Inspired by the DC/Baltimore thread:
(http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=43844)
Has any artificially “mandated” capital city achieved a high level of commercial, cultural, etc., success?
DC sure hasn’t, and being a Pennsylvanian, I can say that Harrisburg DEFINITELY has not. What about in other states or other young nations?
Columbus is now the largest city in Ohio. Its economic success is due more to the service economy than industry, though.
Not sure if this counts, but how about Atlanta, Georgia. Atlanta isn’t on a bay, confluence of rivers, etc. It is a big city solely because of its position as a railway hub. But I don’t know exactly when that was mandated. It is certainly a big and important city, now.
Of course, according to many residents of Boston, it’s not a cultural city. There was a flap in the Letters column of the Boston Globe about this last week.
Well, first of all, I’d disagree with your contention about Washington, DC. With the Smithsonian’s many museums there, I’d say it is something of a cultural center now.
I think that Tel Aviv, which only became Israel’s capital because the Israelis didn’t control Jerusalem at the time, has become the cultural center for secular Israel.
Let’s not forget St. Petersburg. First built in 1703, the only city besides Moscow in which there was a lot of heavy foreign investment under the Tsars, and designed to be Russia’s ‘window on the West’. It was meant to be a cultural and commercial jumping-off point.
IIRC, Denver was just a jerkwater railroad stop when it was declared the capital of Colorado.
Indianapolis, while not much culturally, has a high level of commercial success. Remember, it’s the “crossroads of America” and LOTS East/West and North/South shipping goes through it.
Washington is situated just below the Great Falls of the Potomac (when you hear “Great Falls” put Niagara out of your mind–they’re just a set of rapids).
Trenton. Philadelphia. Washington. Richmond. Raleigh. Columbia. Augusta. Along the Eastern Seabord, most of the main cities (New York and Boston excepted) grew up along the Fall Line. This is the edge of the hard crystalline rocks of the Appalachians/Piedmont, where the rivers encounter softer sedimentary rock of the Atlantic Coastal Plain and erode it much more quickly. This causes falls and rapids. Boats cannot navigate upriver past there without portage or canals.
So when you’re taking a boatload of cargo upriver, it’s natural to unload it just below the falls. This favors commercial activity centering on those locations. Also, the falls provide hydro power.
Washington’s location was no accident. There was bound to be a major city there, capital or no capital.
Columbus and Indianapolis are both located on the National Road (the first section of which was surveyed by old George W., himself). As such, I wouldn’t consider either of them “artificial.” For that matter, at the time that those two cities (and Denver) were set as capitals, there weren’t really any serious cities in the territories that clearly had a better claim. (Cincinnati might have made a claim, but there was no guarantee, at the time, that Clevelend would be any bigger than Sandusky or Toledo. The original Ohio capital was Chillicothe–go find that on a map.)
A better example of the OP might be Lansing, MI. Like Columbus, Denver, and Indianapolis, it was picked for its basically “central” position in the state (ignoring as Michigan legislators tend to, the U.P.). I’m not sure that it developed much more than government through the nineteenth century (although the aggie college was built a few miles east of town), but R.E. Olds built an auto plant there and made it a manufacturing center through the twentieth century.
I’m not sure whether Brasilia has actually attracted industry, as intended, or whether it has simply crested the wave of westward development that the increasing Brazilian population has driven.
Jackson, MS. 
Back in the dim and misty, Natchez was the center of 19th century American industry. No Kidding. Cotton was king, and the King held court in Natchez.
But in 1817, when MS became a state, they decided to be fair and locate the permament capital nearer to the center of the state. Which ended up being along the Pearl river, at a place called LeFleur’s Bluff back then. It started expanding when the railroads came (being in the center of the state) and when highways came, it got even bigger. But it really took off in the beginning of the 20th century.
Now we have a reasonable sized Metro Area here. I-55 and I-20 cross paths here, along with rail and air travel.
