City & Civilization
building the human city
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Lewis Mumford published The City in History in 1961. It became an instant classic and still is in print today. The quote from page 243 illustrates his way of thinking about the city. A way that is not how the city is commonly thought of today nor how is it planned, designed and built.
Mumford focused on “polis” and its relationship to the freedom, creativity, sustainability and human expression. He said that are two fundamentally different kinds of cities: those of power and those of exchange and dialog. He believed that the city and civilization were intertwined and could not be separated as each created and expressed the other. From this perspective, he follows the cycles of growth, decline and rebirth of cities from the first to modern times showing how they served power and at times a larger practice of humanity.
His view of the Medieval city is original, provocative and thoughtful. He argues that the major elements it was condemned for were the manifestations which came form later ideas and growth when the traditions it grew from were violated.
The City in History was controversial when written and remains so today. With his penetrating walk through the history of the city, Mumford writes a searing criticism of our times and indicates ways to build a more human and civil reality.
“From the standpoint of both politics and urbanism, Rome remains a significant lesson of what to avoid: its history presents a series of classic danger signals to warn one when life is moving in the wrong direction. Wherever crowds gather in suffocating number, wherever rents rise steeply and housing conditions deteriorate, wherever a one-sided exploitation of distant territories removes the pressure to achieve balance and harmony nearer at hand, there the precedents of Roman building almost automatically revive, as they come back today: the arena, the tall tenement, the mass contests and exhibitions, the football matches, the international beauty contests, the strip-tease made ubiquitous by advertisement, the constant titillation of the senses by sex, liquor and violence-----all in true Roman style. So too, the multiplication of bathrooms and over-expenditure on broadly paved motor roads, and above all, the massive collective concentration on glib ephemeralities of all kinds, performed with supreme technical audacity. These are symptoms of the end: magnifications of demoralized power, magnifications of life. When these signs multiply, Necropolis is near, though not a stone has crumbled. For the barbarian has already captured the city from within.”
p 243
