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Lewis Mumford and The Architectonic S of Ecological Civilisation
Lewis Mumford and The Architectonic S of Ecological Civilisation
2012
By Dr Peter Critchley
Critchley, P., 2012. Lewis Mumford and the Moral Architectonics of Ecological Civilisation [e-book]
Available through ResearchGate website
<https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Peter_Critchley/publications
Abstract
LEWIS MUMFORD AND THE MORAL ARCHITECTONICS OF ECOLOGICAL
CIVILISATION
This book traces the connection of ecology, regionalism and civilisation in the
life's work of Lewis Mumford. The argument demonstrates Mumford's
ecological regionalism as being grounded in a moral sense of place, Mumford
offering an ecological civilisation as an alternative to the false imperatives of
the megamachine. Mumford is shown to offer an alternative future based on
organic plenitude as against the 'aimless dynamism' of endless material
quantity within the megamachine.
The book seeks to develop the moral and critical purpose at work behind the
varied writings of Lewis Mumford. The attempt is made to identify the contours
of Mumford’s ideal city as a city of human dimensions enabling and
encouraging a vigorous reciprocity and interaction between inhabitants as
citizens; a city which brings the touch, sense and smell of the countryside into
the core market life of the city, brings neighbourhoods in close connection with
each other, brings all city dwellers within close walking distance of parks and
green spaces. Mumford’s objective, it is shown, is to make the city a
communal theatre, a collective experience in which city dwellers are actors
rather than mere spectators in the unfolding drama of urban life.
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The Moral Architectonics of Ecological Civilisation Dr Peter Critchley
Mumford is shown to offer a unique insight into the myriad political, social,
cultural, urban, moral, psychological and ecological problems of a rationalised
modernity. Reason has not brought freedom in the modern world. In many
ways, human beings have come to be enslaved to their own powers,
institutions and ideas. Mumford offers a means of explaining this paradox of
bondage through liberty. The solutions that Mumford articulates bring the
soundest features of past cities to bear upon present forms. The awareness of
the past enables Mumford to address the fundamental problems of rational
modernity. Although Mumford wrote on a wide variety of topics, his purpose
possessed a unifying thread concerning the mode of life within modern
technological society. This book emphasises Mumford's concern to put the
constituents of modern urban life on a sustainable basis in relation to new
technologies and techniques. The key to Mumford's vision is the scaling of
social life to human dimension and proportion, thus producing a life of balance
and harmony with respect to the moral and technical capacities of human
beings.
Contents
INTRODUCTION........................................................................................................1
1 LARGE VIEWS IN THE ABSTRACT AND IN THE CONCRETE.................10
THE INFLUENCE OF PATRICK GEDDES......................................................10
2 MUMFORD’S CRITICAL UTOPIANISM..........................................................22
THE STORY OF UTOPIA....................................................................................22
3 RECONNECTING PLACE...................................................................................40
STICKS AND STONES AND THE GOLDEN DAY...........................................40
THE GOLDEN DAY..............................................................................................66
4 THE CULTURE OF CITIES..................................................................................70
5 THE CITY IN HISTORY.......................................................................................120
6 REGIONS – TO LIVE IN....................................................................................159
THE PRINCIPLE OF REGIONAL DECENTRALISATION.........................159
7 THE REGIONAL CITY.......................................................................................186
8 CITYSCAPE – THE URBAN PROSPECT........................................................204
9 TECHNICS AND CIVILISATION......................................................................218
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INTRODUCTION
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Mumford treated the city as his university, investigating its physical and
social attributes, its neighbourhoods and communities, its buildings and
functions. For Mumford, ‘the city is the point of maximum concentration for the
power and culture of a community .. Here is where the issues of civilisation
are focused’ (CC 1938:3). In this conception, the city is an educative process,
a civilising order.
What is striking about Mumford’s writing is just how multi-faceted and
multi-layered it is, rich and varied in its embrace of a vast range of topics –
geography, industry, transportation, immigration, parks and open spaces,
architecture, neighbourhoods, government, city planning, housing, health and
sanitary conditions and ‘the institutions for social betterment’. But if Mumford’s
approach was extensive it was also comprehensive, governed by the criterion
‘that historic growth should be examined on the basis of present day
conditions, and that the weight given to any particular growth should be a
function of its importance in the contemporary scheme’ (Mumford
Memorandum: Plan for a Civic Background Series ND, LMC). To reform the
cities, there is a need to have an informed grasp of the soundest features of
existing cities as well as an awareness of past planning errors. Mumford thus
critically investigated historical cities in order to divine the key elements of the
city of the future.
Mumford has written with great insight and originality on a wide variety of
topics. His keen moral purpose, combined with a general aloofness from
politics, gives his work an iconoclastic character. Mumford promotes no party
line. This gives his systematic repudiation of life-denying power philosophies,
embodied in militaristic, nationalistic institutions, a liberatory character.
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Further, with his organic and holistic approach, Mumford was an intellectual
range rider rather than an academic specialist. His writing covers a broad
range of topics – utopias, cities, technologies, cultures, values, faiths, art,
aesthetics, architecture, history (Newman 1971; Morely 1985). Mumford never
identified himself by a particular label. He was never a historian, sociologist,
urban or architectural critic or theorist as such. Rather, Mumford
comprehended the multi-faceted nature of human life and society and
incorporated aspects drawn from the whole range of disciplines for his own
critical purposes. Jacoby defined Mumford accurately as a ‘public intellectual’
(Jacoby 1987:5). Even this, however, fails to do justice to Mumford’s breadth
and depth of learning, his very real expertise and profundity in specific areas.
Mumford offers a unique insight into the myriad political, social,
cultural, urban, moral, psychological and ecological problems of rationalised
modernity. Reason has not brought freedom. In many instances, freedom has
issued in human beings becoming enslaved to their powers, institutions and
ideas. Mumford offers a means of explaining this paradox of bondage through
liberty. The solutions that Mumford articulates brings the soundest features of
past cities to bear upon present forms. The awareness of the past enabled
Mumford to address the problems of rational modernity. Although Mumford
wrote on a wide variety of topics, his purpose possessed a unifying thread
concerning the mode of life within modern technological society. Mumford was
concerned to put the constituents of modern urban life on a sustainable basis
in relation to new technologies and techniques.
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This book sets Mumford’s detailed descriptions of and prescriptions for the
urban environment within an overarching ethical framework concerning
human growth and development as expressed through technological
advance. The argument traces Mumford’s thought through a series of phases.
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initiatives. Technology could realise its creative potential for freedom only if
set within programmes for regional development and social democracy that
reconfigured and recontextualised its use. Mumford’s articles of the 1920’s
spelled out his vision of neotechnics as operating within a planned regional
and ecological decentralisation (FM and R 1925:130/5 151/2; RAI
1927:277/88). Mumford argued in favour of a decentralised regionalism that
rests upon the purposeful use of neotechnics to achieve organic communities
that are set within the natural region. Regionalism is crucial in achieving
organic community promoting life-enhancing values.
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characterised by electricity and alloys. The second half of the book abandons
the progressive interpretation of historical development to launch a savage
assault upon the paleotechnic phase. In this critical analysis, Mumford
opposes organic values to the mechanisation and materialism which are the
dominant characteristics of the era. Mumford attacks the survivals of the
paleotechnic phase in existing institutions and values. In so doing, he starts to
modify the soft technological determinism that he had expressed in his earlier
work. By the end of Technics and Civilisation , Mumford was defining his
position in terms of an attempt by human agency to overthrow determinism.
Mumford now started to emphasise that society and values have shaped
technology in the past and that, by appreciating this, human beings could
consciously create their future. Rather than acquiesce passively in a
technological determinism, human beings could impose their own moral
agency upon technological and socio-cultural dynamics.
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Mumford retained the hope that a social and value conditioned technology
could serve to fulfil the needs of the human personality and community. But
the grounds for hope were diminishing. The Second World War was followed
by the Cold War and the Nuclear Arms race. These developments left
Mumford more critical of technology and less hopeful that the necessary
moral transformation would occur and save humankind from what seemed to
be an inevitable doom.
The problem was compounded, in Mumford’s view, by the fact that human
creativity, the very force for hope which justifies a notion of progress, had
been perverted and put to destructive use. The Myth of the Machine (1967)
and The Pentagon of Power (1970) articulated a profound pessimism and
moral outrage on Mumford’s part. Mumford was compelled to revise his earlier
views on technology and society in order to account for this eventuality.
Mumford presented his new work as a rewriting of the history of technology
‘with all the light that linguistics and psychology now thrown on it’ (Mumford
RN 11 September 1963, MP). Mumford was now openly acknowledging that
science and technology were irrational to the core (RN 2 July 1967, MP). The
unreason which characterised the modern age was not simply a result of
misuse but actually expressed something irrational at the core of science and
technology.
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creation. Rather, he celebrated the sensuous terrain and the physicality of the
life world, not so much as ends in themselves but as a route to a higher
wisdom. Mumford affirmed the superiority of empirical knowledge obtained
through direct contact with the material world. Significantly, Mumford was not
interested in ‘technology’ as an abstract, rational pursuit but ‘technics’ as the
industrial arts (Mumford to Kranzberg 15 January 1970). Mumford seeks an
affirmative materialism in which human beings are a part of their environment
through the integration of everyday work and life activity with practical and
sensate experience. Such a world would be human in a direct sense.
Mumford’s concern to define the novel urban forms and social institutions
that corresponded to his profound awareness of the possibilities and
limitations of technics with respect to human freedom and happiness was
demonstrated in a series of major works on The City in History and on the
future for urban space. Mumford’s regionalist alternative led him to develop a
profound critique of power. His perspectives here are of enduring, indeed
growing, importance. Mumford’s concern did not necessarily imply a
deprofessionalisation in favour of an unmediated, spontaneous social
organisation run by gifted amateurs. Rather, Mumford sought a civic order
which fostered a public discourse and consciousness capable of redirecting
the professionalisation of knowledge. The improvement of the quality of public
life was crucial to this perspective. The democratisation of political and
economic power thus implies the need to reconfigure the human realm as a
public sphere capable of organising and exercising power in socially beneficial
ways. In fine, the creation of an urban public sphere, and a plurality of such
spheres within the ecological region, is the only way of checking urban decay
and ecological destruction.
Early on, Mumford, in defining his ‘present interest in life’, defined the
purpose which motivated the whole of his life and career: ‘the exploration and
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planning. Geddes believed that cities could only be studied – and planned – in
a holistic sense, set within the entire living environment within which it
functioned. Planning ‘cannot be done in the office with rules and parallels’ ..
‘Large views in the abstract .. depend upon large views in the concrete’
(Geddes in Miller 1992:53/5). Taking stock of the city by direct experience, the
individual comes to understand the problems and possibilities of the city. At
this stage, the individual is able to join with others in an attempt to make the
city a better place.
The survey was not limited to the physical aspects of the city region but
placed the enquiry within the enlarged perspective of the historical
development of existing institutions, ideas and customs. The regional survey
cannot be limited to the existing spatial society but starts with the present to
read the imprint of past development backwards throughout time. Combining
historical perspective, field research and integrative ecological thought, the
strength of the survey lay in producing realistic plans for the regeneration of
the region.
Geddes viewed the city with the eye of the artist. He sought to sensitize
the inhabitants to the beauty of even the most mundane features of the
cityscape. He built a tower and employed it as a mechanism of visual
education which taught people how to look and appreciate the physical and
social landscape before their eyes. Geddes sought to integrate the entire city
region into an harmonious whole, making it available to all as a total
experience. Geddes’ famous tower articulated the regional survey method,
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Mumford also learned the centrality of social justice to the health and harmony
of the city. The fruits of economic growth need to be distributed equitably. As
Mumford argued:
All matter and energy is a gift, no one created it, no one has earned it, no
one ‘deserves’ it, and therefore no individual or institution should be
allowed to appropriate it selfishly. Marx’s economic function is simply to
wrap nature’s gift in convenient parcels for wider distribution.
Mumford RN 1919
Mumford insists that the ‘rule of life’ is ‘give and take, not dog-eat-dog’ (RN
nd).
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For few discern at all, and hardly any clearly, how this rural world offers us
not only the beauties and bounties of nature, but also in its workers and
their villages the essentials of our civilisation, the simpler origins of our
most complex urban and metropolitan institutions, and these easily
explained, even to much of their working to this day..
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For as we ascend the vale to the mountains, or descend again to the sea,
we are for the time freed from our imperial and national cares; for the
state, its bureaucrats and lawyers, its politicians and their fluctuating
struggles, are for the time forgotten. Of mechanistic industry we see
nothing beyond the village smithy, and of business only the convenient
little shop.. After the fatigues and excitements of the city, we rest amid
green peace, and let our tired eyes roam to the far horizon, instead of
being near-focused on task or print - a simple hygiene towards sanity of
the mind.
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environment does not act directly upon man: it acts rather by conditioning the
kinds of work and activity that are possible in a region’ (Mumford RAI
1927:285).
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The reciprocal engagement of human beings with nature defines the wider
regional context as both ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’. This develops regional
consciousness as a cultural elaboration of place, makes available a dialogue
with nature, and creates a political context for reshaping the interaction of
human activity with nature.
The metropolis stands at the apex in the destruction of nature as the city
expands outwards into the surrounding countryside. Urban society embraces
nature as a form of recreation, reducing nature to being a backdrop of
metropolitan culture.
This metropolitan world, then, is a world where flesh and blood is less
real than paper and ink and celluloid. It is a world where the great masses of
people, unable to have direct contact with more satisfying means of living,
take life vicariously, as readers, spectators, passive observers: a world
where people watch shadow-heroes and heroines in order to forget their
own clumsiness or coldness in love, where they behold brutal men crushing
out life in a strike riot, a wrestling ring or a military assault, while they lack
the nerve even to resist the petty tyranny of their immediate boss: where
they hysterically cheer the flag of their political state, and in their
neighborhood, their trades union, their church, fail to perform the most
elementary duties of citizenship.
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,
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Mumford CC 1938:258
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aesthetic rather than narrowly political. His critical focus is upon the self and
the relation of the self to nature. As Mumford’s writing on utopia – the subject
of the next chapter - makes clear.
As Mumford pursued his interest in the city to deeper levels, the scope of
his enquiry widened to embrace the region, machine culture, community and
the human personality. Putting the outer world to rights led Mumford to the
inner world. The problems in the external environment implied a distortion in
the inner human being. Ultimately, Mumford’s concern is nothing less than the
human condition in general. His approach, however, is highly contextualised
rather than general, integrating community, personality and technology within
the city, within life, within the nightmare scenario of the megamachine.
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Plans that do not rise out of real situations, plans that ignore existing
institutions, are of course futile: mere Utopias of escape. But plans that
neglect to formulate the potential creative forces, even though they are
perhaps feeble at the moment of formulation, are equally futile, no
matter how copiously they are ballasted with statistics and quasi-
scientific demonstration: they lend all their authority to an order that is
already, by definition, past.
Mumford CC 1938:390).
Our most important task at the present moment is to build castles in the
air. We need not fear, as Thoreau reminds us, that the work will be lost. If
our eutopias spring out of the realities of our environment, it will be easy
enough to place foundations under them. Without a common design,
without a grand design, all our little bricks of reconstruction might just as
well remain in the brickyard; for the disharmony between men's minds
betokens, in the end, the speedy dilapidation of whatever they may build.
Our final word is a counsel of perfection. When that which is perfect has
come, that which is imperfect will pass away.
Mumford SU 1950:308
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Mumford’s lifelong search for the good life and the good city begins,
significantly, with Plato’s Republic, the philosophical ideal and rational utopia
whose promise continues to haunt western civilisation. Mumford does not
believe in utopia in the sense of a perfect society. He is concerned not with
the abstract ideal of the perfect society but with the utility of utopia as a moral
vision that can inspire efforts in the creation of a feasibly better society.
Mumford’s view is that is that utopia, whether existing as blueprints of the
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Now the physical world is a definite, inescapable thing. Its limits are
narrow and obvious. On occasion, if your impulse is sufficiently strong, you
can leave the land for the sea, or go from a warm climate into a cool one;
but you cannot cut yourself off from the physical environment without
terminating your life. For good or ill, you must breathe air, eat food, drink
water; and the penalties for refusing to meet these conditions are
inexorable. Only a lunatic would refuse to recognize this physical
environment; it is the substratum of our daily lives.
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But if the physical environment is the earth, the world of ideas corresponds
to the heavens. We sleep under the light of stars that have long since
ceased to exist, and we pattern our behavior by ideas which have no
reality as soon as we cease to credit them. Whilst it holds together this
world of ideas—this idolum—is almost as sound, almost as real, almost as
inescapable as the bricks of our houses or the asphalt beneath our feet.
The "belief" that the world was fiat was once upon a time more important
than the "fact" that it was round; and that belief kept the sailors of the
medieval world from wandering out of sight of land as effectively as would
a string of gunboats or floating mines. An idea is a solid fact, a theory is a
solid fact, a superstition is a solid fact as long as people continue to
regulate their actions in terms of the idea, theory, or superstition; and it is
none the less solid because it is conveyed as an image or a breath of
sound.
This world of ideas serves many purposes. Two of them bear heavily upon
our investigation of utopia. On one hand the pseudo-environment or
idolum is a substitute for the external world; it is a sort of house of refuge
to which we flee when our contacts with "hard facts" become too
complicated to carry through or too rough to face. On the other hand, it is
by means of the idolum that the facts of the everyday world are brought
together and assorted and sifted, and a new sort of reality is projected
back again upon the external world. One of these functions is escape or
compensation; it seeks an immediate release from the difficulties or
frustrations of our lot. The other attempts to provide a condition for our
release in the future. The utopias that correspond to these two functions I
shall call the utopias of escape and the utopias of reconstruction. The first
leaves the external world the way it is; the second seeks to change it so
that one may have intercourse with it on one's own terms. In one we build
impossible castles in the air; in the other we consult a surveyor and an
architect and a mason and proceed to build a house which meets our
essential needs; as well as houses made of stone and mortar are capable
of meeting them.
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The idolum refers to the inner world of ideas and beliefs through which
human beings negotiate and comprehend their experience of themselves and
their external world. Mumford is certainly concerned with the good life for
human beings as achieved through the unity of the internal and the external.
Mumford WD 1979:214
Mumford’s point is clear: the outer and the inner are integrated and each is
to be examined with respect to the effects on the other. The inner realm of
subjective or emotional truth can only be expressed, proven indeed, in the
external realm. This explains Mumford’s claim that architecture is the truest
measure of the value of a civilisation, but it comes with a reverse truth: that
architecture can only be comprehended by reference to the inner purposes of
a civilisation. The interplay between inner and outer realms underpinned
Mumford’s organicist approach: ‘I find, consolingly, that my standards in
architecture and literature are one, so that the good life that hovers in the
background has, at all events, a unity of interior and exterior’ (Mumford in
Spiller ed 1970:30).
Mumford applies the concept of the idolum to show the creative power of
ideas in shaping the culture of times and places.
During the Middle Age the emphasis in industry was upon the production
of tangible goods: the craft guilds set high standards in design and
workmanship; and the aim of the worker, in most of the trades, was to get
a living from his work, and not simply to get enough money to free himself
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What is the chief economic outcome of this ideal? The chief outcome, I
think, is to exaggerate the demand for goods, and to cause an enormously
wasteful duplication of the apparatus of consumption. If the limit to one's
possessions should be simply the extent of one's purse; if happiness is to
be acquired through obtaining the comforts and luxuries of life; if a man
who possesses a single house is considered fortunate, and a man who
possesses five houses five times as fortunate; if there are no standards of
living other than the insatiable one that has been set up in the Country
House—well, then there is really no limit to the business of getting and
spending, and our lives become the mean handiwork of coachman, cook,
and groom. Our Country House will not merely be a house: there will be a
chapel, an art gallery, a theater, a gymnasium, as François Rabelais
imagined. As the common possessions of the community dwindle, the
private possessions of individuals are multiplied; and at last, there remains
no other community than a multitude of anarchic individuals, each of whom
is doing his best to create for himself a Country House, notwithstanding
the fact that the net result of his endeavors—this is the drab tragedy and
the final thing to be said against it—is perhaps nothing better than six
inadequate rooms at the end of nowhere in a Philadelphia suburb.
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The Country House, then, is the chief pattern by means of which the
mediæval order was transformed into the modern order. It does not matter
very much whether the Country House is an estate on Long Island or a
cottage in Montclair; whether it is a house in Golder's Green or a family
manor in Devonshire: these are essentially affairs of scale, and the
underlying identity is plain enough. The idolum of the Country House
prevails even when quarters are taken up in the midst of the metropolis.
More than ever the Country House today tries to make up by an
abundance of physical goods for all that has been lost through its divorce
from the underlying community; more than ever it attempts to be self-
sufficient within the limits of suburbia. The automobile, the phonograph,
and the radiotelephone have only served to increase this self-sufficiency;
and I need not show at length how these instrumentalities have deepened
the elements of acquisitiveness and passive, uncreative, mechanical
enjoyment.
The Country House's passionate demand for physical goods has given
rise to another institution, Coketown; and it is the idolum of Coketown, the
industrial age's contribution to the Country House, that we have now to
consider.
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that are available; and work whose standards are of a qualitative sort, the
work of scholars and artists and scientists, is either frozen out of the
community by deliberate ostracism, or is hitched to the machine; the artist,
for example, being compelled to sing the praises of Coketown's goods or
to paint the portrait of Coketown's supreme esthetic achievement—the
Self-Made Man.
Mumford SU 209/14
1) The belief that the land and the values issuing from its development
belong to all members of the community;
2) The belief that work is a common endeavour undertaken equally by all
members of the community;
3) The belief that the human population is and ought to be controllable in
number and quality.
