ancient cities

372 Hotel, Motel
circulation, whether of cars, goods, or people. If
we accept this, then we have to look for sites that
coordinate, stage, or enable that circulation.
Hotels and motels are a key articulating mechanism
for such flows, a central element of modern
practices such as driving, rationalized work routines,
architectural design, and new building technologies.
This entry looks at their history and role
in urban life.
Historical Evolution
At their essence, hotels emerged to replace older
forms of hospitality shown to travelers (from the
inns of medieval England to the caravanserai of
traditional Arab cultures), with a systematized,
modern equivalent. As historians such as Cynthia
Cocks and Andrew Sandoval-Strausz have described,
the modern hotel offered a controlled, commodified
way of dealing with strangers, a challenge
posed by the vast explosion in city populations
experienced in the booming commercial economies
of the nineteenth century.
Many of the earlier urban hotels were designed
to cater to a rural elite visiting the city for social
functions such as weddings or dinners, or else to
meet with the distributors and purchasers of their
farm products. However, the growing sophistication
of modern consumer economies increased the
demand for basic hotel space by agents pursuing
all manner of commercial services, from traveling
salespeople to touring entertainers featuring in
adjacent music halls and theaters. With the growth
of international trade relations, hotels became
important way stations in the maintenance of colonial
economies.
Luxury Hotels
Within some of the key commercial cities of
major nation-states or imperial economies, luxury
hotels became important features of central
business districts. Through the provision of a full
suite of services—restaurants presenting international
(and hence familiar) cuisine, laundry services,
and telex, telephone, and then fax and
Internet systems—the large hotel often boasted
that it was a city in miniature. Annabel Wharton,
in Building the Cold War, showed how, from the
1950s, the Hilton Corporation fused modern
techniques of hotel management with innovation
in modernist design (including the use steel,
glass, modern plumbing, telephony, and ventilation
systems) as part of a strategy of international
expansion that mirrored the economic
expansionism of American firms. Five-star hotels
were, in these cases, designed to insulate the
traveler from the unpredictability of a foreign
culture (or else, back in the United States, from
the mean streets of the inner city, in the context
of the perceived dangers of the postwar American
downtown).
Of course, it is important to note that alongside
the large, full-service hotels, many cities and towns
have sustained an ecology of hostels, boarding
houses, single-room occupancy hotels, and cheap
hotels with basic facilities, all crucial institutions in
the provision of affordable options for migrant
workers, pilgrims, budget travelers, and the homeless.
This can often be an expression of social
polarization in developing economies. As David
Gladstone has shown, Indian cities such as Delhi
display a stark contrast between gated luxury
hotels and the multitude of dharamshalas (pilgrims’
rest houses), dormitories, guest houses, and
small hotels tucked into the densely packed older
city quarters, with intermittent water supply and
no air conditioning.
Basic Products
Such privations underline the fact that the hotel
product can be fairly basic. Hotels can specialize in
the provision of a bedroom, but with minimal services,
given the preponderance of options—be it
dry cleaners or cafés—in the bright lights of big
cities. Most recently, the rise of the boutique hotel
(a reaction to the studied homogeneity of the chain
hotel), pioneered by the likes of Ian Schrager in
Manhattan, has leveraged the excitement of its
urban location, allowing carefully designed, but
typically small hotel rooms to be charged at relatively
high prices. This is underpinned by a typical
guest who seeks the buzz of cultural life in Shanghai
or New York, rather than the bland and the
predictable.