Silent partner: river and city in sequence and context

Abstract

Lyon has long been known as a city born of the confluence of two great rivers, yet it was only late in the eighteenth century that a project arose to expand the almost 2000 years old city across the Rhone. It would in fact take another long century before the left bank of the Rhone became demographically and spatially part of the city—and longer still in cultural terms. Paradoxically, the dynamic nineteenth century that finally brought the Rhone into the urban fabric of Lyon was also the “century of engineers” that distanced its inhabitants from its shores and waters, a process of estrangement that culminated a generation ago in a wall of parking lots and expressways. Today, as the people of Lyon reclaim their rivers, the sharpest observers of this ancient relationship fear that Rhone and Saone are becoming simulacres of what our age believes rivers ought to be. To shed light upon this enduring contradiction—the centrality of the Rhone to the identity of Lyon and its surprising absence from historical records and everyday life, we turn to the key stage in this relationship, the nineteenth century. Three successive political ages shaped three distinct series of attitudes and actions with regard to the Rhone and its left bank. The contrasts between these three periods expose the key drivers of this enduring yet often hidden transformation of the Rhone into an urban river.