The aim of the Regional Survey is to take a geographic region and explore
it in every aspect. It differs from the social survey with which we are
acquainted in America in that it is not chiefly a survey of evils; it is, rather,
a survey of the existing conditions in all their aspects; and it emphasizes to
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a much greater extent than the social survey the natural characteristics of
the environment, as they are discovered by the geologist, the zoologist,
the ecologist—in addition to the development of natural and human
conditions in the historic past, as presented by the anthropologist, the
archeologist, and the historian. In short, the regional survey attempts a
local synthesis of all the specialist "knowledges."
Such a survey has been conducted in the Southeastern counties of
England under the auspices of various local scientific societies; and the
result of it is a complete description of the community's foundations, its
past, its manner of working and living, its institutions, its regional
peculiarities, and its utilization of physical, vital, and social resources.
Each of the sciences draws upon its general body of knowledge to
illuminate the points under observation; and when problems arise which
point definitely to the lack of scientific or scholarly data, new trails are
opened and new territory defined.
Mumford SU 1950:280
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exhibition by which one could begin at the point where one was standing
and work outwards, in thought, to embrace the whole wide world.
Knowledge that is presented in this fashion is available so that whoever
runs may read; it has every feature, therefore, of popular science as it is
purveyed in the cheap newspaper and magazine, whilst it remains real
science and is not presented as something that verges from a miracle to a
superstition.
Regional survey, then, is the bridge by which the specialist whose face is
turned towards the library and the laboratory, and the active worker in the
field, whose face is turned towards the city and region in which he lives,
may come into contact; and out of this contact our plans and our eutopias
may he founded on such a permanent foundation of facts as the scientist
can build for us, while the sciences themselves will be cultivated with
some regard for the human values and standards, as embodied in the
needs and the ideals of the local community. This is the first step out of the
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present impasse: we must return to the real world, and face it, and survey
it in its complicated totality. Our castles-in-air must have their foundations
in solid ground.
Mumford 1950:282
This is a call for a citizen science, the unification of expressed and tacit
knowledge, and for a democratic technics. Mumford thus calls for a
reorientation of science.
Now, men are moved by their instinctive impulses and by such emotionally
colored pattern-ideas or idola as the dreamer is capable of projecting.
When we create these pattern-ideas, we enlarge the environment, so that
our behavior is guided by the conditions which we seek to establish and
enjoy in an imaginary world. However crude the Marxian analysis of
society may have been, it at least had the merit of presenting a great
dream—the dream of a titanic struggle between the possessors and the
dispossessed in which every worker had a definite part to play. Without
these dreams, the advances in social science will be just as disorderly and
fusty as the applications of physical science have been in our material
affairs, where in the absence of any genuine scale of values, a patent
collar button is regarded as equally important as a tungsten filament if the
button happens to bring the inventor as great a financial reward.
Mumford 1950:283
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Mumford’s vision of ‘home, meeting place and factory; polity, culture and
art’ combined in the region fused with MacKaye’s ‘visualisation’ of an
indigenous landscape containing ‘hidden potentiality’.
The regional planning idea exists for the present in the negative state of
criticism, criticism of the big city and of ‘city planning’. It is not yet sure
enough of itself to offer anything positive: or, rather, we are not as a group
united on a positive program; we are, in fact, still fumbling around for it.
Mumford was concerned ‘to develop the art of regional planning, an art
which will relate city and countryside in a new pattern from that which was the
blind creation of the industrial and territorial planner’. Mumford’s immediate
hopes were not high, seeing the task of reconstruction being entrusted to
those private interests responsible for generating the urban problem in the
first place.
For Mumford, the region forms this general context within which to
generate the solutions to these problems. Mumford’s discussion of utopian
literature exhibits a deeper purpose in serving as a vehicle which enables him
to adapt Geddes’s valley section to his own critical purposes. In The Story of
Utopias, Mumford outlines a plan for the regional reconstruction of the nation.
This plan is developed through interpretative lines leading out of the city and
up the valley section via clustered communities leading up to the mountain
wilderness. Wilderness at the one end and the metropolis at the other end of
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the valley section bound the region. As Mumford writes in his introduction to
the discussion of Plato’s polis:
Mumford SU 1950:33/4
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The great civilizations of the world have been nourished in such valley
sections. We think of the river Nile and Alexandria; the Tiber and Rome,
the Seine and Paris; and so on. It is interesting that our first great utopia
should have had an "ideal" section of territory as its base.
In the economic foundations of the Republic, we look in vain for a
recognition of the labor problem. Now the labor problem is a fundamental
difficulty in our modern life; and it seems on the surface that Plato is a little
highbrow and remote in the ease with which he gets over it. When we look
more closely into the matter, however, and see the way in which men got
their living in the "morning lands"—as the Germans call them—we shall
find that the reason Plato does not offer a solution is that he was not,
indeed, confronted by a problem.
Mumford SU 1950:35
If the inhabitants of our Eutopias will conduct their daily affairs in a possibly
more limited environment than that of the great metropolitan centers, their
mental environment will not be localized or nationalized. For the first time
perhaps in the history of the planet our advance in science and invention
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has made it possible for every age and every community to contribute to
the spiritual heritage of the local group; and the citizen of eutopia will not
stultify himself by being, let us say, a hundred per cent Frenchman when
Greece, China, England, Scandinavia and Russia can give sustenance to
his spiritual life. Our eutopians will necessarily draw from this wider
environment whatever can be assimilated by the local community; and
they will thus add any elements that may be lacking in the natural
situation.
The chief business of eutopians was summed up by Voltaire in the final
injunction of Candide: Let us cultivate our garden. The aim of the real
eutopian is the culture of his environment, most distinctly not the culture,
and above all not the exploitation, of some other person's environment.
Hence the size of our Eutopia may be big or little; it may begin in a single
village; it may embrace a whole region. A little leaven will leaven the whole
loaf; and if a genuine pattern for the eutopian life plants itself in any
particular locality it may ramify over a whole continent as easily as
Coketown duplicated itself throughout the Western World. The notion that
no effective change can be brought about in society until millions of people
have deliberated upon it and willed it is one of the rationalizations which
are dear to the lazy and the ineffectual. Since the first step towards eutopia
is the reconstruction of our idola, the foundations for eutopia can be laid,
wherever we are, without further ado.
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Mumford SU 1962:281
Although Mumford started to make the case for decentralisation only in his
later work, this principle is already apparent in the case for regionalism made
in The Story of Utopias. This regionalism presupposes a degree of
geographical dispersion whilst the emphasis upon ‘localised knowledge’ also
subverts centralisation within the nation state.
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The possibility of this useable past was the purpose which lay behind
Mumford’s next books: Sticks and Stones: A Study of American Architecture
and Civilisation (1924) and The Golden Day (1925). Sticks and Stones is an
architectural history which charts the fall of the medieval world and the rise of
the modern world through an analysis of the implications of these
developments with respect to American buildings.
3 RECONNECTING PLACE
Perhaps the most flawed argument in The Story of Utopias concerns the way
that Mumford traces the split between fact and value to Aristotle. This split is
actually the result of the modern revolution in philosophy which overthrew
Aristotelian essentialism and natural law (Strauss 1953 1989). Politics,
science and morality all became autonomous realms independent of each
other only in the modern world.
During the last century, our situation has changed from that of creators of
machinery to that of creatures of the machine system; and it is perhaps
time that we contrived new elements which will alter once more the
profounder consequences of our civilisation.
Mumford SS 1955:92
Mumford is referring here to the inversion of means and ends, a theme which
was central to the alienation thesis of Marx and the rationalisation thesis of
Weber. Like Marx and Weber, Mumford’s critical and moral focus is upon the
processes by which creative human agency is transformed into human
enslavement, means becoming enlarged and displacing the ends. The final
stage of this inversion is reached with the emergence of the megamachine as
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Unfortunately for our comfort and peace of mind, any real change in our
civilization depends upon much more complicated, and much more drastic
measures than the old-fashioned reformer, who sought to work a change of
heart or to alter the distribution of income, ever recognized; and it will do little
good to talk about a "coming renaissance" unless we have a dim idea of the
sort of creature that is to be born again. Our difficulty, it seems to me, is due
to the fact that the human sciences have lagged behind the physical ones;
and up to the present time our good intentions have been frustrated for the
lack of the necessary instruments of analysis. It may be helpful and amusing,
however, to see what we can do in this department with the instruments that
are already at hand.
In every community, as Frederic Le Play first pointed out, there are
three elements: the place, the work, and the people; the sociologist's
equivalent of environment, function, and organism. Out of the interaction of
the folk and their place, through the work, the simple life of the
community develops. At the same time, each of these elements carries with
it its specific spiritual heritage. The people have their customs and manners
and morals and laws; or as we might say more briefly, their institutions; the
work has its technology, its craft-experience, from the simple lore of peasant
and breeder to the complicated formulae of the modern chemists and
metallurgists; while the deeper perception of the "place," through the
analysis of the falling stone, the rising sun, the running water, the
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decomposing vegetation, and the living animal gives rise to the tradition
of "learning" and science.
With this simple outline in mind, the process that created our present
mechanical civilization becomes a little more plain; and we can appreciate,
perhaps, the difficulties that stand in the way of any swift and easy
transformation.
Thus our present order was due to a mingled change in every aspect
of the community: morally, it was protestantism; legally, the rise of
representative government; socially, the introduction of "democracy"; in
custom, the general breakdown of the family unit; industrially, it meant
the collapse of the guilds and the growth of the factory-system;
scientifically, the spread of physical science, and the increased
knowledge of the terrestrial globe— and so on.
Each of these facets of the community's life was the object of separate
attention and effort: but it was their totality which pro duced the modern
order.
Mumford SS 1955:93/4
Mumford SS 109/100
Mumford calls for urban expansion to be kept within the natural boundaries
of human scale and proportion.
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Mumford SS 110
A city, properly speaking, does not exist by the accretion of houses, but
by the association of human beings. When the accretion of houses reaches
such a point of congestion or expansion that human association becomes
difficult, the place ceases to be a city. The institutions that make up the city
—schools, clubs, libraries, gymnasia, theaters, churches, and so forth—
can be traced in one form or another back to the primitive community: they
function on the basis of immediate intercourse, and they can serve
through their individual units only a limited number of people. Should the
population of a local community be doubled, all its civic equipment must be
doubled too; otherwise the life that functions through these institutions
and opportunities will lapse and disappear.
Mumford SS 110
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Mumford SS 1955:110
The central theme of the book is the idea that ‘life flourishes only in [the]
alternating rhythm of dream and deed’. Progress only occurs through
continuous attempts to make the ideal real.
Mumford located his argument within the wider environment of the city,
the entity which establishes the context and the limits for values and their
transformation. The city represents the place where the inner and the outer
are most integral to each other. The city has been constructed out of inner
and outer experiences and inhibits or enhances human interaction according
to its design and structure.
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Mumford SS 1955:8 9
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But the real problem was not one of design or architecture but of morality
and psychology. Architecture and design were the external expression of the
character of wider society. Mumford’s call for a new, organic, architecture,
then, is a call for a new moral order in society. Good architecture calls for a
profound reorientation of morality within society. To be more than a slick
phrase, the Garden City needs to be invested with real content and power.
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Mumford SS 1955:111/2
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agora’. Mumford called for a ‘refreshment place, and many protected stalls,
and much elbow room for gesticulation’ (RN 1916).
Mumford’s strictures did not just apply to the poorer districts of New York. For
the fashionable rich of Park and Fifth Avenues ‘allow themselves to be herded
in lofty tenements’. Mumford refers to these places as ‘superslums’ ‘whose
sole outlook is upon the walls of – another lofty tenement’ (RN August 21
1916).
Both Sticks and Stones and The Golden Day have their centre of gravity in
the early New England town, functioning as a countervailing force resisting
the pull of the frontier and the depredations of the pioneer. ‘In the villages of
the new world there flickered up the last dying ember of the medieval order’
(Mumford SS 1955:14). The seabord towns of New England embody the
survival of utopia, nucleating rather than mushrooming, retaining their
particular identity and institutions into the nineteenth century through a form of
‘Yankee communism’.
The Puritans knew and applied a principle that Plato had long ago
pointed out in the Republic, namely, that an intelligent and socialized
community will continue to grow only as long as it can remain a unit and
keep up its common institutions. Beyond that point growth must cease, or
the community will disintegrate and cease to be an organic thing.
Economically, this method of community-development kept land values at
a properly low level, and prevented the engrossing of land for the sake of a
speculative rise. The advantage of the Puritan method of settlement
comes out plainly when one contrasts it with the trader's paradise of
Manhattan; for by the middle of the seventeenth century all the land on
Manhattan Island was privately owned, although only a small part of it was
cultivated, and so eagerly had the teeth of monopoly bitten into this fine
morsel that there was already a housing shortage.
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Mumford SS 1955: 4 5
The rough equality and shared spiritual purpose of the New England
inhabitants could be seen in the built environment, in the towns and in the
houses and meetinghouses which expressed the ‘dynamic qualities of
medieval architecture’ (Mumford SS 1955:28).
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Mumford presents early nineteenth century New England and the New
York of his youth as historical examples of the balanced and integrated culture
which he identified as the objective of regional planning. Mumford argues that
the first couple of hundred years of development on the east coast was
characterised by resources being used ‘with thrift and intelligence’ while
‘industries and communities were in a state of balance’ (Mumford CC
1970:346). Mumford’s purpose is not backward looking, engaging in the futile
project of attempting to revive a lost past. In his arguments for regionalism,
Mumford consistently looks forward rather than backwards.
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Mumford was concerned that the regional city be set within an ecological
regionalism. Mumford recalled the New York of his youth. ‘Visually, my
domestic memories are mostly bleak and sniffy, and I hate to think how
depressing the total effect would have been had not Central Park and
Riverside Drive always been there to gladden my eyes and beckon my legs to
a ramble’.
In the 1880’s and the 1890’s, New York had the character of a walking city
accessible through wide tree-lined avenues leading the pedestrian downtown.
It was a city which was scaled to human dimensions. The railroad bridge over
Hellgate spanned the East River whilst Saint John’s Cathedral approached
medium magnificence next to Colombia. The ‘colorful, still selective, middle
class world’ of uptown would disappear by 1920. Consumerism would shortly
prevent New Yorkers from registering a ‘variety of little changes, little
differences’. But in the years of Mumford’s youth, goats could still be found on
pastures beyond 180th street whilst trolleys carried people from tenements to
wide meadows and farms en route to Belmont Park and Sheepshead Bay.
This was the city as an integrated regional and ecological complex. Although
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the New York of Mumford’s youth would soon be lost through commercial
expansion, it left a permanent impression on Mumford. Most of all, Mumford
learned that the ultimate meaning of the city was education. The city exists as
a self-directed educative process of absorption and reflection. ‘We must
conceive of the city not primarily as a place of business or government but as
an essential organ for expressing and actualising a new personality’ (Mumford
quoted by Fischer 1968).
Mumford valued New England above all as a place grounded in its
geographic environment. In contrast, modern towns and cities are organised
in abstract fashion according to geometric gridiron pattern. Further, a genuine
sense of place grounded in topos fosters community, based on civic
mindedness and social cohesion.
Thus the legacy of New England was a valuable one with important
lessons for the present. The sense of place and the sense of community
which characterised New England are precisely what modern civilisation
lacks. The lesson which Mumford drew from New England was that there is a
need to achieve and maintain a productive, equitable and balanced
relationship between urban and natural environments. And there is a need to
develop a communal identity by maintaining social relationships on the basis
of mutual respect and dignity.
To realise the harmony of the New England town requires that space be
turned into place. This realises a subjectivity located in the geographical
relationships of place. This forms the central theme of Sticks and Stones, a
book concerned with the ‘study of American architecture and civilisation’. In
this book, Mumford sought to ‘relate individual structures to their urban site or
their setting in the rural landscape’ (Mumford SS 1955:ix), conceiving
architecture as the relation between space and design, nature and culture.
Mumford identified this as the greatest achievement in Sticks and Stones:
I have left to the last perhaps the greatest contribution that Sticks and
Stones made, though it is one that has not yet, I regret to say, been fully
absorbed by critics and historians of architecture. This is the fact that I
sought to relate individual structures to their urban site or their setting in
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the rural landscape: thus I turned my back upon the habit of treating the
building as a self-sufficient entity, an esthetic abstraction; and in doing this,
I not merely did justice to social conditions but also gave due esthetic
importance to the whole mass of building that necessarily serves as
background for the outstanding works of civic and religious architecture.
The single building is but an element in a complex civic or landscape
design. Except in the abstraction of drawing or photography no building
exists in a void: it functions as part of a greater whole and can be seen and
felt only through dynamic participation in that whole. This seems to me a
fundamental doctrine; but it has yet to be widely honored. Dr. Walter Curt
Behrendt's Modern Building was perhaps the first work after Sticks and
Stones to give due recognition to this social-esthetic relationship.
Mumford SS 1955:ix/x
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at the front, and now seeing them reduced to nothing by the tall spire in
the rear. So the building seems in motion, as well as the spectator; and
this quality delights the eye quite as much as formal decoration, which the
architecture of the seventeenth century in America almost completely
lacked…
In essentials .. both the life and the architecture of the first provincial
period are sound. While agriculture is the mainstay of life, and the medieval
tradition flourishes, the New England village reaches a pretty fair pitch of
worldly perfection; and beneath all the superficial changes that affected it
in the next century and a half, its sturdy framework held together
remarkably well.
Consider the village itself. In the center is a common, a little to one side
will be the meeting-house, perhaps a square barnlike structure, with a
hipped roof and a cupola, like that at Hing-ham; and adjacent or across
the way will be the grammar school. Along the roads where the houses are
set at regular intervals is a great columnar arcade of elm trees. All these
elements are essential to our early provincial architecture, and without
them it would be a little bare and forbidding. The trees, above all, are
an important part of New England architecture: in summer they absorb the
moisture and cool the air, besides giving shade; in the winter their huge
boles serve as a partial windbrake; even the humus from their leaves
keeps the soil of the lawns in better order. The apple trees and kitchen-
garden, giving food and beauty, are not less essential. Would it be an
exaggeration to say that there has never been a more complete and
intelligent partnership between the earth and man than existed, for a little
while, in the old New England village? In what other part of the world
has such a harmonious balance between the natural and the social
environment been preserved?
With this balance between the natural and the social environment, the
village is the living core of civilisation, with a common, a school, a meeting
house. Along the converging roads, at regular intervals, are houses behind
lines of trees. In terms of physical layout, the village expresses a
compactness of design that ensures access to the religious life in the
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centre of the town. Irregularity filled the functional division of the land
between home and farm use according to natural features. Physical layout
was thus the product of a mutualist ethos and respect for organic
principles.
Nowadays we have begun to talk about garden cities, and we realize that
the essential elements in a garden-city are the common holding of land
by the community, and the cooperative ownership and direction of the
community itself. We refer to all these things as if they represented a
distinct achievement of modern thought; but the fact of the matter is
that the New England village up to the middle of the eighteenth century
was a garden-city in every sense that we now apply to that term, and
happily its gardens and its harmonious framework have fre quently
lingered on, even though the economic foundations have long been
overthrown.
This is a medieval tradition in American architecture which should be
of some use to our architects and city planners; for it is a much more
substantial matter than the building of perpendicular churches or Tudor
country-houses in painfully archaeological adaptations. If we wish to tie
up with our colonial tradition we must recover more than the
architectural forms: we must recover the interests, the standards, the
institutions that gave to the villages and buildings of early times their
appropriate shapes. To do much less than this is merely to bring back a
fad which might as well be Egyptian as "colonial" for all the sin cerity
that it exhibits.
Wherever these villages were well-established, they kept sweet and
sound over the centuries: in Connecticut, Sharon and Litchfield and Old
Lyme; in Massachusetts, Shirley Center and Harvard and Andover;
Manchester in Vermont, or Thetford in New Hampshire, still bear
testimony to the life-wisdom and skill of their early planners and
inhabitants.
Mumford SS 1955:8-10
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Mumford SS 1955:10
The just design, the careful execution, the fine style that brings all the
houses into harmony no matter how diverse the purposes they served ..
was the outcome of a common spirit, nourished by men who had divided
the land fairly and who shared adversity and good fortune together.
Mumford SS 1955:6
This is the town which respects definite physical limits and integrity, a basic
geographic unit of organic human society. And for Mumford, this townscape is
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Mumford SS 1955:7
The New England town was in retreat throughout the nineteenth century,
subject to pressures arising from within the industrial revolution. The respect
for limits was dissolved through the promise of unlimited wealth. Industrialism
undermined the artisanal self-sufficiency and social cohesiveness of the small
town by eroding the sense of balance produced by respect for definite limits.
With the replacement of country villages by commercial towns, the rough
equality that prevailed between inhabitants came to be replaced by
distinctions between rich and poor which are corrosive of social unity. Class
war between craftsmen and merchants arose, war between ‘better’ and
‘meaner’ sorts.
In what is ostensibly the age of the common man, rich merchants lure
practitioners of the vernacular so as to convert the traditional low lying New
England farmhouse into a ‘bulky square house with its tipped roof, its classical
pilasters, its frequently ill-proportioned cupola, its “captain’s walk” or “widow’s
walk”. The product is false, recalling ‘a thinned and watered Greece’.
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Indeed, the disciples of the Age of Reason and white perukes would have
been horrified, I have no doubt, at the "barbarism" of the original Greek
temples, as they would doubtless also have been at the meanness of the
dwellings in which Pericles or Thucydides must have lived. Once the
temple-house ceased to be a stage upon which the myth of classicism
could be enacted, it ceased also be a home. For who wishes to live in a
temple? That is a spiritual exercise we do not demand even of a priest.
Small wonder that the temple lingered longest in the South, where, down
to the Civil War, gangs of slaves supported the dignity of the masters and
a large household diminished the chilly sense of solitude.
