Customer Reviews

The Culture of Cities

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Lewis Mumford's The Culture of Cities is anything but what can legitimately be expected from a typical book about urban planning, nor does it read like the average history book either. Rather than coming across as a very precise-but dry-discussion of the most technical aspects of the history of urban planning, Mumford wrote this book as a manifesto tackling nothing less than the very meaning of being human and the future of civilization. As he writes in the beginning of the book; "Today we begin to see that the improvement of cities is no matter for small one-sided reforms: the task of city design involves the vaster task of rebuilding our civilization." (p.9) Considering that most academics often set their sights on small goals of dubious importance to anyone but other specialists in their same field, the fact that Mumford dares to address some of the most meaningful and yet most complicated issues imaginable calls for attention and makes his book one that is impossible to remain indifferent to. Most readers will either be seduced by his romantic utopian thinking or will resent it as arrogant and presumptuous. Personally, I'll confess that I fall in the first group.
Expecting a single main thesis to emerge from The Culture of Cities, and all of its nearly 600 pages, may be naïve since many major topics are addressed throughout the book. However, there is one common thread unifying all of them: from page one to the very end Mumford continues to argue that our present model of civilization has entered a dramatic period of crisis, and that our current choices will result in either rebirth or self-destruction for humanity. The entire goal of The Culture of Cities is to highlight the problem areas and offer possible solutions. In Mumford's view, the most critical of these areas are the relationships between human beings and nature, our own bodies, sexuality, and community. Alienation from all of these crucial components of life is, in Mumford's analysis, what characterizes the daily life of most human beings, and this fact is clearly reflected in the cities we build and apartments we live in. In a particularly meaningful, albeit very long quote, Mumford makes this very clear;
"This metropolitan world, then, is a world where flesh and blood is less real than paper and ink and celluloid.... Living thus, year in and year out, at second hand, remote from the nature that is outside them and no less remote from the nature within, handicapped as lovers and as parents by the routine of the metropolis and by the constant specter of insecurity and death that hovers over its bold towers and shadowed streets-living thus the mass of inhabitants remain in a state bordering on the pathological." (p.258)

In other words, modern civilization is an aberration of what human life could be. Rather than being the main subject of the book, urban planning is a symptom of this more widespread crisis facing humanity collectively. Restoring a healthy relationship with nature, both inside and outside of us, is the key for countering the suicidal path we have entered. This main consideration affects all aspects of urban planning in Mumford's mind, from the necessity for green spaces in the midst of the city and a less polluting relationship with the environment to the designing of apartments and parks with the goal of helping love-making be more comfortable and natural. As much as I am trying to restrain myself from quoting too much from the book, Mumford expresses this idea too beautifully not to be quoted one more time;
"Love-making and home-making, eroticism and domesticity, sexual delight and the assiduous nurture of children-these are among the highest human goals of genuine biotechnic planning.... Good design means going back to fundamentals: a child at wok in a stable and reassuring world: a pair of lovers at play in a room where the scent of lilacs may creep through the window, or the shrill piping of crickets be heard in the garden below." (p. 433)

Mumford's ability to connect the most mundane aspects of urban planning with the most central aspects of human existence is-in my mind-his greatest strength. In the discussion of some of the topics he focuses on Mumford demonstrates to be incredibly ahead of his times. Today, the globalization of the world has been revealing that the attachment to fixed boundaries and rigid identities is becoming increasingly more anachronistic. By arguing for the development of a consciousness that is global and local at the same time and by criticizing any kind of patriotism and nationalism as small-minded, Mumford anticipates this idea by a few decades.
This is not to say that The Culture of Cities is immune from weaknesses. His idealization of the medieval city as much more desirable than modern civilization is historically not very convincing. Furthermore, trying to build the future by looking at the medieval past indicates a nostalgia for a mythical "golden age" that may have never existed more than a concrete platform to develop. Overall, Mumford seems much better at bringing to our attention some of the key areas that need to be addressed than he is at getting down to the nitty-gritty and outlining the concrete steps to be taken. Despite these problems, his work is inspiring and brilliant.

