“The City in History” by Lewis Mumford
Living space
The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity. The positive functions of the city cannot be performed without creating new institutional arrangements, capable of coping with the vast energies modern man now commands: arrangements just as bold as those that originally transformed the overgrown village and its stronghold into the nucleated, highly organized city.
I owe a lot of my interest in geography and urbanism to growing up and living in many different places – army bases, small towns, large metro areas. When you grow up this way it’s natural to compare these places, and it may even spur some creativity on your part. When I was about eleven years old, I used to design and map out imaginary cities as a hobby. These cities tended to resemble Metairie, Louisiana (next to New Orleans), which is where we were living at the time.
In those days I didn’t know who Lewis Mumford was, although a couple of his books rested on my dad’s formidable bookshelf. This book, published in 1961, is a massive work of scholarship which not only chronicles the evolution of urban forms over the centuries but also relates this evolution to larger civilizational themes and currents. It is most definitely heavy reading, and can be a chore to get through at times, but Mumford is a good enough writer stylistically to keep things moving, and he knows how to sum up his arguments in pithy descriptions and metaphors.
Lewis Mumford was something of a phenomenon himself, a college dropout who, over the course of a long life (1895-1990), became one of America’s foremost public intellectuals. As The New Yorker’s architecture critic for several decades, Mumford had a special interest in the built environment. His lack of a college degree was something that he had in common with another prominent urbanist, Jane Jacobs. If I may speculate, I suspect that in both cases, their lack of academic specialization made it easier for them to appreciate the urban organism as a whole.1
“Organism” is the right word. Mumford treats a city as an organic whole, almost like a living body writ large. We homines sapientes have to concern ourselves with getting enough nutrition, finding meaningful and remunerative work, protecting ourselves from all kinds of dangers, entertaining ourselves, and disposing of our waste products. Cities have to do the same things. Cities can be viewed as collections of people adding up to one great living and breathing entity. It’s somewhat reminiscent of the famous frontispiece of Hobbes’ Leviathan.
While this idea of the organic city is central to Mumford’s story, we can identify a number of other themes that run through the book:
The new ways are not necessarily better than the old ones. In fact, the old ones were often clearly better.
Cities should be constructed around the totality of human needs rather than on abstract ideological or technical principles.
Excess should be avoided. This applies to concentrations of economic or political power; occupational specialization; the size and design of cities; and inequalities between classes.
Beyond this, Mumford also deploys two concepts that he identifies as constituting “the rhythm of the city”: etherealization and materialization. The former term, coined by Arnold Toynbee, refers to the way in which innovations become progressively streamlined, improved, and “lightened.” Art and science, which are mainly urban phenomena, constitute the major outlets for etherealization:
Compare the vast clanking mechanism of the medieval clock in the Marienkirche in Lübeck with a fine modern Geneva watch, an infinitesimal fraction of its weight and size, but almost infinitely superior in accuracy. This transformation takes place, in various degrees, all along the line.
We creatures of the computer age, who now carry in our pockets machines that once occupied entire rooms, embody this concept in our daily lives. The other phenomenon, materialization, can be observed “as one walks around the city … through the physical structures of the city past events, decisions made long ago, values formulated and achieved, remain alive and exert an influence.”
Mumford starts his story in prehistoric times, where he puts forth some ideas on how and why people came together in permanent settlements. I find it impossible to judge this section, as it seems rather speculative, and I am not sure how well his archeological sources hold up today. We reach firmer ground when he describes the cities of Egypt and Mesopotamia, and then those of Greece.
The contrast between Greek cities (most of all Athens) and Rome sets up an opposition that continues throughout the book, playing mostly on themes 1) and 3). In Mumford’s view, the Greek city comes close to striking an ideal balance:
The Greek city’s real strength was of another order: being neither too small nor too big, neither too rich nor too poor, it kept the human personality from being dwarfed by its own collective products, while fully utilizing all the urban agents of co-operation and communion. Never had any city, no matter how big, harbored and fostered such a multitude of creative personalities as were drawn together in Athens for perhaps a century.
By contrast, the newer city of imperial Rome is portrayed as a horrific spectacle of grandiosity and violence. It was hideously overcrowded, and the urban poor were packed into vile slums. The masses were distracted by constant entertainments of the “bread and circuses” type, many of them violent and sadistic. On the other hand, Mumford is sufficiently impressed with Rome’s enormous vitality, wealth, and vastness; but there is no question that he prefers the better-balanced urban structures of the Greeks.