Mumford SS 1955:28
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Mumford SS 1955:25/6
The stripping of the Appalachian forest was the first step in our
campaign against nature. By 1860 the effect was already grave enough to
warn an acute observer, like George Perkins Marsh, of the danger to our
civilization, and to prompt him in Earth and Man, to remind his
countrymen that other civilizations about the Mediterranean and the
Adriatic had lost their top-soil and ruined their agriculture through the
wanton destruction of their forests.
In the meanwhile, a new factor had entered. If before the nineteenth
century we cleared the forest to make way for the farm, with the
entrance of the industrial pioneer we began to clear the farm to parcel
out the city. We have called this process the settlement of America, but the
name is anomalous, for we formed the habit of using the land, not as a
home, a permanent seat of culture, but as a means to something else—
principally as a means to the temporary advantages of profitable
speculation and exploitation.
James Mackay, a charitable Scottish observer in the early nineteenth
century, explained our negligence of the earth by the fact that we
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pinned our affections to institutions rather than places, and cared not
how the landscape was massacred as long as we lived under the same
flag and enjoyed the same forms of government. There is no doubt a little
truth in this observation; but it was not merely our attachment to
republican government that caused this behavior: it was even more,
perhaps, our disattachment from the affiliations of a settled life. The
pioneer, to put it vulgarly, was on the make and on the move; it did not
matter to him how he treated the land, since by the time he could
realize its deficiencies he had already escaped to a new virgin area.
"What had posterity done for him?"
The pioneers who turned their backs on a civilized way of life in order to
extend the boundaries of civilization, left us with a heavy burden—not
merely blasted and disorderly landscapes, but the habit of tolerating and
producing blasted and disorderly landscapes. As William Cobbett pointed
out in his attempt to account for the unkempt condition of the American
farm, the farmer in this country lacked the example of the great landed
estates, where the woods had become cultivated parks, and the
meadowland had become lawns. Without this cultivated example in the
country, it is no wonder that our cities have been littered, frayed at the
edges, ugly; no wonder that our pavements so quickly obliterate trees
and grass; no wonder that so many towns are little more than gashes of
metal and stone.
Those who had been bred on the land brought into the city none of that
disciplined care which might have preserved some of its amenities. They
left the smoke of the clearings, which was a sign of rural "progress"; they
welcomed the smoke of the towns, and all that accompanied it.
It is scarcely a paradox to say that the improvement of our cities must
proceed inwards from the countryside; for it is largely a matter of reversing
the process which converts the farm into incipient blocks of real estate.
Once we assimilate the notion that soil and site have uses quite apart
from sale, we shall not continue to barbarize and waste them. Consider
how the water's edge of lower Manhattan was developed without the
slightest regard for its potential facilities for recreation; how the Acropolis
of Pittsburgh, the Hump, was permitted to turn into a noisome slum; how
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the unique beauty of Casco Bay has been partly secured only by
Portland's inferiority as a shipping center. Indeed, all up and down the
country one can pick up a thousand examples of towns misplaced, of
recreation areas becoming factory sites, of industries located without
intelligent reference to raw materials or power or markets or the human
beings who serve them, of agricultural land being turned prematurely into
suburban lots, and of small rural communities which need the injection of
new industries and enterprises, languishing away whilst a metropolis not
fifty miles away continues to absorb more people, who daily pay a heavy
premium for their congestion.
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alone! I give the reader the privilege of tracing the pleasant ramifications of
this notion.)
To see the interdependence of city and country, to realize that the
growth and concentration of one is associated with the depletion and
impoverishment of the other, to appreciate that there is a just and
harmonious balance between the two—this capacity we have lacked.
Before we can build well on any scale we shall, it seems to me, have to
develop an art of regional planning, an art which will relate city and
countryside in a new pattern from that which was the blind creation of the
industrial and the territorial pioneer. Instead of regarding the countryside as
so much grist doomed to go eventually into the metropolitan mill, we
must plan to preserve and develop all our natural resources to the limit.
It goes without saying that any genuine attempt to provide for the
social and economic renewal of a region cannot be constrained to preserve
vested land-values and property rights and privileges; indeed, if the land is
to be fully loved and cared for again we must recover it in something
more than name only. The main objection to keeping our natural
resources in the hands of the community, namely, that private capital is
more zealous at exploitation, is precisely the reason for urging the first
course. Our land has suffered from zeal in exploitation; and it would be
much better, for example, that our water power resources should remain
temporarily undeveloped, than that they should be incontinently used by
private corporations to concentrate population in the centers where a high
tariff can be charged. The number of things that are waiting to be done
— the planting of town forests, the communal restoration of river banks
and beaches, the transformation of bare roads into parkways—will of
course differ in each region and locality; and my aim here is only to point
to a general objective.
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life. In the United States, Mr. Benton Mackaye has sketched out a bold
and fundamental plan for associating the development of a spinal
recreational trail with an electric power development for the whole
Appalachian region, along the ridgeway; both trail and power being used
as a basis for the re-afforestation and the re-peopling of the whole
upland area, with a corresponding decentralization and depopulation of
the overcrowded, spotty coastal region. Such a scheme would call for a
pretty thorough dislocation of metropolitan values; and if it is slow in making
headway, that is only because its gradual institution would mean that a
new epoch had begun in American civilization.
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‘limited in numbers, and in area, and formed, not merely by the agglomeration
of people but by their relation to definite social and economic institutions’
(Mumford SS 1955:111). The task of the community planner is to articulate
this relation.
Mumford SS 1955:110
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Americans could ‘gain the ability to select qualities which it values’ (Mumford
‘The Collapse of Tomorrow: The Emergence of a Past’ 1925:18/9). Mumford
found a ‘useable past’ in Antebellum New England as a place which offered a
great cultural resource upon which to draw. Mumford quite explicitly rules out
a return to the America of the ‘Golden Day’ as both impossible and
undesirable. Mumford’s purpose is to offer The Golden Day as a useful myth
by which to criticise the flaws at the heart of the modern machine civilisation
(Mumford GD 1926:278). He is arguing against the tendency of machine
culture to obliterate the past and any view which is different to its own
mechanistic view: ‘having no past, and no continuity’, machine civilisation
would ensure that humanity would have ‘no future’ (Mumford GD 1926:178).
Mumford’s argument in The Golden Day is a powerful critique of the
way that American civilisation sold out its township tradition for ‘dreams of
great fortune in real estate, rubber or oil’ (Mumford GD 1926:69). What
Mumford shows is that this commercial culture originates in the ‘utilitarian
conquest of [the natural] environment’ (Mumford GD 1926:42) and is a
commodification which rests upon the ‘warfare against nature’ (Mumford GD
1926:59). It ‘required only a generation or two before the trader [of furs]
became the boomtown manufacturer, and the manufacturer, the realtor and
financier’ (Mumford GD 1926:65).
American capitalism was built upon the pioneering exploitation of
nature, something which fed directly into the individualistic free market
ideology of urban industrial civilisation. Both seek to transcend nature through
its conquest. The pioneer’s conquest of the land becomes the ‘inventor-
businessman’s search for power’ (Mumford GD 1926:43 73/4).
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New England’s ‘Golden Day’ was built upon a specific political economy of an
‘always moral’ (Emerson) small property and a diffused wealth which
cultivated respect for the terms dictated by the land, a guaranteed
‘competence’ for both industrious farmers and artisans, self-government, and
a sturdy independence. The political economy of free labour cultivated a
specific culture in which personal values expressed a sureness of self-identity,
industriousness and invention. And these traits in turn fostered a civic spirit. At
the base is manual labour as the study of the external world. For Mumford,
the New England town embodied the values of the individuals who lived in it.
The New England of the mid-nineteenth century maintained a perfect balance
between the past and the future, combining old and new in its regional culture.
Ideally, the new New England would manage to integrate the survivals of a
past culture with the best features of the modern age. Mumford sought a
renaissance along the lines of the New England town, a regionalism that
countered the depredations of the pioneers on the frontier and in industry.
Mumford called upon the current generation to engage in an act of recovery
by identifying themselves as the spiritual children of those who ‘people the
landscape with their own shapes’ as discoverers of ‘a new hemisphere in the
geography of the mind’ (Mumford GD 1926:40/1 34 37).
Mumford continued to develop his view on the regional city. The essay
which concludes The Culture of Cities stands as his most significant
statement. The New England towns that Mumford portrays were symbolic
landscapes, harmonious late medieval towns which were remodelled to fit the
contours of the new world. Their legacy is inestimable. The village spaces that
Mumford describes exist as ceremonial settings for the urban dramas which
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Mumford placed at the heart of a vibrant city life. Mumford invested his
recreation with the routines, practices and ceremonies of real individuals,
articulating meaning through a complex, dynamic web of human action and
interaction.
Mumford never lost this sense of the city as lived experience. He made it
central to his project of regional reconstruction. This was not a case of
recovering a lost past or of mummifying the present. It was upon these values
that Mumford pinned his hopes for a fourth migration. The purpose of regional
planning was to counter metropolitan excesses by establishing limits. The
metropolis extends outwards through the highways. It is here that planning
efforts must focus. Regionalism, for Mumford, was ‘an effort which recognises
the existence of real groups and social configurations and geographical
relationships that are ignored by the abstract culture of the metropolis, and
which opposes to the aimless nomadism of the modern commercial enterprise
the conception of a stable and settled and balanced and cultivated way of life’.
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Mumford studied past cities in order to discern their best features and reveal
the implications that they had for future cities. Contemporary urban design
and planning could be informed by the lessons that these old cities could still
teach. Although Mumford demonstrated a keen understanding of physical
form in both The Culture of Cities (1938) and The City in History (1961), what
concerned him above all was the way of life and the human character that
these cities sustained.
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fundamental facts of its existence. The dome and the spire, the open
avenue and the closed court, tell the story, not merely of different physical
accommodations, but of essentially different conceptions of man's destiny.
The city is both a physical utility for collective living and a symbol of those
collective purposes and unanimities that arise under such favoring
circumstance. With language itself, it remains man's greatest work of art.
Mumford CC 1938:6
Mumford states the problem facing the modern city. In every department,
form has disintegrated and the city has ‘vanished as an embodiment of
collective art and technics’ (Mumford CC 1938:9).
And where, as in North America, the loss was not alleviated by the
continued presence of great monuments from the past and persistent habits
of social living, the result was a raw, dissolute environment, and a narrow,
constricted, and baffled social life. Even in Germany and the Low Countries,
where the traditions of urban life had lingered on from the Middle Ages, the
most colossal blunders were committed in the most ordinary tasks of urban
planning and building. As the pace of urbanization increased, the circle of
devastation widened.
Today we face not only the original social disruption. We likewise face
the accumulated physical and social results of that disruption: ravaged
landscapes, disorderly urban districts, pockets of disease, patches of blight,
mile upon mile of standardized slums, worming into the outlying areas of big
cities, and fusing with their ineffectual suburbs. In short: a general
miscarriage and defeat of civilized effort. So far have our achievements
fallen short of our needs that even a hundred years of persistent reform in
England, the first country to suffer heavily from disurbanization, have only in
the last decade begun to leave an imprint. True: here and there patches of
good building and coherent social form exist: new nodes of integration can
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be detected, and since 1920 these patches have been spreading. But the
main results of more than a century of misbuilding and malformation,
dissociation and disorganization still hold. Whether the observer focuses
his gaze on the physical structure of communal living or upon the social
processes that must be embodied and expressed, the report remains the
same.
Mumford CC 1938:10
We must alter the parasitic and predatory modes of life that now play so
large a part, and we must create region by region, continent by continent, an
effective symbiosis, or co-operative living together. The problem is to
coordinate, on the basis of more essential human values than the will-to-
power and the will-to-profits, a host of social functions and processes that we
have hitherto misused in the building of cities and polities, or of which we
have never rationally taken advantage.
Mumford CC 1938:10
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Mumford CC 1938:11
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by the rapid advance of the biological arts and sciences, as well as by the
steady penetration of sociological thought into every department.
Mumford CC 1938:11
Mumford emphasises the profound changes which will affect the distribution
and increase of population and the efficiency of industry and argues that one of
the major urban tasks is to form an accurate estimate of these new
potentialities and to suggest their direction into channels of human welfare.
Such studies, forecasts, and imaginative projects ‘must bear directly upon the
life of every human being in our civilization.’ (Mumford CC 1938:11).
Today our world faces a crisis: a crisis which, if its consequences are as
grave as now seems, may not fully be resolved for another century. If the
destructive forces in civilization gain ascendancy, our new urban culture will
be stricken in every part. Our cities, blasted and deserted, will be
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cemeteries for the dead: cold lairs given over to less destructive beasts
than man. But we may avert that fate: perhaps only in facing such a
desperate challenge can the necessary creative forces be effectually
welded together. Instead of clinging to the sardonic funeral towers of
metropolitan finance, ours to march out to newly plowed fields, to create
fresh patterns of political action, to alter for human purposes the perverse
mechanisms of our economic regime, to conceive and to germinate fresh
forms of human culture.
Mumford CC 1938:11/2
In the modern world, means of production have been turned into means of
destruction. Freud wrote of thanatos, the death instinct, stalking modern
civilisation and driving out eros, the life instinct. The choice between eros and
thanatos is as old as the Bible. 'I have set before you life and death, the
blessing and the curse. Therefore choose life' (Deuteronomy 30:19).
Mumford wants us to choose life.
Instead of accepting the stale cult of death that the fascists have erected,
as the proper crown for the servility and the brutality that are the pillars of
their states, we must erect a cult of life: life in action, as the farmer or the
mechanic knows it: life in expression, as the artist knows it: life as the
lover feels it and the parent practices it: life as it is known to men of good
will who meditate in the cloister, experiment in the laboratory, or plan
intelligently in the factory or the government office.
Nothing is permanent: certainly not the frozen images of barbarous power
with which fascism now confronts us. Those images may easily be smashed
by an external shock, cracked as ignominiously as fallen Dagon, the massive
idol of the heathen: or they may be melted, eventually, by the internal warmth
of normal men and women. Nothing endures except life: the capacity for
birth, growth, and daily renewal. As life becomes insurgent once more in our
civilization, conquering the reckless thrust of barbarism, the culture of cities
will be both instrument and goal.
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Mumford CC 1938:11/2
In The Culture of Cities, Mumford expresses his admiration for the organic
design of medieval cities, their ‘rural character’, ‘usable open spaces’, the way
that they fit natural contours, the way that their streets function as ‘footways’
connecting little ‘islands’ buildings and an urban pattern that creates ‘small
cities, distributed widely over the landscape’ (CC 1938:434ff 56 59). Streets
were more about urban communication within the town than the transportation
of people and goods between towns. Streets fostered urban solidarity and
association.
The street occupied in medieval city planning a quite different place than in
an age of locomotion. Except in the country, we inevitably think of houses being
built along a line of predetermined streets. But on the less regular medieval
sites it would be the other way about: groups of trades or groups 'of
institutional buildings would form self-contained quarters or "islands." Within
these "islands," and often outside, as part of the connecting urban tissue,
the streets were essentially footways: marks of the daily comings and goings
of the inhabitants. "Islands" formed by the castle, the monasteries, or the
specialized industrial section of the technically more advanced towns were
characteristic features: they had their counterpart in the little internal "islands"
one encounters in the Northern countries in die housing foundations for the
aged or the poor. The Fuggerei in Augsburg is the most handsomely built
survival of this mode, although the Dutch and English foundations of the same
period surpass it in spaciousness. (Mumford CC 1938: 57).
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In the early medieval city, the street was a line of communication rather
than a means of transportation: the unpaved streets were more like the
courtyard of a farm. The streets were sometimes narrow and the turns and
closures frequent: there was a difference in breadth between the main
streets and the subordinate ones. When the street was narrow and twisting,
or when it came to a dead end, the plan broke the force of the winter's
wind and reduced the area of the mud: the overhang of the houses not
merely gave extra space to the inhabitants above but furnished a partly
covered way to the pedestrian. Sometimes the building was constructed to
form an arcaded walk, as in the street leading up to das Coldene Dachl in
Innsbruck: protection against summer sun or winter sleet.
Mumford CC 1938:57
In fine, the medieval city was composed of ‘usable open spaces’, making
its foundation and mode of existence of ‘a far higher standard for the mass of
the population than any later form of town, down to the first romantic suburbs
of the nineteenth century.’ (Mumford CC 1938: 57). The human proportions
and dimensions of the medieval town also entailed smaller numbers. Scale in
quantity and quality go hand in hand.
Reclus, indeed, discovered that the villages and towns of France could be
plotted with amazing regularity on the pattern of a day's walk back and forth
between them. This urban pattern corresponded to the economic one: facilities
for shipping food were extremely limited —Francis Bacon died as a result of
making one of the first experiments with cold storage—and power, whether
obtained through wind mills or water mills or sailing ships, was similarly
distributed. While internally, the importance of the Church and its accessory
institutions limited the growth of the town almost as much as the provisional
definition of the wall itself: its buildings served as cohesive nucleus.
At all events, the facts are plain. The typical medieval town ranged in size
from three or four hundred, which was frequently the size of a fully
privileged municipality in Germany, to forty thousand, which was the size of
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Only in Italy, as a result of the early rise of capitalism there, are the
population figures above the norm. The phenomena of overcrowding and
overbuilding, along with indefinite suburban expansion, only came when the
capacity for building new cities greatly diminished. (Mumford CC 1938: 60).
At the heart of medieval town is a moral purpose. The town was part of a
transcendental moral cosmogony. The ‘essential drama of the medieval
culture’ ‘took place within the Church’ and ‘concerned the passage of sinning
man through an evil and painful world, from which he might emerge through
repentance into heaven, or sink through hardness of heart or confirmed
mischief into hell.’
The earth itself was but a mean stopping place, a wayside tavern of ill
fame, on the way to these other worlds. But nothing that concerned this
drama was mean: on the contrary, the Church, founded through an act of
God, brought into the world constant reminders of the grace and beauty
that was to come: though art and music might tempt men from a higher life,
they also indicated its possibility, indeed its immanence. Life was a
succession of significant episodes in man's pilgrimage to heaven: for each
great moment the Church had its sacrament or its celebration. Beneath the
active drama was the constant chant of prayer: in solitude or in company,
men communed with God and praised him. It was in such moments, only
in such moments, that one truly lived.
Whatever else the medieval city was, in its busy turbulent life, it was
above all things a stage for the ceremonies of the Church. Just as in an
industrial age, the imagination soars to its highest level in a railroad
station or bridge, in medieval culture practical achievement reached its
peak in the service of a great symbol. Men who had little to eat gave part
of that little to say prayers and masses, light candles, and build a mighty
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Mumford CC 1938:62
The construction of buildings enlisted both rich and poor alike, lifting the
ordinary energies of the medieval community to a higher potential. (Mumford
CC 1938: 62).
Such cities are not afflicted by the functional differentiation of space that
marks the modern city. Mumford shows how the medieval communes, ‘the
real corporations and groups that constitute a community’, had their autonomy
subjected to systematic assault by the rationalistic elites of the Baroque
Cities. Monarchy, Nation State, War and power as spectacle and the
spectacle of power put an end to the old collective solidarities and ties of the
medieval town. Modernity was born from death and violence, from abstraction
and quantity. It was a rationalistic desolidarisation that destroyed organic ties.
The transformation of the art of war gave the baroque rulers a powerful
advantage over the real corporations and groups that constitute a community.
It did more than any other single force to alter the constitution of the city. Power
became synonymous with numbers. "The greatness of a city," Botero
observed, "is said to be, not the largeness of the site or the circuit of the
walls, but the multitude and number of inhabitants and their power." The
army, recruited for permanent warfare, became a new factor in the state and
in the life of the capital city. In Paris and Berlin, and other lesser centers,
these standing armies created a demand for special forms of housing, since
soldiers could not be permanently quartered on the population without
provoking a sense of grievance: witness the result of such an attempt in the
British colonies of North America. The army barracks have almost the same
place in the baroque order that the monastery had in the medieval one; and
the Parade Grounds—the new Champ de Mars in Paris, for instance—were
as conspicuous in the new cities as Mars himself was in Renascence
painting. Turning out the guard, drilling, parading, became one of the great
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mass spectacles for the increasingly servile populace: the blare of the
bugle, the tattoo of the drum, were as characteristic a sound for this new
phase of urban life as the tolling of the bells had been for the medieval
town. The laying out of great Viae Triumphales, avenues where a victorious
army could march with the maximum effect upon the spectator, was an
inevitable step in the replanning of the new capitals: notably in Paris and
Berlin. (Mumford CC 1938: 89).
The functional spatialisation of the modern city was part and parcel of a
general economic spatialisation and social fragmentation. In contrast, the
Medieval City was constituted by guilds, whose mutualism made each of
them a true ‘corporation’. The mutualistic socially cohesive form of the
medieval city contrasts markedly with the ‘merciless class-competition and
individual self-assertion’ that characterises the social form of capitalism
(CC 1938:40). Mumford employs his organicist method of uniting
aesthetics and function to condemn the megastructures of accumulated
power in modern society. This is the result of the rise of the capital
economy imposing an abstract, profit-driven, money oriented (dis)order on
particular geo-economies.
For Mumford, the Medieval City represents the best approximation of the
organic human community he sought. The Medieval City was part of what he
called the ‘Eotechnic’ age in Technics and Civilisation (1934). Medieval cities
were ground-hugging cities, constructed in conformity with the contours of the
land and were held to human scale. Design encouraged pedestrian
movement, with every building and civic centre within walking distance.