Lot’s of problems with this:
While you are right that the Fall Line was the impetus of several major cities on the East Coast, the major factor in city location in this part of the U.S. has been ocean, not river, ports. New York, Boston, Baltimore, Savannah, Philadelphia, Wilmington, etc. are all ocean ports. (BTW, Philadelphia is not a Fall Line city - it’s actually downriver of Trenton, which is near the Fall Line. Philadelphia is not directly on the ocean, but the Delaware River below Philly is deep enough for ocean-going vessels, so it serves as an ocean port).
While D.C. is near the Fall Line, by no means was it bound to be a major city. First of all, most of it was a malarial swamp. Second, the originally habitable area, Georgetown (which, BTW, was an existing town when the District of Columbia was created), rests on relatively high cliffs above the river, which creates difficulties in using the hydro power of the river, as well as a portage site. Third, the Potomac’s usefulness as a shipping route is overshadowed by the Chesapeake Bay, with all of the other useful shipping routes nearby created by its tributaries.
The proof is in the pudding. In all its existence, even with the impetus of the federal government, D.C. succeeded in creating only one successful manufacturing industry. That industry, when you think of it, is the obvious one: paper ;). It never became a commercial or trading center (I can’t recall if D.C. even has a stock exchange. If it does, I never heard of it in 8 years living there.
V.
There probably wouldn’t be much on the site of Ottawa if Queen Victoria hadn’t decreed that Canada’s capital would be there.
I’ve heard that Philadelphia is an ocean port. When does the water stop being sea and start being river? Officially, IIRC, it’s a matter of how far up the tide reaches, and therefore Philadelphia is officially on the Atlantic.
Actually, Ottawa’s a perfect example. It was chosen as capital as a compromise between Lower and Upper Canada (Quebec and Ontario today) because the other obvious choices - Montreal, Toronto or Kingston - angered one side or the other. (Ottawa sits right on the border between the two, which is the Ottawa River.)
Ottawa had no compelling reason for being the capital aside from being on the border and being more defensible than Cornwall.
Ottawa is now a fairly major commercial center, including Canada’s main hub of dot-com and telecommunications enterprises, and has a thriving cultural presence.
I had thought that Ottawa had a pretty good start as a transportation hub, with the Rideau and Gatineau rivers and the beginning of the old portage/river trail from Lower Canada to the fur trade in Upper Michigan (they used to skip Lakes Erie and Huron and go across country using the rivers and lakes).
However, the Britannica agrees with ElvisL1ves that the city only gained stature because Victoria settled the feuding of the major cities by ignoring all of them.
This is a national capital that is more than 300 miles away from the nearest major city. It is also far inland, in the middle of a sparsely populated plateau. It is not astride any river, nor does any railroad line connect with it. thus, the only practical way to get in or out is by air!
I have always wondered what drove the brazilians to blow $200 billion+ on this VERY artificial city, out in the middle of nowhere! Of course, Washington DC was sort of the same situation, 200 years ago.
I always thought that Rio de janiero was a much nicer place for a capital…Brazilia is BORING!
toadspittle asks:
Constantinople.
[prophecy]Belmopan, Belize will be the Paris of the 21st century[/prophecy].
I understood that the decision was made because Rio, for all its charm, was the colonial capital. Keeping it there would have been a constant reminder of Brazil’s previous subservience to Europe, its role as simply a supplier of raw materials to be shipped from the big port city. By moving the capital inland, the national identity was supposed to come to be identified with the country’s own economic independence, its pre-colonial (i.e. “pure” Brazilian) culture, and so forth.
Still sounds like a grandiose boondoggle, I agree. The only other post-colonial country I know of that has moved its capital, Nigeria, did so for similar reasons.
Well, besides Nigeria and Belize, there’s the Ivory Coast – Abidjan to Yamassoukrou. Turkey might be considered a “post-colonial” nation to have done it also; except Turkey did it because they lost their extranational territories, and sudenly Istanbul was a city on the periphery.