Mumford further develops the old-vs.-new theme when he gets to the Middle Ages. In his telling, medieval cities were cleaner, aesthetically more pleasing, more in harmony with nature, and as communities more organic than cities of the industrial age. Indeed, Mumford objects to the use of the term “medieval” as a pejorative, claiming that “the use of the word […] for that which is barbarous and ignorant, was a coinage of the eighteenth century” – that is, an Enlightenment-era prejudice.
Judging by Mumford’s descriptions, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the medieval city was superior to the early industrial (“paleotechnic”) one in every important way except two: the generation of wealth and some of the conveniences brought about by modern technology (although both of these are double-edged swords, particularly the latter). As for the widespread notion that the Middle Ages were barbaric, Mumford states as follows:
If we dismissed medieval culture as a whole, because of the torture chamber and the public burning of heretics and criminals, we should also wipe out all pretensions to civilization in our own period. Has not our enlightened age restored civil and military torture, invented the extermination camp, and incinerated or blasted the inhabitants of whole cities?
It was the “baroque era” – basically, that period between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment – that set the pattern for today’s mega-cities. The growth of capitalism and extensive empire-building led to a focus on counting, measuring, and standardization that went far beyond what had been the case previously; the advent of the Industrial Revolution only furthered these trends. In the 16th century, Shakespeare could get away with spelling his name six different ways. A couple of centuries later, that would have been unlikely, or even impossible.
Large standing armies, centralized political power, and intercontinental commercial interests not only created massive cities, they eroded the quality of life previously enjoyed in many of those cities. Consider the important matter of personal hygiene. Mumford further upends the medieval stereotype by pointing out that people in medieval cities were generally cleaner than their industrial-era counterparts. Not only was polluting industry largely absent, but public baths were a fixture of medieval cities. They allowed citizens to get clean and socialize at the same time. By the 18th century, the growth of cities led to shortages of water and the privileging of private housing for the well-off; these factors doomed such establishments.
Despite the book’s immensity, Mumford’s discussion of actual cities is restricted to a rather narrow range. He concentrates on the ancient (mostly Mediterranean) world and then on Europe. He mentions that “I have confined myself as far as possible to cities and regions I am acquainted with at first hand, and to data in which I have long been immersed.” This is his preferred method, which obviously has its pluses and minuses; it does diminish the most obvious drawback of an enormous survey work by a single author, namely the attempt to cover subjects of which one’s knowledge is hazy or speculative in the interests of completeness. It’s somewhat surprising, though, that this lifelong New Yorker says relatively little about New York, or about American cities generally.
Since The City in History was written in the early Cold War period, it’s not a surprise that an intermittent sense of doom hangs over the book – a sense that is enriched and ironized by our decades of distance from its initial publication. Mumford was writing under the new threat posed by nuclear weapons, and he viewed this threat as a manifestation (or “materialization”) of the same forces that led to the emergence of overgrown anti-human technological systems, as reflected in modern metropolises. Here’s his creative but sour metaphor for the midcentury malaise:
Our present civilization is a gigantic motor car moving along a one-way road at an ever-accelerating speed. Unfortunately as now constructed the car lacks both steering wheel and brakes, and the only form of control the driver exercises consists in making the car go faster, though in his fascination with the machine itself and his commitment to achieving the highest speed possible, he has quite forgotten the purpose of the journey.
This is the sort of intellectual leap that you can agree with or not, and it is probably the book’s weakest aspect. Mumford’s habit of mind-reading (“that is precisely what the metropolitan denizen schools himself to do: he lives, not in the real world,” etc.) doesn’t help his argument. I’m happy to note, however, that 64 years after its publication, we still haven’t blown ourselves up despite multiple calamities, while big cities have actually become more livable in some ways.
Let’s end this review with an exercise: constructing Mumford’s ideal city from the principles he sets forth in this book. Like a medieval city, it would be of a modest size, with plenty of access to nature and a minimum of industrial pollution. It would have social classes and divisions, but the populace would mingle in common spaces and the upper classes would be less inclined to wall themselves off. It would grow in a slow and sustainable manner, favoring winding streets, human-scale architecture, and intimate spaces, but would avoid a crushing degree of density. Any large projects related to planning and building would be undertaken with due consideration of both aesthetic and practical concerns. Rapid growth would lead not to faceless sprawl, but to replication of the urban organism in external communities – what Mumford calls “colonization,” and which he traces back to the ancient Greeks. Finally, it would lack massive concentrations of political or economic power.
This city probably doesn’t exist; maybe it can’t. But we can think of urban areas that come closer to this ideal than others. Like a lot of idealistic visions, this one does give us some pointers for improving things.
On that subject, here’s an interesting article that discusses Mumford as an interdisciplinary thinker.