Extensive green spaces and plenty of public spaces for worship, spectacle,
meeting, trading and politicking created diversity and activity within. The
enclosing walls established clear outer boundaries that created a tight urban
form encouraging a common identity and feeling. The townspeople were
active participants in the city life, taking part in the processions and plays held
in the main market, often located close to the church or cathedral, the spiritual
centre of the city. The streets leading to this focal public place were footways,
narrow and twisting routes which visually offset the vastness of the wide
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In the early Middle Ages, even business and religion were in organic
relationship: so much so that business would copy the institutions of religion
in the organization of its trading posts: the Hansa settlements were plainly
fashioned on monastic lines, and exacted the same sort of narrow devotion.
But at the end of the Middle Ages— and this is one of the signs of the end—
even pious matters have a worldly tinge: one seeks security, no longer in
the depths of the Church, but in a shrewd loan, backed by, a note, and
ultimately vouched for by the armed might of the state. "Faith" gives way to
"credit."
Perhaps the most important civic effect of this other-worldly religion, with
its enfolding protection, its abstentions, its withdrawals, was that it
universalized the cloister. Medieval culture, constantly "in retreat," had its
claustrum, where the inner life could flourish. One withdrew at night: one
withdrew on Sundays and on fast days: so long as the medieval complex
was intact, a constant stream of disillusioned worldly men turned from the
market place and the battlefield to seek the quiet contemplative round of
the monastery. The ineffectiveness and costliness of artificial forms of
illumination even prolonged the withdrawal of the night: and winter served,
so to say, as the cloistered period of the year. This universal concentration
on the inner life had its compensatory effect on the imagination: the vulgar
daylight perceptions were illumined by the impassioned hallucinations and
visions of dream: the figures of the inner eye. were as real as those that
fell peripherally on the retina. And though protestantism in the sixteenth
century brought in a distrust of the wanton eye, it preserved for private
.use the habits of the cloister: prayer and inner communion.
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Today, as we shall see later, our architecture has passed from the cave
to the garden, from the monument to the dwelling house. But in throwing
open our buildings to the daylight and the outdoors, we will forget, at our
peril, the co-ordinate need for quiet, for darkness, for inner privacy, for
retreat. The cloister in both its public and private form is a constant
element in the life of men in cities. Without formal opportunities for isolation
and contemplation, opportunities that require enclosed space, free from
prying eyes and extraneous stimuli and secular interruptions, even the most
externalized and extraverted life must eventually suffer. The home without
such cells is but a barracks: the city that does not possess them is but a
camp. In the medieval city the spirit had organized shelters and accepted
forms of escape from worldly importunity. Today, the degradation of the
inner life is symbolized by the fact that the only place sacred from
interruption is the private toilet. (Mumford CC 1938:29).
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itself. For except for a few congested centers, the town of the Middle Ages
was not merely in the country but of the country: food was grown within the
walls, as well as on the terraces, or in the orchards and fields, outside.
Mumford CC 1938:25
What gave the early medieval town a sound basis for health was the fact
that, though surrounded with a wall, it was still part of the open country.
Until the fourteenth century, these two types of environment were scarcely
differentiated... At harvest time, the population of the town would swarm out
into the country, as the slum dwellers of the East End still migrate to Kent
for the hop-picking. One has only to read the household recipes of the
Goodman of Paris, who was of the well-to-do merchant order, to see how the
more prosperous burghers kept a leg firmly planted in each world. Near the
city, the fowler and the rabbit hunter could go after game. Fitz-Stephens
noted that the citizens of London had the right of hunting in Middlesex,
Herefordshire, the Chiltern Hundreds, and part of Kent. And in the streams
by the city, fishing was diligently pursued: not merely on the coast but
inland….
This strong rural influence can be marked on the early city plans; all but a
handful of medieval towns were closer to what we should now call a village
or a small country town than a city: "greatness" did not mean a big
population or a spreading territory.. Gardens and orchards, sometimes
fields and pastures, existed within the city, as well as in the "suburb"
outside: endless illustrations and plans as late as the seventeenth century
prove how universal these open spaces were. Goethe describes such a fine
rear-garden, so favorable to a genial family life, in his Dichtung und
Wahrheit. Medieval people were used to outdoor living: they had shooting
grounds and bowling grounds and tossed the ball and kicked the football
and ran races and practiced archery. When the open spaces filled up, Botero
notes, Francis I provided a meadow near the river for the scholars of the
University of Paris. The spirit of this hearty informal play is carried on,
even today, in the merriest of all urban parks, the Jardin du
Luxembourg.
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Mumford CC 1938:43/4
The principal secular and spiritual concerns of the Medieval City were
expressed in the physical layout. The outward unity of structure articulated the
universal unity of morality. The unity and order of the Medieval City, as
expressed in the church and the guild, was particularly impressive. Individuals
in communities need common values which give their lives a moral purpose.
The pillars of town life provided the context for structuring moral order. The
universal bond in the Medieval City was religious salvation. But more
important than the particular historical of the good life was the need for a
vision of the good in order to morally integrate the community.
The unattached person during the Middle Ages was one either
condemned to exile or doomed to death: if alive, he immediately sought to
attach himself, at least to a band of robbers. To exist, one had to belong to
an association: a household, a manor, a monastery, a guild; there was no
security except in association, and no freedom that did not recognize the
obligations of a corporate life. One lived and died in the style of one's class
and corporation.
Mumford CC 1938:29/30
What Mumford writes here savours a great deal of the functional mediation
proposed by Hegel, the idea that individuals create the identity only by
belonging to a corporate or social bloc or association. Mumford cites Hegel on
two occasions in the chapter from which this passage comes from in The
Culture of Cities. The individualism and atomism that reduces bourgeois civil
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Mumford notices the change in the retreat from the common good and the
common life on the part of individuals.
‘The first radical change, which was to destroy the form of the medieval
dwelling house, was the development of a sense of privacy. This meant, in
effect, withdrawal at will from the common life and the common interests of
one's associates. Privacy in sleep: privacy in eating: privacy in religious and
social ritual: finally privacy in thought.’ (Mumford CC 1938:40).
Mumford charts the decline and fall of the institutions and values of the
common life and the rise of individualism and privacy, a social atomisation
that went hand in hand with political centralisation under the auspices of the
nation state. ‘Organic planning and building, not for show but for defense,
civic association, the expression of common values.’ (Mumford CC 1938:22).
As the physical utilities of the town became more complicated, the need
for more detailed municipal regulations and for more zealous and far-
sighted municipal enterprise became greater. The growth of population
gradually centered political attention more and more upon the mechanical
means of existence, and the institutions bound up with common interests and
feelings, with the common ideology, became more feeble, if they did not
disappear. This change was closely associated with those larger
transformations that marked the growth of a technical and capitalistic
culture. Finally, in the nineteenth century, the physical organs and
activities became the main determinants of plan, and the, social life of
the city was squeezed, as it were into the accidental apertures left open by
railroad extension and real estate speculation.
Mumford CC 1938:57/8
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When the cities joined the king, in order to lessen the impositions of the
nobles or ecclesiastics, they succeeded only in displacing a local tyrant by a
more ubiquitous one: presently they found themselves the subjects of the
state they had helped create. The essential difficulty was that the political
unit, the economic unit, and the religious unit were not in symmetrical
relationship, and were not unified in any common framework other than the
dynastic state. Power, privilege, ancient custom had made the political map
of Europe a crazy quilt of conflicting jurisdictions and disparate allegiances
and meaningless particularisms.
Mumford CC 1938:69
In pursuit of external power over their neighbours, the cities consented to the
loss of their own internal freedom. In the process, they also lost the moral case
against other forms of despotism. For Mumford, the only part of Europe where
the civic corporations and the territorial state achieved unity without loss of
civic liberty was the Swiss Cantonal Confederation. (Mumford CC 1938:79/80).
The modern state began to shape itself in the fourteenth century. Its
marks are a permanent bureaucracy, permanent courts of justice, permanent
archives and records, and permanent buildings, more or less centrally
located, for conducting the official business… This movement, or rather, this
settlement, took place first in financial administration … it was gradually
extended to all the other offices of State. And the process itself was a
reciprocal one: the centralization of authority necessitated the creation of
the capital city, while the capital city, commanding the main routes of trade
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The nation state was the new idol, the locus of power and the object of
veneration. The power and meaning once vested in corporations, guilds,
local communities was displaced from the everyday lives of people and
projected upwards into the abstraction of the modern state. Whereas in the
medieval regime, power, place and people were localised, decentralised
and grounded, now they were connected and concentrated around the
centre of the capital city. Only in the Germanic countries did the municipal
economy survive.
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The state grew at the expense of the component parts: the capital city grew
out of all proportion to the provincial cities, and in no small measure at their
expense. Though natural capitals were usually situated at points of special
advantage for trade and military defense—these being elements that
entered originally into their selection—the baroque rulers brought all the
powers of the state to bear to confirm these advantages…
In short, the multiplication of cities ceased; city building was no longer, for
a rising class of small craftsmen and merchants, a means of achieving
freedom and security. It was rather a means of consolidating political power
in a single center directly under the royal eye and preventing such a
challenge to the central authority from arising elsewhere, in scattered
centers, more difficult to control. The age of free cities, with their widely
diffused culture and their relatively democratic modes of association, gave
way to the age of absolute cities: a few centers that grew inordinately, leaving
other towns either to accept stagnation or to stultify themselves in hopeless
gestures of imitation.
Mumford CC 1938:82
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external means of enforcing this pattern of life lies in the army; its economic
arm is mercantile capitalist policy; and its most typical institutions are the-
standing army, the bourse, the bureaucracy, and the court. There is an
underlying harmony that pervades all these institutions: between them
they create a new form for social life — the baroque city.
Mumford CC 1938:82
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Mumford CC 1938:91
The money economy also rose hand in hand with the death instinct.
Rationalisation entailed not merely commercialisation and industrialisation but
also militarization. ‘Capitalism in its turn became militaristic: it relied on the
arms of the state when it could no longer bargain to advantage without
them: the foundations of later colonial exploitation and imperialism.’
(Mumford CC 1938:91).
Most of all, however, the development of capitalism extended secular
habits of thought and modes throughout every department: ‘this was the
warp, exact, orderly, superficially efficient, upon which the complicated and
effulgent patterns of baroque life were worked out. The new merchant and
banking classes emphasized method, order, routine, power, mobility, all the
habits that tended to increase effective practical command.’ It was no
accident that Newton, physicist of the new mechanical universe, became
master of the mint, or that the merchants of London helped found the
Royal Society and conducted experiments in physics. Capitalism was a
machine economy within the machine universe. These ‘mechanical
disciplines were in effect interchangeable.’ (Mumford CC 1938:90).
The result was dis-placement and dis-ease, the abstraction of power and
meaning from popular control and comprehension. The world became one of
vast impersonal systems and forces which were beyond the individual. The
modern world was conceived and defined by abstraction.
Behind the immediate interests of the new capitalism, with its abstract
love of money and power, a change in the entire conceptual framework
took place. And first: a new conception of space. It was one of the great
triumphs of the baroque mind to organize space, make it continuous,
reduce it to measure and order, to extend the limits of magnitude,
embracing the, extremely distant and the extremely minute; finally, to
associate space with motion.
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Mumford CC 1938:90/1
The conceptual revolution changed the way that human beings related to
and thought about the world. The general sense of time and space became
more mathematical, geometric, clean, precise and cold.
The abstractions of money, spatial perspective, and mechanical time
provided the enclosing frame of the new life. Experience was progressively
reduced to just those elements that were capable of being split off from the
whole and measured separately: conventional counters took the place of
organisms. What was real was that part of experience which left no murky
residues; and anything that could not be expressed in terms of visual
sensations and mechanical order was not worth expressing. In art,
perspective and anatomy; in morals, the systematic casuistry of the Jesuits;
in architecture, the fixed proportions of the Five Orders, and in city building,
the elaborate geometrical plan. These are the new forms.
Mumford CC 1938:93/4
Mumford acknowledges that the age of abstract analysis was an age of brilliant
intellectual clarification. In the natural sciences, the method of abstraction led to
the discovery of units that could be investigated completely just because they
were dismembered and fragmentary. The gain in the power of systematic
thought and in the accurate prediction of physical events resulted in an
impressive advance in technics.
However, with respect to society and human beings as social beings, ‘the habit
of thinking in terms of abstractions worked out disastrously. The new order
established in the physical sciences was far too limited to describe or
interpret social facts’ (Mumford CC 1938:94). Mechanistic thinking in terms
of abstractions results in real men and women, real corporations and cities,
being treated by government and law, by politicians and economists, as if they
were imaginary bodies. Mumford describes Divine Right, Absolute Rule, the
State, Sovereignty as ‘presumptuous fictions’ which are treated ‘as if they were
realities.’ The notion of limits disappears. Instead, all that matters is the endless
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Mumford CC 1938:94
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the first significant separation between the urban rich, who drive, and the
urban poor, who walk (CC 1938:94/7).
The new spirit in society was on the side of rapid transportation. ‘The
hastening of movement and the conquest of space, the feverish desire to "get
somewhere," were manifestations of the pervasive will-to-power.’ (Mumford
CC 1938 ch 2).
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This increase in the tempo of life, this rapid motion, these superficial
excitements and dangers, were the psychological sweetening of the bitter pill
of autocratic political discipline. In the baroque city one might say, "The
carriages move swiftly," just as people say in present-day fascist Italy, "The
trains run on time."
Mumford CC 1938: 99
The old medieval alleys, courts and triangles were severed. Whereas
individuals once enjoyed active participation in a lively civic life, they came to
be reduced to being mere passive spectators of displays of central power. A
certain sign of the decline of the city for Mumford was the way that urban life
came to be replaced by urban pageantry. The aura of class rule and imposed
order was expressed in the symmetrical building style and the uniform rows of
bourgeois homes and shops.
The military parade had its feminine counterpart in the capital: the
shopping parade. The ritual of conspicuous waste took up an ever larger
share of the time and effort of living: competitive spending affected every
class; for the same flourishing pride has dictated new methods of living to the
people, and while the poorest citizens strive to live like the rich, the rich like
the gentry, the gentry like the nobility, and the nobility strive to outshine one
another, no wonder that all the sumptuary trades increase. In the baroque
period the medieval sumptuary laws, governing the dress and expenditure
of each class according to tradition, began to fall into disrepute, even when
they were not actually lifted from the statute books. Luxury, instead of
distinguishing special public festivals and celebrations, became a daily
commodity. Competitive luxury. To spend more was more important than to
spend enough.
Mumford CC 1938:99
‘The buildings stand on each side [of the avenue], stiff and uniform, like
soldiers at attention: the uniformed soldiers march down the avenue, erect,
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Mumford drew attention to the connection of the new capital cities with the
centralisation of political and economic power within the capital economy, with
particular attention to the means of organised violence.
In the Middle Ages the soldier had been forced to share his power with the
craftsman, the merchant, the priest: now, in the politics of absolute states,
all law had in effect become martial law. Whoever could finance the arms
and the arsenal was capable of becoming master of the city.. [This]
transformation of the art of war gave the Baroque rulers a powerful
advantage over the real corporations and groups that constitute a
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community. It did more than any single force to alter the constitution of the
city.
CC 1938:87/8
The rise of the nation state and the city of capital meant the end of
medieval notions of the common good and the common life.
The city had almost ceased to be a common enterprise for the common
good; and neither the local authority of the municipal corporation, nor the
universal authority of the Church, was sufficient to direct for the benefit of the
commonwealth the new forces that were making headway throughout
European civilization.
There is little more to be said about the medieval city. Its economic and
its social basis had disintegrated, and its organic pattern of life had been
broken up. Slowly, the form itself became dilapidated, and even when it
continued to stand, its walls enclosed a hollow shell, harboring institutions
that were also hollow shells. It is only, as it were, by holding the shell quietly
to one's ear, as with a sea-shell, that one can catch in the ensuing pause
the dim roar of the old life that was once lived, with dramatic conviction
and solemn purpose, within its walls.
Mumford CC 1938:72
The Capital City was the product of a ‘new conception of space’ in which
space was reduced to ‘measure and order’ as a result of the ‘abstract love of
money and power’ under capitalism (CC 1938:91). Promoting prestige, status
and power over against justice, mutuality and balance, the Capital City is like
the monumental building in representing a ‘respect for death which is
essentially a fear of life’ (CC 1938:434). The end of the Capital City is
centralised power, for which the built environment exists as a means.
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of the Capital City was bad enough, but the city was also disfigured by social
and environmental destruction. Even worse for Mumford was the moral and
psychological degradation. The avarice and egoism of the Capital City
horrified Mumford. Under ‘carboniferous capitalism’ all came to be
subordinated to the overriding objective of economic gain. Cities expanded
with no regard to limits. The expansionary drive of profit making overwhelmed
any notion of a common plan or controlling purpose. Mumford portrayed the
Capital City as an urban wasteland, a place of relentless squalor and
ugliness, external and internal, physical, social and psychological.
What was purely a visual perspective in the baroque city becomes in the
later metropolis a more pragmatic perspective of profits through urban
extensions. In the upward extension of the city the same tendencies prevail: to
increase urban heights and distances and numbers has now a direct financial
motive. (Mumford 1938 ch 4).
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Mumford CC 1938:235
Mumford points out the extent to which the emergence of the big city from
the multitude of regional cities that characterized the Middle Ages has
become so obvious a fact as to be assumed to be inevitable and unalterable.
But Mumford doubts whether the transition from a town economy to a
metropolitan economy is a permanent one. Mumford asks the most pertinent
questions here: Will life continue to ebb out of the villages and country towns
and regional centers? Will urban life come to mean the further concentration of
power in a few metropolises whose ramifying suburban dormitories will finally
swallow the rural hinterland?
Whilst vast plans have been drawn up in various metropolises on the
assumption of the continuation of this trend of endless metropolitan
aggrandizement, Mumford detects ‘a new economic and social pattern: a step
beyond the metropolitan economy.’ (Mumford CC 1938: 223). Far from
representing the forces of modern civilization, Mumford describes the
metropolis as ‘one of the biggest obstacles to their fruitful human use.’
(Mumford CC 1938: 224).
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bureaucracy, and the army began to direct "national interests" toward the
service of the industrialist: they sought raw materials and markets
capable of absorbing his excess production: hence the partition of Africa,
Asia, and similar "backward" sections of the world. The industrialist, in
turn, abandoning his naive belief in laissez-faire and free enterprise,
came to rely upon his imperialistic allies to help stabilize industry and
to give it monopoly advantages: hence protective tariffs, subsidies,
export subventions.
This coalition of economic interests was in good part responsible for
the continuous increase of population in the great capitals during the
nineteenth century, and for the building up of new metropolitan centers.
The overgrown city, instead of appearing as an isolated phenomenon, an
emblem of purely political concentration, became the dominant type:
Coketown, the pure industrial city, was the recessive form after 1890.
Mumford CC 1938:225
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Mu mfo rd CC 1 9 38 : 2 29
Megalopolis is the beginning of the end of the city, the ‘beginning of the
decline’. Mumford has to be quoted at length here. His words are precise and
directly to the point and require no further elaboration or interpretation.
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Necropolis. War and famine and disease rack both city and countryside.
The physical towns become mere shells. Those who remain in them are
unable to carry on the old municipal services or maintain the old civic life:
what remains of that life is at best a clumsy caricature. The names persist;
the reality vanishes. The monuments and books no longer convey meaning;
the old routine of life involves too much effort to carry on: the streets fall info
disrepair and grass grows in the cracks of the pavement: the viaducts break
down, the water mains become empty; the rich shops, once looted, remain
empty of goods by reason of the failure of trade or production. Relapse into
the more primitive rural occupations. The historic culture survives, if at
all, in the provinces and the remote villages, which share the collapse but
are not completely carried down by it or submerged in the debris. First the
megalopolis becomes a lair: then its occupants are either hunted out by
some warrior band, seeking the last remnants of conquest in gold or women
or random luxuries, or they gradually fall away of their own accord. The
living forms of the ancient city become a tomb for dying: sand sweeps over
the ruins: so Babylon, Nineveh, Rome. In short, Necropolis, the city of the
dead: flesh turned to ashes: life turned into a meaningless pillar of salt.
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However, Mumford insists, one must not make the mistake of identifying the
logical stages of a process, as discovered and systematized by intellectual
analysis, with the living reality. There is nothing inevitable about the course of
history, no matter how much the intellect detects a process at work. Intellect is
an active force in altering the course of history. ‘For in real life, in real cultures,
history does not present a solid laminated block of uniform dimensions that one
may break down into smaller blocks, each unified within itself to form part of a
consistent whole. End-processes often occur in the middle of a culture;
accidental mischances and injuries may bring to the middle-aged the normal
deteriorations of senescence. Likewise early processes or rejuvenating
reactions may be noted in the final phases of the most mechanized
civilization. In short, time as experience and duration upsets this logical order,
which is based chiefly on time as an attribute of spatial movement. Mutations
arise in human communities from unexpected sources: the social heritage
makes society much less of a unity than we are compelled to conceive it, by the
nature of language, when we interrupt the complex stream of actual life in
order to take account of it in thought. Out of these mutations, a new social
dominant may arrive: veritably a saving remnant.’ (Mumford CC 1938: 293).
Mumford thus points out that the final stage in civilization is often reached
at an intermediate point in urban development. If intellect can detect the end
long before it is in sight, then there is some hope for altering the course of
history, human beings as knowledgeable change agents within an historical
process that has become conscious.
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In other words, the life course of cities is essentially different from that
of most higher organisms. Cities exhibit the phenomena of broken growth, of
partial death, of self-regeneration. Cities and city cultures may have sudden
beginnings from remote gestations; and they are capable of prolongations
as physical organizations through the life-spans of more than one culture:
witness Damascus, most ancient of surviving towns, already venerable in
St. Paul's day. It is only as parable rather than as scientific statement that
one may talk of the spring or winter of a civilization as if the cycle had a
climatic inevitability, or of the birth and death of a culture-phase, as if any
contemporary observer could confidently recognize either the birth-cry or
the death-rattle.
