Flammable Cities: Urban Conflagration and the Making of the Modern World

10. The Great Fire of Hamburg, 1842: From Catastrophe to Reform

10 The Great Fire of Hamburg, 1842 From Catastrophe to Reform D S Fires in cities are generally described as singular events and exceptional catastrophes in their history. The course of a fire, dates and facts about buildings destroyed, and reconstruction plans are often recorded in detail, but “fire historians” seldom look at the social, political, economic, and environmental ramifications, nor at the changes in mental perception brought about in their wake. The impact of a fire is sometimes dramatized to raise money for victim support and restoration funds, although owners of damaged properties often receive adequate compensation from insurance companies or have the opportunity to start new, attractive businesses afterward. But fire is also at times the cause of long-term change and reform, and is a catalyst for the introduction of stricter building regulations, social reform, and more effective governance. Such transformations are only implicitly related to fires, but research frequently reveals fires to be the starting point for social and spatial transformations. We should bear in mind that preindustrial cities frequently burned down and had to be rebuilt. Fire, here, we must define as an “erupting” large blaze.1 These blazes are events spanning a certain time period in a specific place. Ulrich Beck, in his World Risk Society, developed a typology of uncertainty relevant to such 212 events, which differentiates between temporary uncertainty, unaware uncertainty , intended uncertainty, and inadvertent uncertainty. Concerning the threat of fires in cities, he notes that the chain of events preceding them cannot be completely avoided even with comprehensive prevention. To illustrate his point, Beck quotes the Swiss author and dramatist Friedrich Dürrenmatt: “The more planned the action of man, the more unexpectedly he is struck by accident .”2 Risk management assesses insurability based on the frequency of fires as a means of calculating compensation. In this sense, risk becomes a market opportunity for insurance companies, and fires are turned into so many “claims.” Beck develops an important general framework to evaluate catastrophes, but there are few studies that deal specifically with fire.3 Some authors have developed a model to differentiate between four overlapping phases within a disaster management cycle: “1) Emergency responses, 2) Restoration of the restorable , 3) Reconstruction of the destroyed for functional replacement, and 4) Reconstruction for commemoration, betterment and development.”4 Disasters can vary considerably depending on the cause, the extent of destruction, the psychological consequences, the type of reconstruction, and the governance structures before and after modernization. A comparative overview of large urban fires illustrates their significance in a historical context (table 10.1). This The Great Fire of Hamburg, 1842 213 Table 10.1. Some comparative data on big fires and their impact. S F,  L,  H,  C,  (   ) 500,000 inhabitants 160,000 inhabitants 550,000 inhabitants 410,000 inhabitants 13,200 buildings 1,700 buildings 18,000 buildings 28,000 buildings 70,000 homeless 20,000 homeless 100,000 homeless 300,000 homeless ~10 deaths 51 deaths 300 deaths 3,000 deaths 0.6 square miles 0.12 square miles 3.1 square miles 4.5 square miles US$1.8 billion US$1.6 billion US$300 million US$8.6 billion (2005) (2008) (2006) (2005) Sources: Walter G. Bell, The Great Fire of London in 1666 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1971); Julius Faulwasser, Der große Brand und der Wiederaufbau von Hamburg: Ein Denkmal zu den fünfzigjährigen Erinnerungstagen des 5. bis 8. Mai 1842 (Hamburg: Meißner, 1892); Christine Meisner Rosen, The Limits of Power: Great Fires and the Process of City Growth in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Peer Rechenbach and Jürgen Meinert, “Of Fire Disasters and Their Consequences: City Planning, Fire Departments and Safety Measures in Hamburg and Chicago,” in Tales of Two Cities/Stadtgeschichten: Hamburg & Chicago, ed. Claudia Schnurmann and Iris Wigger (Münster: Lit, 2006), 45–55; Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research, “Quick Facts about the 1906 Earthquake and Fires,” http://mceer.buffalo .edu/1906_Earthquake/additional_information/earthquake-facts.asp, accessed October 17, 2011; Museum of the City of San Francisco, “San Francisco 1906 Earthquake,” http://www.sfmuseum.org/1906_eq_quests/eq.htm, accessed October 17, 2011. chapter shows how Hamburg’s burned-down city center was modernized and reorganized after the fire of 1842 in a manner that was unlikely to have occurred under other circumstances.5 Thus, the blaze was an important agent of change in the transformation of...