The Bastides of southwest France - French public architecture

That every meaningful city represents a political system has always been known. Political science developed from the designs for a complete polis. The rules of order which cities have formed certify also those of the state by which they are ruled.... Visible in each city is who rules it and how it is ruled. - Wolfgang Braunfels(1)

Wolfgang Braunfels's city is a book. Exposed, transparent, and legible, the urban environment is an imprint of authority. This authority, according to Braunfels, is not necessarily unified. Within the city contending institutions battle, recording histories of their defeats and victories in stone, brick, wood, and mortar. Indeed, the notion of the city as inscribed by power is now a commonplace in architectural history. Although this essay began very much within this tradition and hardly breaks with it entirely, it does register some doubts about the ability of the built environment to relate such direct messages. The voices said to be registered in the architecture are institutional and empowered. The city is figured as the minutes of a parliamentary session. This is a valid and fascinating tier of meaning to explore, yet it is by no means the only one. How can one see behind the dominant discourses of this parliament of facades? Developments in urban historical geography - and particularly the morphogenetic approach propounded by M. R. G. Conzen - offer the possibility of such a glimpse, arming historians with a strikingly powerful set of tools with which to set about the analysis of the built environment. Nonetheless, though it accepts the palimpsestual nature of the urban text and frames intentionality broadly, this method does not question the iconicity of urban structures, their immediate representation of social relations.(2)

Henri Lefebvre's consideration of space as a product can perhaps help.(3) Space, seen not as the void between human interventions, is cast by Lefebvre as produced by social relations, and as determining the built environment dialectically. His thoughts suggest a modification of the questions one asks of urban space as a historical phenomenon, stressing relations rather than pure authority, dispositions rather than form, and the dialogues of urban pattern rather than the soliloquies of individual structures. It is with these issues in mind that I would like to explore the bastides of southwest France.

Sheer numbers attest to the importance of the bastides in any account of the medieval town.(4) In an effort to colonize the wooded wilderness of southwest France, almost seven hundred towns were founded during the two centuries between 1200 and 1400.(5) Many of these new towns were laid out on a grid plan of intersecting streets [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED], and centered on an arcaded market square [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED].(6) It is this regularity that has engaged the fascination of observers. The regularly planned bastide, strikingly at odds with conventional, organicist accounts of medieval town planning, sits uncomfortably in many histories of the town.(7) Nevertheless, since some bastides were not regularly planned, geometric essences cannot form the basis of a comprehensive typology; this can be established only by taking juridical, geographical, political, and economic circumstances into account.

There is good reason, however, to focus upon the regular bastides. This is not to say that they ought to be examined in isolation from other bastides, or indeed from other European developments; rather, it is proposed that a functional analysis of their form can illumine the determinants underlying the employment of a regular plan in a particular historical context. In testing the directness of address in medieval town planning, it is most telling to examine those foundations in which the language of power is seen to operate most explicitly: regular new towns.(8)

Within the regularly planned bastide the market square is of particular interest and import [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. Not only was it the basic geometric unit, and consequently spatial synecdoche of the new town, but it was also only partly public and subject to a degree of ownership. As such it can be seen as the clearest expression of the founder's power, which was inscribed in the square and in the ordered distribution of property - the environment of his subjects. Such an inscription, like the distinctive and evocative footprint of a wild animal, inspires, despite physical absence, an awareness of presence. I wish, however, to avoid a facile opposition of oppressor and oppressed, and to demonstrate the inadequacy of its insertion into the production of the bastides, which was governed not by oppression per se, but rather by the friction engendered by interaction, expedience, pragmatism, legal compromise, and profit. The essay posits a functional analysis of the grid plan, hypothesizing concerning responsibilities for its use and the intentions of those who employed it; but thepaper also aims at maintaining a dialogical view of the spatial dispositions of the towns, in which urban form is read as the result of both immediate, intended planning and of mediated, social relations.(9)