Mumford CC 1938:295
The only way to avoid the totalitarianism that current trends and
tendencies promised was a renewal of a regionalism based upon the total
reorganisation of the social order around garden city nuclei. For Mumford, this
defined the political task for future generations (CC 1938:300/493).
Mumford recognises that the boast of the metropolis is that it is a world city
is not an idle one, with numerous centres of world-contact and concentration
points for travellers and administrators. Mumford points to advances in
international communication. ‘What was once present only in an urban point, is
now available throughout a whole region.’ (Mumford CC 1938:297).
However, in order to function, the ‘world city’ requires a ‘world order’.
Mumford’s words in 1938 are pertinent in an era of globalisation, demanding a
need to rescale the world order in order to recover placed-based social and
moral meaning.
A world in disorder can find no use for such a city, except to make it a center
of political aggression and financial aggrandizement, incapable of performing
the essential functions of a city even for its own teeming population. Any
effective effort to reconstitute the metropolis demands something more than
local traffic plans or local building regulations: as Benton MacKaye has said, to
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To cast off the dead-form of the metropolitan order, and to concentrate its
surviving energies upon the social utilization of its real goods, within the greater
regional framework, is perhaps the most pressing task of our civilization: the
issues of war and peace, socialization or disorganization, culture or
barbarism, rest in good part on our success in handling this problem.
Mumford is not pessimistic, pointing to the fact that the symbols of the new
social order have already appeared. A new way of living has disclosed itself in
new buildings, the positive foundations for this order have been laid in the
biological and the sociological sciences. The demands and readjustments
entailed are more profound than a merely economic revolution. ‘The next step
lies in contriving the political organization appropriate to this new task, and in
working out, in concrete detail, the effective economic means.’ (Mumford CC
1938: 298).
For all of his praise of organicism and respect for the factor of time,
Mumford is not an advocate of some vague evolution. On the contrary, he
points to knowledge as playing a key role in bringing about change.
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Mumford CC 1938:298/9
Mumford CC 1938:298/9
Arguments like this show why Lewis Mumford is such a difficult theorist to
pigeon-hole; he doesn’t fit existing categories and boxes easily. Mumford
praises organic change or evolution just as much as any conservative, but he
also points to the active role of knowledge, enlightenment, in bringing about
desirable ends leading beyond the present. The transformations which
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While the rational definition of the ideal framework does not alone
effect the necessary transition, it is an important element in changing the
direction of the blind process, and in hastening the necessary social
adaptations. The strongest social organizations and social pressures,
without such well-defined goals, dissipate their energies in uneasy random
efforts occasioned by passing opportunities. No goal, then no direction: no
underlying plan, no consensus, then no effective practical action. If society
is paralyzed today, it is not for lack of means but for lack of purpose.
Mumford CC 1938:298/9
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means better’. Rather, ‘the new marks of efficient industry’ are ‘flexibility of the
power unit, closer adaptation of means to ends, nicer tuning of operation’ (TC
1934).
In a review of Technics and Civilisation, Mumford was taken to task for
not developing this idea further: ‘There are signs that Neotechnic industry will
decentralise itself .. With decentralisation will go the slums, the diseases of
the city, the evils of overcrowding, all that he righteously attacks .. And with
the possibility of decentralisation and a return to the small community comes
also the possibility of rational city planning, a subject on which he has written
in the past’ (Kaempffort 1934:17).
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Mumford CC 1938:484
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Mumford CC 1938:484
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affinities with Plato, a key influence upon Mumford. Plato argued that to
discover the true nature of political and social justice it is necessary to ‘first
look for its quality in states, and then only examine it also in the individual,
looking for the likeness of the greater in the form of the less’ (Plato, Republic,
trans. Paul Shorey, in Hamilton and Cairns, eds., Collected Dialogues, 368e-
369a). The architectonic is a crucial concept. Mumford frequently framed
his argument in architectonic terms, setting the parts within a structured
whole.
The moral should be plain: we must design whole social units: we must
design cities: and in the order of design the arrangement of the essential
social institutes, their adequate provision and service-ing, is a key to the
rest of the structure. It is on the purely instrumental physical services that
we must practice the most stringent economy, even parsimony; it is on the
political and educational services that we must spend with a lavish hand.
This means a new order of design and a different type of designer: it
means that that emphasis will shift progressively from the stage-set to the
drama, and that the handling of the social activities and relationships will
engage the fuller attention of the planner. In time, this will have the effect
of reducing the instrumental arts of town planning to fairly stable routine,
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while a greater amount of energy and economic support will be set free for
the expressive arts: painting and sculpture, drama and music, will again
have greater importance than sanitation and sewage and the studious
habits of antisepsis.
The elemental unit of planning, then, is no longer the house or the
houseblock: the elemental unit is the city, because it is only in terms of this
more complex social formation that any particular type of activity or
building has significance. And the aim of such planning is not the efficiency
of industry by itself, or the diminution of disease by itself, or the spreading
of culture by itself: the aim is the adequate dramatization of communal life:
the widening of the domain of human significance so that, ultimately, no
act, no routine, no gesture will be devoid of human value, or will fail to
contribute to the reciprocal support of citizen and community. When this
drama is sharply focused and adequately staged, every part of life feels an
uprush of social energy: eating, working, mating, sleeping are not less
than they were before, but far more: life has, despite its broken moments,
the poise and unity of a collective work of art. To create that background,
to achieve that insight, to enliven each individual capacity through
articulation in an intelligible and esthetically stimulating whole, is the
essence of the art of building cities. And less than that is not enough.
Mumford CC 1938:485
Mumford is arguing for the local urban sphere in holistic terms, embracing
social, cultural, geographic and ecological dimensions. The local sphere not
only gives a sense of place. It is a self-constituted social order which involves
‘an active trade union and cooperative movement: the first to push wages
upward, claim a larger share of the total product, and create an effective
political demand for government-aided housing: the second to organise and
administer the units built, focusing and interpreting the consumers demand,
acting as a mediator between the official agencies and the professional
services and eventual occupants’ (CC 1938:471). This is to establish the
‘structures of common life’.
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While regions should become the basic units of political and economic life,
the inter-relation of regions within the province, of provinces within the
‘country’, is no less important: for both corporations and conflicts must take
place over these wide areas. But the reconstitution of regions will not
automatically solve a community's problems... The advantage of creating a
sound basis for economic and social activities, is that the new problems
will have greater significance; they will embody more important issues and
lead to more fruitful results. Ideally, these inter-regional areas of jurisdiction
and control and taxation—functions implied in the political definition of
sovereignty—should be worked out by collective experiment.
CC 1938:363
This chapter closes with a discussion of some of the problems that arise
as a result of Mumford’s vagueness with respect to political strategy.
Mumford was ready to accept the involvement of the state in subsidising
housing, controlling land use and directing trade. His failure to distinguish ‘the
political’ from the state and his failure to be explicit on questions of political
organisation creates a worrying ambiguity in Mumford’s politics. The
decentralisation of political power seems to be accompanied by the increased
exercise of state power in the common interest. This implies a vacuum which
invites a bureaucratisation which contradicts Mumford’s intentions. Mumford is
really attempting to establish appropriate relations between the particular and
the universal so as to ensure the democratic constitution of the common good
from below. Mumford could thus argue in favour of participatory local
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Throughout his career, Mumford was not free from charges of elitism in
his practise. Mumford is an eloquent advocate of decentralised decision
making and democratic planning whilst also presenting arguments which he
justifies as being in the best interests of the citizenry. To be completely
consistent, would Mumford not have had to have remained silent in order to
allow citizens themselves to determine their own interests? Would that have
not been the only way to respect citizens as autonomous agents? Yet it is the
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Mumford’s principles and his vision of the good city are attractive,
consistent with the rest of his writing on the soundest features of The City in
History. The great problem is that Mumford’s failure to connect his vision with
the agencies and forces for its realisation expose him to the charge of
utopianism or, in the very least, moralism. The end of the ‘Green Republic’ or
the Regional City requires at least some political awareness. And here,
Mumford’s aversion to Marxism, his concern to preserve his distance from
practical politics, weakens his position. Without a political organisation, a
strategy for political mobilisation, Mumford is left predicating social
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Mumford’s points against party political radicalism are well made. But
whatever their deficiencies at the level of political practice, the Marxists have
had the merit of addressing fundamental questions of class relations, power,
control and systemic dynamics. The Marxists are able to criticise society by
reference to objective structures and relations which shape and direct the
productive and political life of society according to the interplay of material and
class interests. There are objective reasons why the city is subject to
boundless growth, why it becomes a site for accumulation, why no limits are
respected, why apparently irrational policies are favoured over clearly rational
alternatives.
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Long ago the Jews claimed as their patrimony the land where the graves
of their forefathers were situated; and that well-attested claim seems a
primordial one. The city of the dead antedates the city of the living. In one
sense, indeed, the city of the dead is the forerunner, almost the core,
of every living city. Urban life spans the historic space between the
earliest burial ground for dawn man and the final cemetery, the
Necropolis, in which one civilization after another has met its end.
Mumford 1966: 15
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As the city takes form, much more will be added: but these central
concerns abide as the very reason for the city's existence, inseparable
from the economic substance that makes it possible. In the earliest
gathering about a grave or a painted symbol, a great stone or a sacred
grove, one has the beginning of a succession of civic institutions that
range from the temple to the astronomical observatory, from the theatre
to the university.
Thus even before the city is a place of fixed residence, it begins as a
meeting place to which people periodically return: the magnet comes
before the container, and this ability to attract non-residents to it for
intercourse and spiritual stimulus no less than trade remains one of the
essential criteria of the city, a witness to its inherent dynamism, as
opposed to the more fixed and indrawn form of the village, hostile to the
outsider.
Mumford CH 1961: 18
The origins of the city, then, are not simply material but sacred and
spiritual. Human beings have an idea of the city which invests the natural
cycle of life and death with meaning and purpose.
The first germ of the city, then, is in the ceremonial meeting place that
serves as the goal for pilgrimage: a site to which family or clan groups are
drawn back, at seasonable intervals, because it concentrates, in addition to
any natural advantages it may have, certain 'spiritual' or supernatural
powers, powers of higher potency and greater duration, of wider cosmic
significance, than the ordinary processes of life. And though the human
performances may be occasional and temporary, the structure that
supports it, whether a Palaeolithic grotto or a Mayan ceremonial centre
with its lofty pyramid, will be endowed with a more lasting cosmic image.
Mumford CH 1961:18
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This means that the mind, detached from its immediate animal needs,
comes to play freely over the whole canvas of existence, and ‘to leave its
imprint on both natural structures, like caves and trees and springs, and man-
made artifacts, elaborated in their image.’ (Mumford CH 1961:18).
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Mumford thus argues that 'home and mother' are written over every phase
of neolithic agriculture and the new village centres. ‘It was woman who
wielded the digging stick or the hoe: she who tended the garden crops and
accomplished those masterpieces of selection and cross-fertilization which
turned raw wild species into the prolific and richly nutritious domestic varieties:
it was woman who made the first containers, weaving baskets and coiling the
first clay pots. In form, the village, too, is her creation: for whatever else the
village might be, it was a collective nest for the care and nurture of the young.
Here she lengthened the period of child-care and playful irresponsibility, on
which so much of man's higher development depends.’
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House and village, eventually the town itself, are woman writ large. If this
seems a wild psychoanalytic conjecture, the ancient Egyptians stand ready
to vouch for the identification. In Egyptian hieroglyphics, 'house' or
'town' may stand as symbols for 'mother', as if to confirm the similarity
of the individual and the collective nurturing function. In line with this, the
more primitive structures - houses, rooms, tombs - are usually round
ones: like the original bowl described in Greek myth, which was modelled
on Aphrodite's breast.
Mumford CH 1961: 22
Village life is embedded in the primary association of birth and place, blood
and soil. Each member of it is a whole human being, performing all the
functions appropriate to each phase of life, from birth to death, in alliance with
natural forces that he venerates and submits to, even though he may be
tempted to invoke magical powers to control them in his group's interest.
Before the city came into existence, the village had brought forth the neighbour:
he who lives near at hand, within calling distance, sharing the crises of life,
watching over the dying, weeping sympathetically for the dead, rejoicing at a
marriage feast or a childbirth. Neighbours hurry to your aid, as Hesiod reminds
us, while even kinsmen 'dawdle over their gear'.
Mumford thus praises the ‘order and stability of the village’, highlighting its
‘maternal enclosure and intimacy’, its ‘oneness with the forces of nature’.
‘Without this communal identification and mothering, the young become
demoralized: indeed, their very power to become fully human may vanish,
along with neolithic man's first obligation - the cherishing and nurturing of
life.’ Mumford locates the origins of morality in the mores, the life-
conserving customs, of the village. The disintegration of these mores
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embedded in the affective ties and bonds of the village points to the
destruction of the city. ‘When these primary bonds dissolve, when the
intimate visible community ceases to be a watchful, identifiable, deeply
concerned group, then the 'We' becomes a buzzing swarm of TV, and
secondary ties and allegiances become too feeble to halt the disintegration
of the urban community. Only now that village ways are rapidly disappearing
throughout the world can we estimate all that the city owes to them for the
vital energy and loving nurture that made possible man's further development.’
(Mumford 1966: 24).
Mumford 1966: 28
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These village values are disappearing with the rise of the mega-city. Villages
are being sucked into the orbits of the highly organized metropolises,
undermining an ancient mode of life that satisfies the primal needs of human
beings. ‘But once we allow the village to disappear, this ancient factor of safety
will vanish. That danger mankind has still to reckon with and forfend.’
(Mumford CH 1961: 69).
In determining the origins of urban life, Mumford argues that the early
construction gangs under the control of supervisory personnel formed the first
complex machine, coordinated centrally and functioning with precision and
discipline. Mumford draws attention to the impact of this militaristic order upon
urban life. Mumford is concerned to check this multiplication of order and
discipline as suppressive of the vitality and diversity which is central to urban
living. The first cities were control centres rather than marketing or
manufacturing centres. In these cities, work was increasingly routinised and
specialised through the division of labour, something which had an enfeebling
impact as regards human psychology and physiology. The transition from
mutualistic village life to power oriented cities introduced repression (CH
1961:21 33/4 65; TOM-H 1972:46).
In time, the hunter's beneficent role became soiled by the sadistic lust for
power. Unable to count on a voluntary response from the community, the
hunter-king filled the silence with his self-praise. (Mumford 1966:32/3). Whilst
the villages protected by the hunter flourished better than those without
protection, ‘the very prosperity and peaceableness of the neolithic village may
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have caused its protectors to exchange the watchdog's role for the wolf's,
demanding 'protection money', so to say, in an increasingly one-sided
transaction.’ Mumford draws the analogy with the contemporary world, where
‘one gang chieftain or another controlling prosperous business enterprises and
powerful labour unions, laying huge if under-cover taxes on amusement,
transportation, and building, brazenly suborning judges and enlisting policemen
in partnership, we are in a position to understand the success of these earlier
chieftains. The cowed villagers submitted, lest the protector show uglier teeth
than animals he offered protection against. This natural evolution of the hunter
into political chieftain probably paved the way for his further ascent into
power.’ (Mumford CH 1961:33).
Yet Mumford is careful not to exaggerate the element of coercion at the
beginning, drawing attention instead to ‘the further concentration of technical,
political, and religious power, which transformed the uncouth, primitive chieftain
into the awe-inspiring king.’ (Mumford 1966:33).
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Mumford CH 1961: 45
Mumford 1966: 45
This makes the point that even in his historical work, Mumford has a
critical eye on the present urban condition and is concerned to draw
appropriate lessons. This is apparent in Mumford’s praise for Athens and the
ancient polis. Mumford valued Athens highly for its human psychology and
physiology rather than for its physical appearance. Mumford did not consider
Athens great on account of its architecture. Mumford’s point was that ‘the life
it contained was more significant than the container’. Athens was an urban
civilisation which was regulated by gifted amateurs rather than professionals
and bureaucrats. This achievement of an active citizen body is concentrated
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in the polis and proceeds through the agora, the common market or meeting
place (CH 1961:150/1).
Poor peasants and shepherds, if they were willing to live leanly, could
keep going without submission to a vast collective organization; and since
the tempting surplus was lacking, they could not so easily be bribed by
bread and shows. If there was thus less opportunity for one-sided
exploitation, there was less need for a strict, over-all control. Hence,
perhaps, a somewhat looser form of organization grew up, less formalized,
less stiffly ranged in hierarchic rank. With this came personal
independence : alike in judgement and in action. Independence and self-
reliance were as engrained in pre-imperialist Greece as in Emersonian New
England: there was pride in the old saying:' Greece and poverty are twins.'
The Greek poleis in their best days had no great surplus of goods: what
they had was a surplus of time, that is, leisure, free and untrammelled, not
committed - as in America today - to excessive materialistic consumption,
but available for conversation, sexual passion, intellectual reflection, and
aesthetic delight.
The urban was in close continuous contact with the rural: ‘In their formative
period the Greek cities never lost their connexions with their countryside or
their villages: there was a tidal drifting in and out of the city with the seasons.’
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royal and imperial conquerors, the conversation ceased - it is the slave's lot,
observed Euripides,' not to speak one's thought'. With that the struggle likewise
came to an end. What was left of the old urban drama was a mere spectacle, a
show staged before a passive audience, with professional freaks,
contortionists, and dwarfs usurping the place once occupied by self-
respecting citizens.
Certainly the proportion of spectators to actors was altered under the
more servile system of government; and this radical change expressed
itself in the forms of the city. In the old polis every citizen had an active part
to play: in the new municipality, the citizen took orders and did what he was
told, while the active business of government was in the hands of
professionals, tempted by loot or hired for pay, often reaching for both,
as with the notorious Roman tax farmers and publicans. Even where the
forms of self-government were preserved by the Romans, they applied only
to an hereditary oligarchy.
The city thus ceased to be a stage for a significant drama in which
everyone had a role, with lines to speak: it became, rather, a pompous show
place for power; and its streets properly presented only two-dimensional
facades that served as a mask for a pervasive system of regimentation and
exploitation. What paraded as town planning in the Hellenistic Age was not
unrelated to the kind of smooth lies and insidious perversions that go under
the name of public relations and advertising in the American economy
today.
Where the city originated in the agora, the democratic market place of
citizen intercourse and interaction, the Hellenistic city became ‘a showplace
where the power of the rulers, dynastic or mercantile, was put on display, both
to awe and to entertain their subjects.’ (Mumford CH 1961: 230).
The urban forms which Mumford most favours are the ancient polis and
the Medieval Town. It would be no exaggeration to claim that Mumford’s ideal
future community is the (post)modern polis democracy. Mumford describes
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the polis as the product of a ‘devolution of power from the citadel to the
democratic village-based community’ and ‘the rise of the village itself to a new
degree of self-consciousness and cosmic insight’. (Mumford CH 1961: 147).
This made the classical Greeks antagonistic towards centralised power and
governance.
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In organic planning, one thing leads to another, and what began as the
seizure of an accidental advantage may prompt a strong element in a
design, which an a priori plan could not anticipate, and in all probability
would overlook or rule out. Many of the surviving irregularities in medieval
towns are due to streams that have been covered over, trees that were
later cut down, old baulks that once defined rural fields. Custom and
property rights, once established in the form of lots, boundaries, permanent
rights of way, are hard to efface.
Mumford CH 1961:347
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Alberti was in many ways a typical medieval urbanist. In his concern for
functionalism, the localization of business, curved streets, 'he did no
more', as Lavedan observes, 'than register approval of what he saw
under his eyes'. Even when Alberti justifies the continuously curving
street, with its gently blocked yet ever-changing vistas, he was only giving
conscious expression to something his predecessors recognized and
valued, too. The slow curve is the natural line of a footwalker, as anyone
can observe if he looks back at his tracks in the snow across an open
field, unless he has consciously tried to overcome this tendency. But the
pleasure in that curve, once laid out by the pedestrian, is what gives
character to medieval building, on such a consummate piece of late-
medieval and Renaissance building as the High Street in Oxford. There
a single tree whose branches jut out beyond the building line enriches
the picture more than would a whole arcade of streets.
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The other source of the organic curves in the medieval town was the
emphasis on its central core. Lavedan goes so far as to say that 'the
essential fact of medieval urbanism is the constitution of the city in such
a fashion that all the lines converge towards a centre, and that the
contour is usually circular: this is what contemporary theorists call the
radio-concentric system'. Unfortunately, the term radio-concentric calls
to mind the spider web. What one finds, rather, in most towns, is a
central quarter or core, surrounded by a series of irregular rings, which
have the effect of enclosing and protecting the core, while, by devious
passages, approaching more closely to it. Where there is something
that approximates a continuous circular street, it is almost surely the
indication of a wall that has been torn down. Even in a little town like
Bergues, as seen in Blaeu's great Atlas, with its almost geometric
precision in its central core, only three streets come together at the
centre. The resulting plan is generated by the two opposing forces of
attraction and protection: the public buildings and open places find
security behind a labyrinth of streets, through which the knowing foot
nevertheless easily penetrates. It is only with the baroque planners who
worked to overcome the medieval pattern that the street drives
headlong into the town centre, as in the asterisk plan - though Alberti
himself, as it happens, anticipated this new scheme, which symbolized the
collection of public power in a centralized institution or a despotic
prince.
The conflict between organic and mechanical principles forms the core
theme of Mumford’s historical analysis of cities. Mumford values most highly
the spirit of wholeness evinced by the Medieval town. This spirit survived in
the greatest cities of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in Florence and
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Turin. The post-medieval style was ‘so deeply organic’ that it appeared to be
‘a continuation of its own past’. Eventually, however, the organic mode of
development was subverted by ‘a new ideological form .. derived from
mechanistic physics’. The mechanical mode of urban development destroyed
the spirit of wholeness.
