Page 151 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

from places of “cows and pigs” to those boasting modern urban features, such as “paving and

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lighting.” Similar dynamics were at play in German cities, where elites increasingly aimed at the

active incorporation of urban hinterlands, and in Dublin, where proponents of the annexation of

suburbs attempted to find space for new housing and to increase municipal income through

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taxation.

In Volhynia, the problem of border regulation was also cloaked in the language of

modernization, rationalization, and standardization. Considerable confusion reigned as to where the

jurisdiction of the towns ended and where that of the rural administrative units began, with town

planners frequently expressing their frustration that restrictive borders physically limited the potential

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for urban development. And yet the peculiar intersections between national and religious identities,
material cultures, and urban spatial politics also drove discussions about the appropriate location of

borders. Attempts at annexation frequently intersected with political, national, and economic

agendas, constituting moments of potential change when people decided on which side of a border

they wished to live—and for what reasons.

Real differences certainly existed between town centers and their hinterlands. While the

inhabitants of the center were usually Jewish, urban peripheries constituted what Yoram Bar-Gal has

called the “World of the Goyim”—areas that, in Volhynia, were home to a combination of people

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identified as Christians, usually Polish or Ukrainian, but sometimes German or Czech. As one

45 Wood, Becoming Metropolitan, here: 90; in general: 85-128.
46 On Germany, see Leif Jerram, “Bureaucratic Passions and the Colonies of Modernity: An Urban Elite, City
Frontiers and the Rural Other in Germany, 1890-1920,” Urban History 34, no. 3 (2007): 390-406; Kristin Poling,
“Shantytowns and Pioneers beyond the City Wall: Berlin’s Urban Frontier in the Nineteenth Century,” Central
European History 47, no. 2 (September 2014): 245-274. On Dublin, see Ciarán Wallace, “Fighting for Unionist
Home Rule: Competing Identities in Dublin 1880-1929,” Journal of Urban History 38, no. 5 (2012): 932–949.
47 In 1925, planners in Równe argued that the borders had to be expanded in order for the town to develop. See
“Protokół Komisji, wyłonionej w myśl uchwały Magistratu z dnia 15 września 1925 r. Nr 40 :10, spisany dnia 1
października b. r. w sprawie ustalenia granic pomiarów miasta Równego,” DARO 31/1/283/567-568od. Since the
muddy region around the castle in Równe was not included within the boundaries, the authorities could not drain it.
See DARO 31/1/283/688.
48 Yoram Bar-Gal, “The Shtetl - the Jewish small town in Eastern Europe,” Journal of Cultural Geography 5, no 2
(1985): 25.

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