Maps are compelling, aren’t they?
And ancient maps doubly so. Gorgeously pictorial, they all – from every culture, scattered across the world – have striking similarities.
For ages now I have been learning the geography of New Amsterdam by heart: The mill, the fort, the House of the Fiscal, the Market Place, the East India Brewery. The beginnings of New York are absorbing, and not just because of what they became.This was a new beginning, a cautious toe in a brave new world. And so: it was on an island, bordered on two sides by rivers. And where the settlement faced landwards, there was a city wall.
The wall is shown in 1670, though its survey was done in 1660.
Cast your eyes across the globe to Tangier, less than a decade after the map of New Amsterdam.
It was not conquest or exploration, but marriage which brought Tangier into the hands of the English. Charles II, for all his mistresses, managed to take a wife: Catherine of Braganza. Whilst many dowries might be a house, or a farm, Catherine’s were two cities: Tangier and Bombay.
Look at Tangier. Bordered on two sides by water, and hunched with its back to the sea, the city is fortified by a spiky city wall. Within, houses are crammed in streets,and it has a castle, a church, fruit groves. Without, a mighty port on the sea and wide open space as far as the eye can see.
Like a man clinging to the side of a cliff who gets a little purchase, these new settlements grabbed a defensive plot and clung to it for dear life until they felt a little more at home. Which, unfortunately, the English never did in Tangiers. The Moors soon ousted them.
It was not just in the New World this happened; it made sense in Europe. Look at Bern, Switzerland:
Or Durham in England:
It’s all very Maslow. It was in 1943 that Abraham Maslow showed how, when we are in extreme need, we take care of our comforts in a particular order.
Food, water and shelter comes as a first; and it is swiftly followed by the need to be part of a community, being protected from violence. The early colonial strongholds are this triangle in map form. They show with blatant clarity how man sets out to conquer the world. With extreme caution.
As a country becomes one’s own, we can spread out a little. Get our feet under the table , so to speak. We know the end of this story: we can see any of these urban sprawls today. But I’m closing on a city that never was, a plan made by a man in 1717.
It was a plan for a colonial city. And it was to be called Azilia, and based right in the middle of the fruitful state of Georgia by a man called Sir Robert Montgomery.
It was to be twenty miles square: not hedged by water, but by great thick city walls. No longer hunched against a patch of coast, but out and proud in the middle of paradise. Those squares? Each is an estate, one mile square. There are 116 of these in the plan. In the centre, a city three miles square surrounded by a ‘void’ of green land. This is a place built with security in mind, sure: but also self-fulfillment.
A colonial paradise: a sign that we are home in far distant lands.
It was never built. But to me it is a bridge between those hunched cities, with their backs to the sea and their muskets trained over the city wall, and today’s great urban conglomerations.
A missing link.