In the social disorganization that followed, power came into the hands of
those who controlled armies, trade routes, and great accumulations of
capital. With the rise of military despotisms, came the suppression of
academic freedom in the universities, and the studious suppression of the
independence of the spiritual powers, in the interests of the temporal
rulers. All this has a familiar ring today: it parallels what went on in Russia,
Germany, Italy, and various other parts of Europe after the First World
War, and what went on, even in the physically remote United States, after
the Second World War. The transformation of the medieval universities
from international associations of scholars to nationalistic organizations,
servile to the new despots, impervious to 'dangerous thoughts', bound by
loyalty oaths, went on steadily; and it had its parallels in the Church and
the city.
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became the universal imperatives: they had long been practised, but
they were now openly avowed, as guiding principles for a whole society.
Every aspect of life was removed from the medieval pole and re-
assembled under the new sign of the Prince. Machiavelli's The Prince
reveals the character of the politics and the plan of the new city. Later,
Descartes, would re-interpret the world of science in terms of the ‘unified
order of the baroque city.’ (Mumford CH 1961: 398/9).
The mechanical mode of planning creating the Baroque City took nothing
from the Medieval towns and had much more in common with the planning of
the ancient royal cities. They were built expressions of the politics of oligarchy
and centralised despotism that had accompanied the rise of the modern
nation state and its centralisation of authority. Indeed, in comparison with the
ancient planners, the Baroque planners were ‘even more ruthless, one-sided,
non-cooperative, even more indifferent to the slow, complex interactions, the
patient adjustments and modifications, through trial and selection, which mark
more organic methods of city development’. (Mumford CH 1961:401/2). The
Baroque style was the product of fundamental socio-economic changes,
particularly the shift from an economy of goods to an economy of money and
the emergence of new military and bureaucratic forms of power. The result
was an entirely different mode of life.
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In our own time, the mechanical world picture at last reached the state of
complete embodiment in a multitude of machines, laboratories, factories,
office buildings, rocket-platforms, underground shelters, control centers.
But now that the idea has been completely embodied, we can recognise
that it had left no place for man. He is reduced to a standardised servo-
mechanism: a left-over part from a more organic world.
PP 1970:430
Mumford thus came to argue that the only way to avert nuclear holocaust
would be to replace the mechanistic philosophy of the megamachine with a
renewed organic philosophy. The militarised, bureaucratised systems of
modern states needed to be replaced by a global network of decentralised,
humanly scaled, regionally integrated local communities.
Mumford lists an impressive and extensive list of urban ills – from dirt
and squalor to noise – to conclude:
Considering this new urban area on its lowest physical terms, without
reference to its social facilities or its culture, it is plain that never before in
recorded history had such vast masses of people lived in such a savagely
deteriorated environment, ugly in form, debased in content. The galley slaves
of the Orient, the wretched prisoners in the Athenian silver-mines, the
depressed proletariat in the insulae of Rome - these classes had known, no
doubt, a comparable foulness; but never before had human blight so
universally been accepted as normal: normal and inevitable.
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The fact that the dehumanisation accompanying urban blight has come to be
normalised is an integral part of our predicament. At this stage, Mumford has
clearly begun to fear that the forces ranged against him in his attempt to save
the city are irresistible. His restatement of the case for the garden city, which
concludes The City in History, lacks the conviction it has in Mumford’s
previous works.
Mumford notes the increase in the number, area, and population of great
cities to argue that megalopolis is fast becoming a universal form, the
metropolitan economy is becoming the dominant economy. ‘No effective
enterprise is possible without a close tie to the big city.’ (Mumford 1966: 599).
Far from being a sign of strength, for Mumford these developments point
to weakness. Whilst, for many, increasing size, scale and quantity denote
power and progress, to Mumford they point to a self-destroying imbalance and
disharmony.
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Where once Mumford had placed a great deal of faith in new technologies
in realising his vision of decentralised regionalism, he had come to be aware
of the extent to which the liberatory potential of technology had been
absorbed by the megamachine. Mumford was quite ready to acknowledge the
destruction of all hope, that the advancement of technology, far from being a
force for emancipation, would progressively undermine and eventually destroy
civilisation.
At the present rate of progression since 1600, it will not need another
century or half century to tip thought upside down. Law, in that case, would
disappear as theory or a priori principle and give place to force. Morality would
become police. Explosives would reach cosmic violence. Disintegration would
overcome integration.
Mumford argues that civilization has been brought to this very point,
and much more quickly than Adams had predicted. ‘Every part of this
prophecy has already been fulfilled; and it is useless to speculate about the
future of cities until we have reckoned with the forces of annihilation and
extermination that now, almost automatically, and at an ever-accelerating
rate, are working to bring about a more general breakdown.’ (Mumford CH
1961:558).
Mumford locates the origins of this crisis in the basic contradiction at the
heart of the city in history.
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Mumford CH 1961:635
On the other hand, the city owed its existence, and even more Megalopolis
its enlargement, to concentrated attempts at mastering other men and
dominating, with collective force, the whole environment. Thus the city
became a power-trapping utility, designed by royal agents gathering the
dispersed energies of little communities into a mighty reservoir, collectively
regulating their accumulation and flow, and directing them into new
channels … eventually hurling its energies outward in destructive assaults
against other cities. Release and enslavement, freedom and compulsion,
have been present from the beginning in urban culture.
Out of this inner tension some of the creative expressions of urban life
have come forth: yet only in scattered and occasional instances do we
discover political power well distributed in small communities, as in
seventeenth-century Holland or Switzerland, or the ideals of life
constantly regulating the eccentric manifestations of power. 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
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the machine itself and his commitment to achieving the highest speed
possible, he has quite forgotten the purpose of the journey. This state of
helpless submission to the economic and technological mechanisms
modern man has created is curiously disguised as progress, freedom, and
the mastery of man over nature. As a result, every permission has become
a morbid compulsion. Modern man has mastered every creature above
the level of the viruses and bacteria - except himself.
Never before has the 'citadel' exercised such atrocious power over the
rest of the human race. Over the greater part of history, the village and the
countryside remained a constant reservoir of fresh life, constrained indeed
by the ancestral patterns of behaviour that had helped make man human,
but with a sense of both human limitations and human possibilities. No
matter what the errors and aberrations of the rulers of the city, they
were still correctible. Even if whole urban populations were destroyed,
more than nine tenths of the human race still remained outside the circle
of destruction. Today this factor of safety has gone: the metropolitan
explosion has carried both the ideological and the chemical poisons of
the metropolis to every part of the earth; and the final damage may be
irretrievable.
These terminal possibilities did not, I repeat, first become visible with
the use of nuclear weapons: they were plain to alert and able minds, like
Burckhardt in the eighteen-sixties, and like Henry Adams at the beginning of
the present century.
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And so today: those who work within the metropolitan myth, treating its
cancerous tumours as normal manifestations of growth, will continue to
apply poultices, salves, advertising incantations, public relations magic, and
quack mechanical remedies until the patient dies before their own failing
eyes. No small part of the urban reform and correction that has gone on
these last hundred years, and not least this last generation - slum
demolition, model housing, civic architectural embellishment, suburban
extension, 'urban renewal' - has only continued in superficially new forms
the same purposeless concentration and organic de-building that prompted
the remedy. Yet in the midst of all this disintegration fresh nodules of
growth have appeared and, even more significantly, a new pattern of life
has begun to emerge. This pattern necessarily is based on radically
different premises from those of the ancient citadel builders or those of their
modern counterparts, the rocket-constructors and nuclear exterminators. If
we can distinguish the main outlines of this multi-dimensional, life-
oriented economy we should also be able to describe the nature and the
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functions of the emerging city and the future pattern of human settlement.
Above all, we should anticipate the next act in the human drama, provided
mankind escapes the death-trap our blind commitment to a lopsided,
power-oriented, anti-organic technology has set for it.
Each unit in this system has a certain degree of self-sufficiency and self-
direction, equal to ordinary occasions. But by being linked together, the
power stations form a whole system whose parts, though relatively
independent, can upon demand work as a whole, and make good what
is lacking in any particular area. The demand may be made at any point
in the system, and the system as a whole may be drawn on to respond to
it. Though the whole is at the disposal of the part, it is the local user who
determines when it shall be used and how much shall be taken. No single
central power station, however big, would have the efficiency, the flexibility
or the security of the whole grid, nor would it be capable of further growth,
except by following the pattern of the grid.
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Mumford PS 1946:56
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For Mumford, the scale of the task has increased with the expansion of
technics. Where once the health and vitality of the city depended upon the
control of the river valley, now it is the ‘whole planet’ that must be brought
under control. This control is not merely technical but moral, recognising
‘organic norms and limits’ within ‘the entire ecological system on which man's
own life and welfare depends.’
Mumford thus argues that ‘the prime need of our age is to contrive
channels for excessive energies and impetuous vitalities that have departed
from organic norms and limits.’ (Mumford 1966: 649). Mumford is clear that
this is a matter of restoring balance between human technical capacities and
the moral capacities. Mumford expresses his impatience with scientists
engaging in fictions and fantasies and with death dealing politicians. ‘ If we
were prepared to restore the habitability of the earth and cultivate the empty
spaces in the human soul, we should not be so preoccupied with sterile
escapist projects for exploring inter-planetary space, or with even more
rigorously dehumanized policies based on the strategy of wholesale
collective extermination. It is time to come back to earth and confront life in
all its organic fecundity, diversity, and creativity, instead of taking refuge in
the under-dimensioned world of Post-historic Man.’ (Mumford 1966: 650).
The problem is that there are still too many people, in business, politics and
science, who equate the expansion of technical and material power not only
with progress, but with divinity itself. In a recent book, Mark Lynas calls the
human species the ‘God Species’. Indeed, Lynas’ book is entitled The God
Species (2011). Reading the book makes it clear that Lynas is not actually
referring to human beings as such, least of all the moral capacities of
human beings. Instead, Lynas’ focus is upon nuclear power, biotechnology,
genetically engineered food and geoengineering. In identifying technical
power with divinity, Lynas takes his cue from the engineer Steward Brand
who begins his Whole Earth Discipline (2010) with the quote: ‘We are as
gods and HAVE to get good at it.’ Whilst this would seem clearly to be a moral
and an anthropological question, relating to something deep in human nature,
Brand merely gives us a series of dreary assertions of technological power.
Brand is identifying divinity with knowledge and hence power. There is nothing
at all new in this, it is the age-old delusion of human beings aspiring to the
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power of gods. Mumford has heard all these arguments and gives them short
shrift.
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,
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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.
Mumford praises Tocqueville, Marx and Mill for anticipating the ‘conditions
of dynamic equilibrium under which the advances of the machine economy
might at last be turned to positive human advantage’. The task is to give an
ideal form to the ‘radically superior conditions of life’ that the emerging city
would make available to all. The problem is that ‘the evil institutions that
accompanied the rise of the ancient city have been resurrected and
magnified in our own time’, putting the ultimate issue in doubt. Totalitarian
rulers have reappeared, political and technological powers being elevated
to the status of deities.
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Mumford’s fear and trepidation. This would not have surprised Mumford at
all. He anticipated the further inroads of death and destruction into civilised
order so long as technical and instrumental solutions were sought for moral
and anthropological problems. Where the likes of Brand and Lynas engage
in a veneration of technologies, Mumford demands that human beings
cease to sacrifice themselves in the worship of false gods.
The prospects are not all bad. Should the forces of life rally together,
Mumford argues, then humanity stands on the verge of a new urban
implosion. However, realising this possibility requires that moral and
technical capacities become integrated, creating a new integral personality.
‘We must now conceive the city, accordingly, not primarily as a place of
business or government, but as an essential organ for expressing and
actualizing the new human personality - that of 'One World Man'. This
integral personality overcomes the old separations of humanity and
nature, town and country, citizen and foreigner. The new systems of
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power and communication are turning the entire planet into a village. As a
result, ‘the smallest neighbourhood or precinct must be planned as a
working model of the larger world.’ (Mumford 1966: 653).
Now it is not the will of a single deified ruler, but the individual and
corporate will of its citizens, aiming at self-knowledge, self-
government, and self-actualization, that must be embodied in the city.
Not industry but education will be the centre of their activities; and
every process and function will be evaluated and approved just to the
extent that it furthers human development, whilst the city itself provides
a vivid theatre for the spontaneous encounters and challenges and
embraces of daily life.
At the last moment - and our generation may in fact be close to the
last moment - the purposes and projects that will redeem our present
aimless dynamism may gain the upper hand. When that happens,
obstacles that now seem insuperable will melt away; and the vast sums
of money and energy, the massive efforts of science and technics, which
now go into the building of nuclear bombs, space rockets, and a hundred
other cunning devices directly or indirectly attached to dehumanized and
demoralized goals, will be released for the recultivation of the earth and
the rebuilding of cities: above all, for the replenishment of the human
personality. If once the sterile dreams and sadistic nightmares that
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obsess the ruling elite are banished, there will be such a release of
human vitality as will make the Renaissance seem almost a stillbirth.
Mumford 1966:
But the innovations that beckon urgently are not in the extension and
perfection of physical equipment: still less in multiplying automatic
electronic devices for dispersing into formless suburban dust the
remaining organs of culture. Just the contrary: significant improvements
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will come only through applying art and thought to the city's central
human concerns, with a fresh dedication to the cosmic and ecological
processes that enfold all being. We must restore to the city the
maternal, life-nurturing functions, the autonomous activities, the
symbiotic associations that have long been neglected or suppressed. For
the city should be an organ of love; and the best economy of cities is
the care and culture of men.
The city first took form as the home of a god: a place where eternal
values were represented and divine possibilities revealed. Though the
symbols have changed the realities behind them remain. We know now,
as never before, that the undisclosed potentialities of life reach far
beyond the proud algebraics of contemporary science; and their
promises for the further transformations of man are as enchanting as
they are inexhaustible. Without the religious perspectives fostered by
the city, it is doubtful if more than a small part of man's capacities for
living and learning could have developed. Man grows in the image of his
gods, and up to the measure they have set. The mixture of divinity,
power, and personality that brought the ancient city into existence must
be weighed out anew in terms of the ideology and the culture of our own
time, and poured into fresh civic, regional, and planetary moulds. In
order to defeat the insensate forces that now threaten civilization from
within, we must transcend the original frustrations and negations that
have dogged the city throughout its history. Otherwise the sterile gods
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Rather than invest alienated technical powers with divinity, human beings
need to recognise these powers as their own social powers and organise
them accordingly. Rather than venerate false gods and new idols, seeking to
appease them by offering up human sacrifices, human beings need to come
‘back to the earth itself as the fundamental postulate’ (Untitled Unpublished
MS 1916, MP).
‘It is time to come back to earth and confront life in all its organic
fecundity, diversity, and creativity, instead of taking refuge in the under-
dimensioned world of Post-historic Man.’ (Mumford 1966: 650).
Mumford therefore argues that ‘Before modern man can gain control over
the forces that now threaten his very existence, he must resume possession
of himself. This sets the chief mission for the city of the future: that of
creating a visible regional and civic structure, designed to make man at
home with his deeper self and his larger world, attached to images of
human nurture and love. (Mumford 1966 ch 18).
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6 REGIONS – TO LIVE IN
THE PRINCIPLE OF REGIONAL DECENTRALISATION
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political crisis afflicting western society had to proceed from the local and
regional levels (Mumford ‘Wardom and the State’ 1919:303/5).
‘The Fourth Migration’ took this coming regionalism as its central purpose.
There had been three great migrations in American history, the pioneers
settling the land, the industrial urbanisation that created the industrial cities,
and finally the financial expansion which created the large metropolis, whose
growth swallowed up surrounding regions. What occupied Mumford’s thought
most of all, however, was the fourth migration. The fourth migration entails a
return to the land from megalopolis. The first migration settled the West, the
second populated the industrial cities, the third concentrated people and
buildings in the capitalist megalopolis of finance and commerce. With respect
to the fourth migration, Mumford writes of a technological revolution taking
place which involves a ‘tidal movement of population’ outward from large
cities. This offers individuals possibilities ‘to remould themselves and their
institutions’. Further, this outward movement signalled the end of the
metropolis. The ‘forces that created the great cities [have] made improvement
within them hopeless’. The attempts ‘to build up a more exhilarating kind of
environment’ proceeds with the construction of garden cities outside the
metropolis. Insisting that the hope of the city lies outside itself’, Mumford
argues for the regional city as ‘a permanent seat of life and culture, urban in
its advantages, permanently rural in its situation’.
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The regional city establishes the context for both civic and ecological
renewal. Realigning social, economic and cultural life ‘towards a higher type
of civilisation’. This also involves land conservation, checking suburban
sprawl. And it implies a new economics, ‘specifically planned for the maximum
of local subsistence .. [with] communities based on natural economic and
geographical considerations’. Offering the basis for the revitalisation and
diversification of urban and rural economies (FM and RTLI 1925:130/3 151/2
reprinted in Sussman 1976:55/64 89/93).
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longer tied to the coalmine, the railroad or the big city: ‘neither efficiency nor
economy was to be equated with big units of production’. Kropotkin foresaw
what the large corporations discovered only during the Second World War,
namely, that the farming out of special industrial operations in bits and
pieces actually often made the reputed economies of scale dubious. ‘The
finer the technology, the greater the need for human initiative and skill
conserved in the small workshop. Effective transportation and fine
organisation were often superior to the mere physical massing of plant under
one roof’. (Mumford 1966: 585).
Mumford 1966:585
Even before the invention of the motor car, the radio, the motion picture,
the television system and the world wide telephone, Kropotkin realised ‘that
the new means of rapid transit and communication, coupled with the
transmission of electric power in a network, rather than a one-dimensional
line, made the small community on a par in essential technical facilities with
the overcongested city’. With the small unit as the basis, Kropotkin saw the
opportunity ‘for a more responsible and responsive local life, with greater
scope for the human agents who were neglected and frustrated by mass
organisations’ (Kropotkin 1985; Mumford 1966: 584/5).
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balance between urban and rural areas, with outlying areas attracting
industries and populations from overscale cities. This development requires
planning in order to avoid scattering. Most importantly, new regional cities
would acknowledge the need for limits, determining size and population. The
dispersal of industries and population from overscale cities is thus a
structured decentralisation. Once established, a regional city would not be
allowed to expand. The city would be stationary rather than expansionary. The
problem of increasing size and population would be addressed by building
new cities. With limits, there are boundaries. Physical boundaries are critical
in creating a sense of place underpinning community. These boundaries
should respect geography, surrounding each city with a greenbelt composed
of farm and recreational land, supplying each city with a source of fresh food
and offering city dwellers contact with the country. Regional cities would thus
create a reciprocal relation between urban and rural ways of life.
A key influence upon Mumford’s thinking with respect to the regional city
was Ebenezer Howard and his Garden Cities of Tomorrow. Behind the
concept of the Garden City, Howard saw 'the splendid possibilities of a new
civilization based on service to the community'. Howard proposed to check
the unbounded expansion of the industrial city by relocating people in new
medium sized cities in the outlying country. The key principle is human scale.
Urban sprawl would be prevented by surrounding these regional cities with
greenbelts for agriculture and recreation. All land would be owned in common.
With town and country planned as an interlocking regional whole, individuals
would enjoy a neighbourly feeling of community, social variety, fresh air and
green space. ‘Town and country will be married, and out of this joyous union
will spring a new hope, a new life, a new civilisation’ (Howard 1965:48).
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Howard’s purpose was to save the city, not to escape it as his critics
alleged. Howard thus sought to give the new organic city all the advantages
that the big city possessed before its inordinate expansion put them beyond
the means or beyond the reach of its inhabitants. Overscale cities are too
large and too socially fragmented to function as a genuine human community.
Howard saw that once the city has achieved an optimum size, its need is not
to increase its own area and population, but ‘to be part of a larger system that
has the advantage of large numbers and extensive facilities.’ (Mumford 1966:
587). In acting upon his ideal by building two garden cities – Letchworth and
Welwyn Garden City – Howard initiated the New Town Movement which, for
all of its flawed bureaucratic implementation, had a great deal of merit.
Mumford made the connection between Howard’s Social City and the
conception of the Regional City.
In his concept of Social Cities, even before the first garden city was
founded, he carried this development to its next stage. If the garden city
was not to depend for its higher functions upon the over-burdened
metropolis, reducing its own status to that of mere satellite, then the
smaller new towns, once they were sufficient in number, must deliberately
group together in a new political and cultural organization, which he called
a 'Social City' - that which Clarence Stein and his colleagues were later to
call the Regional City - to pool their resources and provide such facilities as
large numbers alone make possible: a technical college or a university, a
specialized hospital or a professional symphony orchestra. Howard
pointed out that ten cities of thirty-thousand population each, connected by
fast public transportation, politically federated and culturally associated,
could enjoy all the advantages that a single unitary city of three hundred
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The first point to be noted is that the land in the garden city is not
parcelled out into individual ownership: it must be held by the common
authority under which it is developed: such increments as may arise
through the growth of the garden city must be reserved for the
community. Not merely did Howard seek to eliminate the private landlord:
he eliminated the temptation to increase density in order to raise land
values. He likewise did away with instability through irrational or
speculative changes in land use.
The second important characteristic is controlled growth and limited
population. The outward limit of urban development was set by Howard's
proposal to surround every garden city by a permanent reserve of open
country: to be used either for agriculture or recreation. This agricultural
belt was not merely to serve as a green wall against the encroachment of
other communities: it was to provide opportunity for local production of
food, with a good market close at hand.
