous and modern city of the time and on whose docks the Tsar worked for a time disguised as a stevedore-spy. Upon his return home, Pedro ordered the Swiss architect Domenico Trezzini to convert the swamps of the Neva River into canals in the style of those of his admired Amsterdam, which would soon have baroque palaces, churches and sumptuous homes designed by architects brought from half of Europe.
The most important contribution of Catherine the Great (1729-1796) to St. Petersburg was not only to bring the construction of the Winter Palace to a successful conclusion, but also to endow it with impressive works of art destined to form the basis of the future Hermitage museum. Of course, Saint Petersburg was still looking to Europe, since none of the pieces in the collection were by Russian artists; and this attitude would not change until the end of the 19th century, when the city was flooded by a wave of Russian nationalism that had little affinity with that of the tsars.
Then the revolutions would come and St. Petersburg would change its name with each new regime change. Petrograd, Leningrad... until finally recovering its original name in 1991, after the fall of the Berlin wall. Even so, the Saint Petersburg of today has little to do with the city of the future that Tsar Peter imagined, nor with that of Putin's childhood, which, as everyone knows, is Petersburg.
Daniel Brook speaks of Saint Petersburg in A history of future cities (Norton, 2013), along with other cities of the future such as Bombay, Shanghai, or Dubai, as he could also have spoken of Madrid, Canberra or Brasilia. But the truth is that, as happens with children, they rarely -if never- turn out as their parents would have wanted.
Bombay had its origins on a few small islands off the western coast of India inhabited by humble fishing communities. It experienced a first period of growth under Portuguese tutelage, before being ceded to the British Crown when Charles II of England married Caterina de Braganza. But it would not live its years of greatest splendor until the British East India Company took control, between 1668 and 1858, the year in which it was returned to the British Crown.
Created as a kind of architectural carbon copy of London with tropical trim, Bombay soon became the second city of the British Empire and, incidentally, the most progressive and modern in all of Asia. The idea was based on equipping the Hindus with a British mentality, that is, Indians on the outside, English on the inside. Along the way, however, they forgot about the increasingly large population that lived just four steps from the showy neo-Gothic buildings in the center, and that are now those hyper-populated slums left by the hand of God.
The beginnings of Shanghai were similar to those of Bombay: from a handful of fishing villages near the mouth of the Yangtze in the Pacific, to transform in record time into a populous emporium whose prosperity attracted not only the British but also the French, Portuguese and Americans. In its most glorious years it was the bomb, even, or especially, during the Opium War. Western merchants lived like royalty while ignoring Chinese laws. But well before the Mau revolution, it had already entered a time of decline. Another failed urban experiment.
As for Dubai, it is hard to believe that its current kitsch effervescence will not follow in the footsteps of the other cities of the future portrayed by Brook in his book whose reading invites us to expect the worst for today's Barcelona, which insists on amending without rhyme or reason. Cerdà's successful and farsighted plan. Barcelonans on the outside, Danes on the inside? How awful!