This book is a statement of Mumford's views on city planning. It begins with a 300-page history of European and American cities, from the Middle Ages through the 1920s. Following this, Mumford takes up a variety of topics in turn, including regional planning (and why he advocated for it), politics of regionalism, and miscellaneous topics such as agriculture, hygiene, museums, housing, and schools. The book is punctuated every 50 pages or so with pictorial features of black-and-white photographs or drawings together with paragraph-long analyses of these items related to topics from the main text. The book also includes a glossary, a 50-page annotated bibliography, and an index.

This book was seminal in its time. It represented a massive scholarly undertaking, and many of its ideas are still relevant today, some 70 years later. The historical overview is interesting and informative. Mumford points out how residents of cities in the Middle Ages enjoyed freedoms not possessed by land-bound peasants, and how life in the cities of those times did not entail exile from natural surroundings. He goes on to describe how cities lost more and more of their green spaces as they become more densely developed, and how the air and water of industrial cities made these places quite unhealthy. He also describes the original Garden City concept, which aimed at building small livable cities for the working class. These Garden Cities were supposed to be economically self-contained, with several options for industrial employment within their boundaries. Nowadays, when we think of the Garden City concept however, we think of the birth of suburbs, towns in the country where people only keep their beds, and which they leave each morning to go into the big cities for work and shopping. Mumford had a strong distaste for such developments, calling them "dormitories", and he rails against time wasted in workaday commutes. His ideal would be small cities of 30,00-40,000 inhabitants, with dense efficient housing, plenty of green space for everyone, and workplaces within walking distance from home for all.

Mumford's organization of the volume barely conceals a strong underlying message- -that cities in the distant past were pretty good, then they got worse, and now (in the late 1930s) they are heading towards Armageddon. He views the enormous megalopolis of the Twentieth Century as leading inevitably to armed conflict and misery. Given the context of his time, such a belief is quite understandable. Within two years from the publication of the book, his predictions of dire destruction did seem to come true. Nevertheless, world society somehow got through the problems of the 1940s, and people seem perfectly capable of living peacefully with their neighbors in cities that are much larger than any Mumford discussed. Thus, the problems that he claimed to be inevitable with big cities were not inherent in the size of the cities themselves, but more likely were products of an unstable era.

As a scholar in the Western tradition of the 1930s, Mumford may have had little background or interest in cultures beyond Europe or North America. However, as a modern reader, I found his notion that the general history of cities began in Europe in the Middle Ages a bit disconcerting. European cities at that time were in contact either directly or indirectly with the great cities of the East, from Jerusalem to Istanbul, Cochin to Shanghai and beyond. Such a survey of the history of cities, if written today, would need to consider the elements of city life beyond Europe. By using a comparative approach and including the cities of the Incas and Aztecs, one might be able to deduce which factors affecting the development of cities are universal or inevitable, and which are culturally bound.

One additional weakness of Mumford's argumentation is that he relies on comparisons of cities across time to try to identify which elements go into healthy cities. He concludes from these comparisons that as a city gets older, life in the city tends to go downhill, and he tries to identify the factors that make it do so, such as increasing population density. He might have gotten more accurate results by comparing cities synchronically, cities that share the same time and culture, but were developed along different lines with varying results.

In general, Mumford's writing style is delightful to read- -from the first page, I could recognize that he was an author who took pride in his craft. Although some peculiarities of his argumentation do not stand the test of time, many of his ideas are still quite exciting and well worth discussing. It would be great to see an edited volume of this work, with the most important points condensed into a shorter text.

Just a correction on the previous review, actually. Culture of Cities was written before The City in History. Culture was 1938, and History was 1961. In fact, The City in History was originally going to be a revision of The Culture of Cities.

This book has two parts. The first part covers the city from the middle ages to the modern megalopolis (as of the 1930s when the book was written). The second part presentats the concepts of biogregions and garden cities as the way forward for urban life. Mumford's presentation of bioregionalism is ground-breaking - if we had followed the bioregionalist vision in the USA quality of life would have been tremendously enhanced. But some momentum is building for bioregionalism (e.g. Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life.
Mumfords presentation of the history of urban life here is quite good, although his later work The City in History is superior on that front. It is the presentation of bioregionalism that is the special contribution of The Culture of Cities.

I really enjoyed this book because of the parallels to his previous book, the history of cities. if you enjoyed that, you'll enjoy this a lot.

there are a few thinly drawn conclusions that i could dispute but in general an immensely enjoyable and thought-provoking book written in a very engaging style.