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The slowness of the garden city in taking root is due to the fact that it
is, so to speak, the native form only for a co-operative and socially
planned society: one in which agriculture is on a parity with industry, and
in which the necessary social basis in land ownership and land control is
lodged in the community. To be built successfully, the garden city should
be the product of a regional authority, with a wider scope of action than
the municipality, and with greater local concentration than a centralized
bureau operating from Washington, London, or Paris. The garden city
can take form, in other words, only when our political and economic
institutions are directed toward regional rehabilitation. What is important
to recognize is that these new principles of urban development, as
demonstrated by Sir Ebenezer Howard and his associates, are universal
ones: they point toward balanced urban communities within balanced
regions: on one hand, a wider diffusion of the instruments and
processes of a high human culture, and on the other the infusion into the
city of the life-sustaining environment and life-directed interests of the
countryside.
In ‘Garden Civilisation’ Mumford argued that ‘the utopia which had seemed
so lofty and unattainable came down to earth’ (GC 139). Howard’s concern to
discover a peaceful path to social reform as opposed to violent political
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revolution appealed to Mumford’s platonic temper and his concern that ideals
of balance, order and good form be respected. Mumford found Howard’s
marriage of town and country particularly appealing. Mumford enjoyed city life
but also liked to walk in the countryside. He was concerned, then, to preserve
green spaces around the expanding city, both for farming and for recreation.
He would characterise the ideal human community as combining the diversity
and the organism of the city with the neighbourhood stability and community
closeness of the village. The integration of the best features of city and village
would issue in the good life. This was Mumford’s ideal, a walking city, a scaled
community connected to other communities by a transport system, separated
by greenbelts. Writing with respect to Boston, Mumford proposed a
surrounding greenbelt connected by an ‘emerald necklace’ running throughout
from the centre of the city. The satellite towns would maintain a life ‘of their
own while participating in all the diversified activities of a large city – and
without paying the price in population, environmental degradation, or
suburban sprawl’ (Mumford S 1982:167/8).
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communities that set limits on their physical growth. Land was divided and
used according to social need and function rather than being given over to
profit (SS-D 1-2; ‘Life by Rule of Thumb’ 1922:102/3).
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Mumford 1966:354
As against the ‘false stability’ of the nation state, resting upon tyranny and
suppression, Mumford outlined the principles of a regionalism which
corresponded to geographic, social and economic facts – that fitted the
contours of the land and the cultures of the people.
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The RPAA sought to challenge the seeming inevitability of the trend toward
increasing urban concentration. Changing technology and economic
structures influenced thinking on this point. The old coal and steam economy
concentrated industry and population along the railroads and their termini. A
new age of industrial and residential decentralisation was promised by the
development of the automobile, telephone, radio and long distance electric
power networks. With the electric power grid making power for industry
available over a much wider area, industry no longer had to locate in specific
areas. Transportation was becoming decentralised through the expanding
road network, opening up more areas and permitting a wider dispersal of
population and business. Such developments, Mumford argued, were
restoring the ‘center of gravity’ to small rural based factories and cottage type
industries managed by skilled workers (Mumford ‘The Theory and Practice of
Regionalism’ 1928:18/9; CL 1951:342).
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‘Regional planning asks not how wide an area can be brought under the
aegis of the metropolis, but how the population and civic facilities can be
distributed so as to promote and stimulate a vivid, creative life throughout a
whole region – a region being any geographic area that possesses a certain
unity of climate, soil, vegetation, industry and culture’ (RTLI in Sussman
1976:90).
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Not merely must we define and express the region: we must work out, by
deliberate experiment, the areas for inter-regional co-operation and for
super-regional authority. In displacing the functions of the power-state by
those of the service-state we must also transform the structure of the
existing organizations. The task calls for imaginative audacity and moral
vision: how much so, one may discover by considering the methods of
political co-ordination that grew up in our recent past.
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and unaffordable. With economic expansion, the city starts to lose its cultural
diversity as commercial projects win in the competition for urban space. The
city is increasingly privatised from within as public spaces retreat before
financial muscle (Mumford ‘The Intolerable City: Must it Keep Growing?’
1926:286/7).
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Although the complex drama of human life reached its apex in the city,
Mumford was aware that the physical character of the city, as expressed in its
architecture and urban design, could enhance or inhibit this drama. The
overscale city destroys the urban ecology. As a result of overscale, the city
loses its diversity. The very idea of the city as an urban habitat supporting a
variety of human and natural activity is destroyed. The response to
breakdowns in transport, housing, law and order, industry, is more of the
same, technological solutions and economic growth, the very forces driving
overscale in the first place.
The problem is the endless growth of the city, reducing space, increasing
congestion, raising costs to an unsustainable level. The effect of the reduction
in space is the increasing spread of the city.
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The old technologies of the railroad and the steam engine were
responsible for the rapid urban growth leading to the metropolis. The new
technologies extend this growth by increasing the functional differentiation
within the city, swallowing up more and more land outside the city. This
undermines the human and natural ecology of the city.
The argument does not imply that great urban centres must be dissolved
but that the principle of limits be respected. Great urban centres can only
survive if they are scaled to human dimensions. Overscale generates crises
leading to breakdown and eventual collapse. Once appropriate scale has
been achieved, new urban places must be created which possess their own
particular mix of urban functions. The urban form is not ended but
reconfigured. The overscale metropolis, the sprawling city centralising power
and administration, and establishing vast industrial zones, residential suburbs
and fashionable suburbs organised around the central business district is
replaced by the scaled metropolis based on decentralised urban spaces. This
takes advantage of the new technologies and exploits their potential to sustain
a decentralised mode of life, to create garden cities within the region.
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Sunnyside and Radburn gave the ideas of the RPAA a physical presence
and offered examples of planned community development. Built by the RPAA
affiliated City Housing Corporation (CHC), neither Sunnyside and Radburn
were model garden cities. Radburn lacked greenbelt, low income housing and
industry. Sunnyside represented the redevelopment of an existing urban area.
Radburn was characterised by ‘superblocks’ consisting of large interior greens
and underpasses which ensured the separation of vehicular and pedestrian
traffic. Peripheral roads outside the residential blocks gave vehicular traffic
access to houses along cul-de-sacs. Houses faced inward towards the
greens, connected by a network of pedestrian paths.
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which were created as a result of older towns becoming too large to function
effectively (CC 1938:397/8 484/5; ‘The Social Function of Open Spaces’
(1960/1:1/6).
Jane Jacobs accused Mumford of not so much saving the city as replacing
it with a green suburb in the name of the city, defining ‘wholesome housing in
terms only of suburban physical qualities and small town social qualities’
(Jacobs 1961:19). Certainly, Mumford values the simple life and the clean
environment of the country village. But Mumford is quite explicit in defining the
garden city as an urban settlement which combines the best features of town
and country, compact and bounded, distinguished from the dormitory suburb.
The garden city would possess a broad industrial base and make provision to
accommodate all income groups. This made it quite distinct from the
homogeneous suburbs which segregated people according to income,
occupation and culture. Indeed, Mumford preferred the term ‘regional city’ to
‘garden city’. The term ‘garden city’ implied a suburb whereas what Mumford
was seeking was a small city expressing diversity and vitality.
The regional city would be a real city and would therefore have to offer a
broad range of social and cultural facilities and functions beyond employment
– theatres, libraries, museums, leisure centres, civic centres. But since no
small city of 30,000 could provide the same range of cultural opportunities as
a big city, Mumford proposed a constellation of small cities connected to each
other by a rapid transit system. Overall activities would be coordinated and
administered by a common regional government. Small cities would cluster
around a larger regional centre so that an urban network is constructed which
gives individuals all the benefits of a large city without the disadvantages of
congestion. Each small city could have its own area of cultural specialisation
and provision could be made to ensure that the cultural resources of the
whole region could be pooled and shared (Mumford ‘Regional Planning and
the Small Town’ 1950:84).
This proposal for new cities raises the question of what would happen to
the old cities. With excess population leaving and pressures of overscale
easing, there would be a great possibility of cities refounding themselves.
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Whilst suburbs could exchange some green space for social space, creating
places for contact and interaction between individuals, thus generating a civic
culture, the cities could also replace some social space with more green
space, opening up room to let more air and sun in, create gardens, squares
and pedestrian malls. Mumford thought that cities could develop their own
particular greenbelt in the form of a continuous green web extending through
neighbourhoods, connecting up garden and park. Mumford even suggested
that back alleys should be converted into green malls. These would widen at
places into shaded plazas, rimmed by shops and cafes. The ‘building up of
older cities, the breaking up of congested centers and the establishment of
new centers’ are conceived as ‘parts of one process, which aims to
rehabilitate the region’ (Mumford RAI 1927:277/88; ‘Cities fit to live in’
1948:530/3; ‘The social functions of open space’ in Crowe ed 1961:22/40).
Mumford appreciated that his proposals would meet with the hostility of
business which had a vested interest in endless growth, and of public officials
concerned both with the cost of the proposals and with the opposition of
business. Mumford understood that the ambitious objective of building ‘cities
fit to live in’ would require heavy federal and state subsidies even in the early
stages (CFTLI 1948:530/3). And this required a sympathetic government. The
problem is that even on those rare occasions when the cause of socialist
reformism has found or even formed such a government, that government has
been severely constrained by private capital.
Regardless of political problems, though, Mumford’s intellectual case was
strong. Mumford called upon planners to reject the view that planning ‘is
merely a way of providing the physical means for the continuous expansion
and congestion of the cities’. Rather, planners ought to use their skill and
influence to build, ‘region by region’, a ‘humanized’ environment, ‘with
countryside and city developed together for the purpose of promoting and
enhancing the good life’ (quoted by Scott 1971:250/1). The problem, of
course, is that urban planners work with and within existing institutions and
hence consider bold schemes for the reorganisation of urban areas like
Mumford’s to be ‘futile’. Vested interests in public and private sectors cannot
be challenged.
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To identify urban planning with the growth of the city made more
professional and political sense, if not more urban sense. Plans for
reconstituting the city and founding new cities are not the province of planning
and the planner but of social movements (Scott 1971:248/52).
Mumford did get a chance to put his ideas into practice. Mumford had
envisaged Radburn as a full scale garden city. This vision was only partially
realised, for all of the merits of the Radburn experiment. What Mumford had in
mind was the garden city as a reconstituted medieval town, scaled to human
needs, embodying form and unity. Such a city would express social diversity
whilst also preserving social cohesion, appropriate scale and unity of form in
its neighbourhoods. The best features of medieval towns and modern cities
would be combined to form a new city.
Hence Mumford was concerned to emphasise that the most crucial aspect
of the experiment in planning a community undertaken at Radburn was not
the physical attributes the provision of civic nuclei like shops, schools and
parks which serve to increase contact between individuals and the
establishment of boundaries, like greenbelts and roads, so as to increase the
sense of belonging. As against boundless expansion destroying form and
unity, the city would be bounded to create in the neighbourhood ‘a stage upon
which the drama of social life may be enacted’ (Mumford ‘Social Function’
1/6).
The garden city was more than a planning ideal for Mumford, an
alternative to the overscale city which planners ought to adopt. The garden
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city was also a philosophy and a social movement which challenged the
growth ideology of capitalist modernity and which contained the potential to
found a new civilisation of urban and rural settlement upon principles of
ecological balance and limits to growth. Such a movement promised not
merely to change the places where individuals lived but the consciousness
and practices and habits of these individuals. Mumford was under no illusions
that the planned communities he envisaged could survive in a culture
dominated by a drive for profit and physical growth (Mumford ‘The Fate of the
Garden Cities’ 1927:37/9).
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The decentralised regional city contains the potential to end the sprawl
which destroys balance. The garden city offers an alternative to the privatistic
suburbs, satisfying the desire for greenspaces whilst respecting the need for
public commons, avoiding the class-income exclusion which characterises
bourgeois suburbs.
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All of which makes it plain that Mumford was very far from being uncritical
in his advocacy of the garden city, which is something that his critics have
frequently alleged (Jacobs 1961; Goodman ‘Pragmatism’ 444/7). Mumford is
as keen as his critics that zoning of work, residence and industry is inimical to
urban life, that each district should be a city in miniature, that the urban form
should fit the terrain (ILM July 6 1984; LM ‘Opinions of the New Towns’
1956:161/4; Mumford ‘The Sky Line: Old Forms for New Towns’ 1953:138/46).
One must finally judge the regional plan not by its separate details but
by its drift. Thus, the report talks about garden cities but drifts towards
further metropolitan centralisation; it talks neighbourhood planning and
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better housing but drifts toward our present chaotic methods of supplying
both; it talks of objective standards of air and light for building but drifts
toward overintensive uses of even suburban areas.
PNY 1932:227
Mumford supported the sites given over for industrial decentralisation but
argued that these needed to be accompanied by ‘proposals for new
decentralised business areas’ (PNY 1932:235). He called for the creation of
‘business subcenters’ which could function for ‘recentralisation’ around
smaller central districts. Such a proposal offers a basis for addressing the
problems of the existing metropolis.
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These were principles which Mumford had long pursued. For Mumford,
regional planning was more than ‘just a technique’ but a ‘mode of thinking and
a method of procedure’. To address the problem as a question of housing
would be to proceed from the wrong end. This would only serve to encourage
real estate speculation, a massing of outsized towers, overcrowding and
zoning. Planning that proceeded along these lines reproduced the very urban
chaos that it purported to solve. Adams’ plan was designed to serve the needs
of the corporate rulers of New York: its aim from the beginning was as much
welfare and amenity as could be obtained without altering any of the political
and business institutions which have made the city precisely what it is’.
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In sum, these natural areas created a relief model of the valley section,
rising up from regional cities and staple crop bottom lands to small farms and
diversified agriculture with pastoral slopes and wilderness alongside the rim.
Employing the valley section as an organising concept. Mumford was able
to project the regional dispersal of people and industry in a consciously
planned migration out of New York. ‘For a hundred years in America, business
has been concentrating financial resources, concentrating factories and urban
districts, attempting to create material prosperity by producing goods which
could be quickly “turned over”’. Mumford appreciated that a new industrial
revolution was underway, decentralising industry and dispersing people
beyond the city into its environs. This would be the ‘fourth migration’ leading
out of the metropolis.
Mumford’s criticism of the Adams Plan was thus based upon a regionalist
vision for the city. Mumford was clear that the urban chaos of the metropolis
could only be overcome by a new exploration of the valley section concept,
setting cities like New York within a natural framework. In presenting his case
against the metropolitanists, Mumford proceeded from the need to lift from the
city ‘some of the burden of the business overhead and sales promotion
ground rents in congested districts and so forth’ (RTLI 1925:92).
The ecological dimension of Mumford’s regionalism is to be stressed. Here
he built upon the work of RPAA colleagues like Benton McKaye. McKaye’s
‘visualisations’ encompassed more than urban planning and housing but
sought to bridge the conservation movement and community planning so as
to envisage regional planning as ‘a single thing’. McKaye developed his trail
as a network of interrelated systems, ‘a thing to grow and be developed apart
from our more commercial development’. McKaye proposed that a series of
wilderness ‘neutral zones’ be established so as to offer all citizens ‘equal
opportunity for real life’. McKaye brought a ‘broad gauged enlightening
approach’ to the problems generated by commercial and industrial life, an
approach designed to preserve ‘habitability’ against the ‘grinding down
process of our modern life’. City planning should proceed by founding a solid
regional base for ‘a more extensive and systematic development of outdoor
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community life’. The creation of communal farms and recreation camps would
nurture ‘the primal instincts of .. working in a common cause’.
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This is a vision for the critical recovery of the polis on the modern terrain,
reconfiguring and recontextualising modern technologies and techniques so
as to create the material preconditions of a free and equal citizenship as a
universal designation. Democracy could thus be realised as a participatory
conception, sustaining the notion of a public sphere or spheres capable of
supporting citizen association, interaction, deliberation and decision-making.
This public is capable of exercising conscious control over the world,
mediating social and natural ecology and forming an invigorating polis that
embodies not only a democratic citizenship but also an ecological citizenship.
Mumford’s concern to root democracy in diversity in the context of defining a
universal good out of respect for particularity establishes the framework for
mediating between social and natural ecology.
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order and the natural region. Urban planning, for Mumford, entailed a civic
and ecological regionalism premised upon local renewal.
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If ‘progress’, technology, and growth really were the solution, there would
not be a problem in the first place. Three hundred years of technological
innovation and economic expansion have issued in ugly cities and in societies
characterised by excess, waste, violence and misery. People who are
materially richer than any other in history are experiencing a profound spiritual
and moral malaise. More than two centuries after Kant theorised the ideal of
‘perpetual peace’, the spectre of total war has never loomed larger. ‘Progress’
in itself cannot be a solution. If it were, modern society would not be in the
grip of the neurosis and nihilism it now is. There is no automatic connection
between technological expansion on the one hand and human happiness and
freedom on the other. The means of the one do not necessarily ensure the
realisation of the ends of the other. Human beings may conquer nature by
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The future of nations lies in the success which greets the efforts of
communities and associations to establish corporate autonomy and to
carry on their functions without subservience to that large and jealous
corporation called the state.
For all of the use of words like restore and recover, Mumford did not
embrace a nostalgic paradigm which identified all the best models of civic
order and city life in the past. Mumford was not attempting to recover a lost
past. Any renewal or recreation on his part was future oriented. Certainly,
regionalism implied a politics and culture based on ‘compact and closely
integrated communities’ (Mumford ‘The crisis of the socialist left’ MS 1915,
MP). This offers something novel - a new political culture or cultural politics, a
politics rooted in an expressivist mode of everyday life. Regionalism is the
subjective recovery of place leading to an existential mode of politics. This
entails a sense of place through the scientific apprehension of the
environment and a notion of socio-cultural activity arising in the geographic
associations of place. For Mumford, regionalism contained the potential to
offer an alternative framework for social and political life, reviving cities on the
basis of cooperative institutions.
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processes by which novel forms and institutions emerge to constitute the new
social order. Instead of political struggle and change there is moral and
cultural conversion. In these terms, Mumford’s call for new cooperative
relationships between nature, society, culture and self is a valuable legacy,
broadening the range of issues that fall within the scope of politics. But as
regards political strategy, Mumford is silent.
Mumford’s silences with respect to politics owe a great deal to his concern
with the end rather than with the means. Mumford was frequently cautioned
that his proposals ignored the complex web of political and administrative
interests in the way of his regional programme. In reply, Mumford would point
out that his concern was with what was desirable from a human perspective,
not what was practicable within existing political and institutional constraints
(LM-CS April 3 1964 CSP). And Mumford had a point to the extent that those
constraints were the problem and not the sphere of potential solution.
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For Mumford, politics and the formal institutional sphere offered limited
possibilities for a real transformation. In his view, political action must be
superseded by a more substantial socio-cultural transformation, one which
changed values. Change is ‘not merely a matter of appropriating catchwords
or starting [political] parties: it is a matter of altering the entire basis upon
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which our present venal and mechanistic and life-denying civilisation rests’
(Mumford ‘Reflections on our present dilemmas’, 1919 in FK 1975:200/9).
Mumford had little respect for organised political creeds which attempt to
engineer the ideal public and which are characterised by sterile, mechanistic
thinking. He dismissed Marxism as a mixture of ‘formulas and incarnations’
(Mumford ‘Second decade’ 1961; ‘The year 1918’ 1919; ‘Geography as a
basis for social reform’ 1917 MP).
Mumford sought nothing less than the revaluation of all values in the
modern world. Modern civilisation had reached a point where ‘progress’ was
measured in terms of the capacity to destroy life, to annihilate it. Technological
development had unleashed destructive tendencies within modern
rationalisation. The development of forces of production through
industrialisation had created a technological capacity for destruction. The
destructive tendencies, exercised against social and human ecology as well
as against the natural ecosystem, could only be checked by a new mode of
thinking, acting and organising with respect to the relation to nature. For the
destructive impulse, in Mumford’s view, was the product of a limited notion of
self and subjectivity, shaped in antagonistic relation to nature. The redefinition
of self implied changes in culture and values.
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Ed Soja has argued that the American restructuring of the city in light of
the depression represented a process in which ‘capital and the state worked
effectively to replan the city as a consumption machine, transforming luxuries
into necessities, as massive suburbanisation created expanded markets in
consumer durables’ (Soja 1989:101/2). This proceeded under a ‘state-
managed urban system’ involving the selective abandonment of the inner
urban core and expensive state subsidies supporting those left in the urban
core (Soja 1989:180/9).
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Mumford accepted the need for the national planning of the economy.
However, he sought to democratise planning functions and agencies by
diffusing power to the local level. Decisions are to be taken by those directly
affected by the outcomes.
What Mumford was proposing was a novel version of John Stuart Mill’s
stationary state, challenging the conventional approach to social justice which
emphasises abundance through economic growth. Mumford instead put the
emphasis upon a fair distribution of the results of growth already achieved. In
the economy of ‘basic communism’, the working classes would be given a
decent income by a redistribution which reduced the income of the upper
classes. Social justice should mean precisely that the excesses of riches and
poverty should be avoided as ruinous to the polity. A fair distribution making
for stability in balance and function should be achieved. All classes should be
forced to accept a ‘normalised standard of consumption’. Imposing constraints
upon growth would foster a cooperative ethos and a more disciplined ordering
of the relationship of human beings to the material world. The word in the new
era is ‘stability, not expansion’ (CM 1944:391/423; TC 1934:364/433).
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existing urban life. The result is a bleak, barren urban landscape. Jacobs
argued that the problem lay with a modernist urban planning which placed an
almost exclusive emphasis upon the physical dimensions of an urban area to
the neglect of urban social life. Operating according to a crude sociological
conception of mass society, urban planners look to spatial organisation to
make good the perceived deficiencies of social life. The planners completely
ignore the authentic community life that urban dwellers generate for
themselves. The solution is for planning to proceed by recognising the
capacity of existing urban social life to generate and sustain its own forms of
community, forms which planning may destroy but can never create.
