Page - 242 - in The Power of Urban Water - Studies in premodern urbanism

242 UlrichMüller to the rest of the city’s urban spaces. Looking at these reveals functional connections in the formof land-bridges,quays,or storagespaces, livingorcraftsmen’squarters, shipyardsormar- ketplaces. A particularity of Haithabu and Schleswig (but also of early Lübeck) is theway in which the locationcombines the logisticsof cargo loadinganddespatchwith thoseof commer- cial exchange and trade. Further urbanisation led to differentiated andmore complex struc- tures, and it was this that first resulted in the relocation of themarket into the city. The city wasultimately closedoff, bothmaterially by the citywalls, and immaterially by themunicipal laws. The question of who started these building arrangements and retained responsibility for their ongoing functioning should, according topractical-theoretical approaches, be ‘located’ in variousdimensions.Neither thekingalonenorhis local representative, nor the apparently flat hierarchiesofself-organisedgroupsof interestedparties (guilds, travellerswithcommonroutes) were thesole initiatorshere.47Themodelof interdependentprocessesofnegotiationonvarious levels comes closer to the reality than any purely top-down or bottom-up approach. All three examples givenhereprove that the internal andexternal urbanisationof the city resulted from the initiative andsupport of theking, aswell as that of the local elite. Evenwhen thepractices of individual actors or groups of actors can be identified, it must be assumed that such city- creatingmeasuresdonot result solely fromprivate initiatives. …andHabourscapes Ifwealsounderstand‘harbourscapes’as ‘imaginedworlds’, constructedvia thevarious ‘scapes’ and thehistorically contextualised imaginationsof people andgroups,we findour focus shifts beyond social practices to thewider cultural processes thatwork to create new global orders. With the beach- andharbourmarkets inHaithabu and Schleswig, just as in early Lübeck, the portbecamevisibleasaplaceof economic transactionsandapartof theearlyandhighmedie- val ‘financescapes’.Viking-periodemporia likeHaithabuwere inparticularperceivedas ‘special economic zones’.48 These zones were not only bound to the European networks, but also, in their function as ‘brokers’, formed points of interface with the global networks of theMiddle Ages inAfrica andAsia.49 In the spatial interface between logistics and economy (themarket- place),we see thematerial and immaterial flows concentrated into the smallest possible area. The port also represents various forms ofmonetary commerce.50 On one hand, Haithabu is a ‘subspace’ forbullion-basedtradeandcommerce,whichdominatednorthandnortheastEurope during the EarlyMiddleAges.Here goodswereweighed against hack-silver orArabic dirhams andanexchange rate fixed.Thenagain, inacertainway theemporium formeda ‘specialmone- tary zone’, connecting theCarolingianandOttonianmonetaryeconomieswith theareasofbul- lion-based tradeandcommerce to thenorthandnortheast. The transition toamonetaryecono- mywasalreadyalmost complete inSchleswig,but themarketplacestill remained theeconomic centreofexchange, justas itwasbefore.Finally,Lübecknotonly representsaneconomyexclu- sively basedonmonetary trade and commerce, it also showsa shift and increaseddynamic in the streamsof goodsand finances, and their increasedcomplexity. The former isdemonstrated by the inner-citymarketplace, aswell as in thepartial relocationof these activities to themer- chants’ houses; the latter is expressednot only in theneweconomic formsof transactions, but 47 For example, Ellmers 2018;Radtke 2017b; Jahnke 2008. 48 Kalmring 2016, 17. 49 Sindbæk2017, 560–562; Preiser-Kapeller 2018, 141–192. 50 Kershawet al. 2018.