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Mumford had long been grappling with the centralising forces which were
working to destroy the city. Importantly, Jacobs failed to address these forces
as a systematic obstacle to the associative urban society she projected on the
basis of the neighbourhood. This neighbourhood world was already in the
process of being destroyed by political and economic forces driving increased
scale (Bookchin 1974:122). A genuine decentralisation must adopt a holistic
approach in relation to the identification of places, a civic public sphere rooted
in a democratic society and in harmonious relation to nature. All these aspects
are inter-related. Mumford was as critical as Jacobs of ‘utopian’ planners and
of their technocratic practice. Mumford’s regional city projected a democratic
social vision which premised community on a shared civic and ecological
ethic. This contrasts markedly with the rationalised technocratic regime which
sought to control and centralise the management of urban space.
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The clear differences that exist within the planning tradition are completely
ignored in some postmodernist critiques. Christine Boyer in Dreaming the
Rational City (1983) condemns a whole tradition of city planning as ‘rational’ in
a ‘disciplinary’ sense, as aiming at ‘perfect’ order through an exclusive control
of ‘knowledge’. In the Foucaultian concern to expose the authority of experts
as deriving from the power/knowledge nexus, such critical arguments
seriously underplay the radical potential of planning visions, failing to
emphasise different strands of planning and failing to explore how ideals can
be distorted through inadequacies and biases in the instruments and
institutions of planning practice. If reason has been incarnated in a narrowly
technocratic and institutional form, it should also be pointed out that, for
Mumford, reason possessed an ineradicable ethical, aesthetic and ecological
dimension. Mumford’s organic, holistic approach offered a way of determining
relationships between individuals in society and between society and nature
within a regional context. The conception of a regional city offered a
framework within which to develop a discourse about the public sphere and
ecology. Mumford has left an enduring legacy which underlines the integrated
political, ethical, aesthetic and ecological dimensions to a genuine community.
And Mumford is important for another reason. Mumford spent his entire life
identifying and fighting against the socio-economic forces destroying the city.
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Postmodernist critics of ‘the rational city’ miss their target and too easily
scapegoat city planners. The ‘anti-city’ that Mumford condemned is not
produced by city planners but by the forces with which they have to deal in
order for their plans to be implemented as ‘practical’ and ‘realistic’. The less
visionary the dream, the more likely its implementation. The result has been
more of the same, fostering rather than checking the forces creating the anti-
city.
An organic image of the city requires for its actual fulfilment a dimension
that no single generation can ever supply: it requires time, not merely an
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Mumford UP 1968:161/2
Mumford acknowledged that a valid urban design ‘must be one that allows
for its historic and social complexity, and for its continued renewal and
reintegration in time’. The problem with the garden city is not that it is planned
but that its planning relies too much on a ‘single instantaneous image’
(Mumford UP 1968:165). Mumford also agreed with Jacobs’ criticism of the
low densities and overtly residential character of new towns.
a more organic view of the city holds that the greater the inherent
dynamism of science, technics, and finance, today, the greater need there
is for a durable urban container. For as I pointed out in 'The City in History,'
when the container changes as rapidly as the contents, neither can
perform their necessary but complementary functions. Here at last we
have, I believe, an essential key to sound urban and architectural design
today: it must not merely welcome variety and complexity in all their forms,
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Mumford UP 1968:163
Jane Jacobs and William Whyte sought to recover the urban centre
against the movement outward to suburbia (Jacobs 1961; Whyte 1988).
Jacobs was not so much concerned with the physical structure of the city as
with ‘city life’ and ‘street neighbourhoods’ which are ad hoc ‘networks’ rather
than discrete units (Jacobs 1961:120 121). The street neighbourhood, the city
and interest communities are defined according to social function.
Decentralisation thus proceeds in a functional sense. The ‘city district’ must be
large enough to exercise political power and establish a civic framework
capable of encompassing a welter of associations like churches, political
clubs, business groups and civil leagues forming the core of social and
political life in the city.
Jacobs argued strongly in favour of city life against the apathy of planners
and public. The focus upon the problems associated with the city and upon
the exodus from the city has neglected the vital social life of the city and the
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loss that the end of urbanism would represent and the most powerful force
behind the destruction of urbanism is the spread of the ‘anti-city’.
The city needs streets full of people, not only for urban vitality but also for
urban safety. On crowded streets many eyes keep watch. Jacobs accuses
Mumford of seeking ‘to do the city in’ (Jacobs 1961:17/20 540). Whyte agrees
with Jacobs against Mumford: urbanity is not something that can be
transferred to just outside the old city to form a new city: “It is the quality
produced by the great concentration of diverse functions and a huge market
to support the diversity”. A city requires entertainment centres, theatres,
galleries, sporting facilities, leisure centres to draw people in. And such a city
needs a large population density (Whyte 1988:234 227/243).
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One thing that Mumford and Jacobs agreed upon was the threat that the
automobile posed to the health and viability of the city. The incessant demand
to build more roads in order to relieve congestion was based upon an illusion,
Mumford argued. The more roads that were built, the more automobiles,
buses and trucks were lured on to them. More roads meant an increasing
volume of traffic (Moorstein ‘City Can Be Beautiful: Ask Lewis Mumford’
1946:11; Mumford ‘The Sky Line: The Roaring Traffic’s Boom – III 1955:78).
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Mumford met the objection that Americans hated walking head on: ‘where
walking is exciting and visually stimulating, whether it is in a Detroit shopping
center or along Fifth Avenue, Americans are perfectly ready to walk’. To make
cities attractive would require parks, trees and outdoor cafes but it required
something more. The entire city is to be repatterned so as to end the rigid
zoning procedures that transform vast areas into bleak and monotonous
single distinct zones – one for shopping, one for industry, one for commerce’
(‘Highway and City’ 1958:186).
It wasn’t only the automobile that had ruined New York, Mumford was
particularly critical of the skyscraper. The skyscraper existed as a symbol of
the age, expressing avarice and bigness over cooperation, unity and human
scale. It was an image of a progress which was lacking in human purpose,
mere growth for the sake of growth, a nihilistic process without end.
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not the best hopes of the United Nations’ (FGU 1956:43/4). Even worse, ‘the
skyscraper is an eloquent but unintentional symbol of the general perversion
of life values that takes place in a disintegrating civilisation’ (Mumford AT
1952:130).
Mumford was also highly critical of the housing blocks being designed for
the poor. Vast, high rise complexes, with a grim faced, uniform design, and
patrolled by a private police force. ‘Control’ was designed into the structure.
These housing blocks were designed without any concern for any human
activity within a vital neighbourhood life: ‘humanly speaking, they stink’
(Mumford ‘The Sky Line: Mother Jacobs’ Home Remedies’ 1962:148ff). The
architectural premises were flawed. A tall tower was no substitute for a
genuine neighbourhood. Constructing housing complexes lacking community
facilities is simply ‘exchanging slums for superslums’. Whilst these buildings
were not as bad as the slums that they replaced, ‘they will be in 50 years’
(Mumford ‘The Sky Line: The Gentle Art of Overcrowding’ 1950:79/83).
All of which begs the question as to just what urban renewal meant for
Mumford. Mumford’s meaning is contained in the many proposals he made for
changing the urban environment, in the values implicit in his criticism of the
metropolis, in the features of historical cities that he identified as sound.
Despite a tendency to look to the historic city to illuminate his ideal city,
Mumford is not a nostalgic thinker. When asked if there was a metropolitan
region in the world that matched his prescriptions for a richer city life,
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Mumford replied ‘it does not yet exist’. Mumford was not looking to build the
perfect city, for ‘who would want to live in utopia?’ (Mumford ‘The City as Both
Heaven and Hell’ 1961:465; ILM July 12 1978). Mumford’s urban values
influenced the future city in less direct ways. Mumford ‘speaks of values and
of living with nature in a reasonable habitat, of family life, and of self-
discipline. Unlike the planners of utopias, he does this without offering
solutions but by illuminating the virtues of the good life in humane cities’
(Harry W Wiese A Tribute to Lewis Mumford 31). This perfectly captures
Mumford’s notion of an organic planning that leaves so much to the future and
to creative human agency. And Mumford urged planners to allow for time.
Great historic cities are collective works of art which evolve slowly as the
accumulation of small changes. Time and not the planner introduces beauty
and diversity into a city (Mumford ‘The Life, the Teaching and the Architecture
of Matthew Nowicki 1954:153/9; Mumford ‘Social Complexity and Urban
Design’ 1963:119/126).
That said, Mumford did lay down the need for carefully considered social,
anthropological and aesthetic principles in order to ensure good urban design.
And he offered clear ideas of his own in elaborating these principles. Planning
must leave fairly wide margins of freedom to admit change in the future. Good
planning does not involve a detailed programme conforming to a
predetermined image of the ideal city:
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and creating something that does justice to our own needs and our own
aspirations, in our own style, for it is in the nature of a living tradition to
produce fresh forms’ (Mumford ‘Reflections on Venice’ March 22 1954 LMC).
Nevertheless, since architecture and design were not the problem, they
could not provide the solution. Urban renewal could not be focused on the city
alone given the variety of external influences and forces. Urban renewal
required a global strategy that involved energy conservation, pollution control,
industrial decentralisation, agricultural reform. All of this could only be funded
through a national government programme. And none of it would succeed
without the complete transformation of the current way of life. Mumford
consistently argued throughout his life that social transformation depended
upon a prior transformation of morals and values. Turning to planning,
architecture and money for solutions to urban problems is like ‘applying a
homemade poultice for the cure of cancer’ (Mumford ‘Mother Jacobs’ Home
Remedies’ 1962:148ff).
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structure and neighbourhood solidarity. Mumford did not deny that poverty
and racism were corrosive factors renting the urban fabric from within. Yet he
was also aware that the poor immigrant families of the New York of his youth
had maintained stabilizing values of family and community to create a strong
urban fabric. Contemporary urban disintegration was a certain sign of a
disintegrating society.
With this view of the origins of the urban crisis it ought to come as no
surprise that Mumford cautioned against the $50 billion ten year programme
being considered by the federal government. Such monies would simply
mean more of the same under the auspices of the very people responsible for
the current problem.
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During the last three centuries our ways of life have profoundly changed..
This change manifested itself first as a loss of form: fragmentation,
disorder, atomism…
Yet underneath the disorder and confusion a new civilisation has been
growing.. In many departments of art, we seem at last on the brink of
achieving form: here and there the crystal of a new order has begun to
take shape.. To understand these new potentialities, to further this
crystallisation, to clarify this change – these are the goals of our present
discussion.
The attainment of form, the loss of form, the renewal of form – synthesis,
breakdown, renewal – is the consistent ‘arc’ in Mumford’s writing (Shaw
1973:72; Dow 1977:72). Whatever the specific social and historical details,
the fundamental plot is the same. ‘Life’, not classes, nations or individuals,
plays the leading role in Mumford’s narrative. Mumford’s work unfolds a
primal, continuous moral drama concerning the synthesis , breakdown and
renewal of Life.
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denounces the Myth of the Machine not as a myth but as a false myth which
needs to be replaced by the true myth of Life. Life rather than various external
mechanisms shapes historical development. Mumford rejected the
technological determinism associated with Marxism (the Marxism of his day,
that is). For Mumford, human life as creative, artistic and form-giving is the
superstructure of history, coming in time to affirm Levi Strauss’ concept of
cultural determinants (‘Technics and the Nature of Man’ 1966:309; ‘Appraisal’
528; Lasch 1980); ‘Appraisal’ 528; Lasch 1980). As Casey Blake put it,
Mumford’s position is characterised by the affirmation of ‘values over
technique’ (Blake 1983:125/137). This set Mumford against the dominant
positivist form of Marxism which made art, religion, morality etc mere
epiphenomenona of the superstructure (Blake 1983:132). As Mumford
explained in his preface to the draft chapter on machines, machines are to
conceived as part of culture. Far from producing human consciousness,
machines are a product of human consciousness. ‘The vast material
displacements the machine has made in our physical environment are
perhaps in the long run less important than its spiritual contribution to our
culture’ (July draft 1930:43/4; August draft 1930:2/3). Mumford’s approach
makes the development of modern industry and machinery the objective
external expression of human desires and interests which are the primary
determinants of history.
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‘Five or six centuries before the main body of the army forms, spies have
been planted among the nations of Europe. Here and there, in strategic
positions, small bodies of scouts and observers appear, preparing the way
for the main force: a Roger Bacon, a Leonardo da Vinci, a Paracelscus.
But the army of machines could not take possession of modern society
until every department had been trained; above all, it was necessary to
gather a group of creative minds, a general staff, who would see a dozen
moves beyond the immediate strategy and would invent a superior tactics.
These are the physicists and mathematicians.. Behind the scientific
advance guard came the shock troops, the miners, the woodmen, the
soldiers proper and their inventive leaders. At last, the machines are ready.
The outposts have been planted, and the army trained. What is the order
of the battle and where does the machine claim its first victory?
Once the key inventions were planted, once the medium was established,
once the general staff was ready to supply a general system of
abstraction, ideas and calculations, the time had come for the machine to
take possession of western civilisation. At last, the derivative products of
industrialism could spawn and multiply.
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TC 1934:12/8
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Mumford’s point here addresses the pathos of means and ends at the
heart of modern processes of rationalisation. The means have become
enlarged so as to displace the ends. ‘Power and social control, once
exercised chiefly by military groups who had conquered and seized the land,
have gone since the seventeenth century to those who have organised and
controlled and owned the machine. The machine has been valued because it
increased the employment of machines. And such employment was the
source of profits, power, and wealth to the new ruling classes..’ (FTC
1986:30).
it was also due to a weakness of the entire philosophy upon which the new
techniques and inventions were grounded. The leaders and enterprisers of
the period believed that they had avoided the necessity for introducing
values, except those which were automatically recorded in profits and
prices. They believed that the problem of justly distributing goods could be
sidetracked by creating an abundance of them: that the problem of
applying one’s energies wisely could be cancelled out simply by
multiplying them; in short, that most of the difficulties that had hitherto
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the machine is no longer the paragon of progress and the final expression
of our desires, it is merely a series of instruments, which we well use in so
far as they are serviceable to life at large, and which we will curtail where
they infringe upon it or exist purely to support the adventitious structure of
capitalism.
FTC 1986:114
Mumford argues that the decay in the absolute faith in machine philosophy
derives from a number of causes. One is the fact that the technological
progress has increased instruments of destruction, threatening the existence
of organised society:
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FTC 1986:115
Human beings have advanced too swiftly, failing to assimilate the machine
and coordinate it with human capacities and needs. Human beings have
‘outreached’ themselves through their blind confidence that the problems
caused by the machine could be solved by the machine (FTC 1986:115).
A further cause of the decay of the mechanical faith is the realisation that
the machine is in the service of capitalist enterprise. Capitalism and technics
are often at war, with the result that ‘the human gains of technics have been
forfeited by perversion in the interests of a pecuniary economy (FTC
1986:115). To overcome problems and resolve dangerous tensions in the
structure of society, there is a need to ensure that the perfection and
extension in the range of machines is accompanied by the perfection and
humane direction of the organs of social action and social control: ‘the
problem is equally one of altering the nature and the rhythm of the machine to
fit the actual needs of the community’ (FTC 1986:116). With the dissolution of
the mechanical world picture, the claims of ‘life’ are now beginning to be
represented at the very heart of technics. Mumford thus writes of progress
towards an organic ideology.
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One could not plan cities.., one could only hope to plan out of it: to use
invention and imagination to get beyond it. So long as coal and steam
were used in railroads, the yards had to be uncovered: so long as local
transportation was feeble and slow, these yards had to push into the heart
of the city. Better planning awaited a better technology.
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I finally discovered what my thesis was. Roughly, it is this. For the last
thousand years there has been a constant technological progress. This
has had three phases, and more roughly three time periods: the eotechnic
(wind and water and wood complex) from 1000 to 1750: the paleotechnic
(coal and iron and steam) from 1700 to 1900: the neotechnic (electricity
and the hard alloys and the lighter metals) 1820-? Up to the neotechnic
period, technological progress consisted in renouncing the organic and
substituting the mechanical: this reached its height around 1870.
Since then, the new trend, visible in technics as well as in philosophy and
social life, is the return to the organic by means of the mechanical: a return
with a difference, namely, with the whole body of machines and analytical
knowledge we have acquired on the way. This last aspect of my thesis was
unnoticed by me until the facts thrust themselves into my face.
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TC 1934:355/6
FTC 1986:105
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FTC 1986:112
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exchange usurped the function and meaning of the things that were
exchanged’. Profit reigns as the ‘main economic objective’ as ‘money getting’
becomes a ‘specialised form of activity’ (TC 1934:373). Mumford looks to
restore the true basis of wealth and wealth creation against the ‘superstitious’
basis of the financial structure of capitalist production and consumption.
At the bottom of the structure are farmer and peasant, who during the
entire course of the industrial revolution, which their increase of the food
supply has made possible, have scarcely ever received an adequate
return for their products.. Furthermore: what are called gains in capitalist
economies often turn out, from the standpoint of social energetics, to be
losses; while the real gains, the gains upon which all the activities of life,
civilisation and culture ultimately depend were either counted as losses, or
were ignored, because they remained outside the commercial scheme of
accountancy.
TC 1934:375
This situation developed because the new ‘realities were money, prices,
capital, shares: the environment itself, like most of human existence, was
treated as an abstraction’ (TC 1934:168). Mumford proceeds directly to the
moral, indeed to the ontological, failure which lies at the core of capitalism.
This failure is expressed in terms of the elevation of the abstract over the real,
the subsumption of life under the regularities of machine culture. Against this,
Mumford argued that the organic principle be made the organising principle of
human life. This required an alternate arrangement of social relations. It also
required a recognition of the true essentials of the economic processes in
relation to energy and life – conversion, production, consumption and
creation. Conversion refers to ‘the utilization of the environment as a source of
energy’.
The prime fact of all economic activity is the conversion of the Sun’s
energies: this transformation depends upon the heat-conserving properties
of the atmosphere, upon the geological processes of uplift and erosion and
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FTC 1986:124
The permanent gain that emerges from the whole economic process is in
the relatively non-material elements in culture – in the social heritage itself,
in the arts and sciences, in the traditions and processes of technology, or
directly in life itself, in those real enrichments that come from the free
exploitation of organic energy in thought and action and emotional
experience, in play and adventure and drama and personal development –
gains that last through memory and communication beyond the immediate
moment in which they are enjoyed. In short, as John Ruskin put it, There is
no Wealth but Life; and what we call wealth is in fact wealth only when it is
a sign of potential or actual vitality.
An economic process that did not produce this margin for leisure,
enjoyment, absorption, creative activity, communication and transmission
would completely lock human meaning and reference’.
FTC 1986:126/7
For this reason, a working ideal for machine production can be based
upon neither the gospel of work nor the constant increase in the quantitative
standard of consumption.
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FTC 1986:128
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need for limits of human wants and concentrates instead upon the satisfaction
of needs, which gears production to fundamental requirements rather than to
an escalating consumption as a result of manufactured and commodified
wants (TC 1934:380/2 385 388/9 392/7).
Mumford argues for a ‘Basic Communism’ in which all are provided for,
regardless of occupation, according to need. A small fixed income is extended
to the community as a whole. The claim to livelihood acknowledges that all
individuals are members of the community: ‘the energy, the technical
knowledge, the social heritage of a community belongs equally to every
member of it’ (FTC 1986:152).
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FTC 1986:155
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FTC 1986:159
To the extent that Mumford called for a new approach to science and
technology as crucial for the necessary reshaping of the human condition, his
position is worthy. But Mumford can be faulted in terms of failing to develop
the political implications of his projected organic order. Mumford does not fully
explore the institutional contexts for his recontextualising of science and
technology. And the problem is that gaps in political thought tend to be filled
by bureaucracy. Indeed, Mumford possibly invited bureaucratisation by
investing a good deal of hope in the emergence of professionals and
managers in industry and government, something which contradicted his
critical revelation of the origins of such elites in the acquisitive impulses of
capitalism (Blake 1990:284/5).
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institutions’ may emerge, ‘little theaters’ which foster the ‘community spirit’,
creating an alternative society within the shell of the planned community (RTLI
1925:91 93).
With the insights and the methods that are now in use, such a deep
organic transformation in every department of life is inconceivable except
by slow piecemeal changes. Unfortunately, such changes, even if they
ultimately converged of the same goal, are too partial and too slow to
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Mumford CL 1951:223/4
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In The Myth of the Machine (1967), Mumford sets the problem of the
misapplication of technology in the widest historical context possible. The
‘religion’ of technology in the modern world is based upon a misconception of
human origins and human nature. Worse, the modern ideal of ‘progress’,
which equates technological advance with human advance, is simply a
‘scientifically dressed up justification’ for the way that ruling classes have
obtained and maintained power since the age of the pharaohs (Mumford
Prologue to Our Time 1975:45).
By the time of The Myth of the Machine, Mumford was referring to the
‘megamachine’, a system comprising animate and inanimate parts which are
interchangeable, centrally organised and centrally controlled. Mumford viewed
technology as a process of production rather than simply as a product of this
process. Mumford conceived the modern megamachine as a new god which
‘cannot be approached or argued with, as Moses approached the burning
bush or Jonah bargained with God to recall his threat to Ninevah’ (Mumford to
Roderick Seidenberg 30 August 1965, Mumford Papers). This later Mumford
viewed technology as producing order, system and control. This
understanding caused Mumford to abandon his earlier soft technological
determinism in favour of the social and psychological determinants of
technology.
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analysis is that it was too narrowly an analysis of profit rather than products’
(Mumford to Bauer 11 September 1932 Mumford Papers).
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and control of external forces. The latter could never be achieved without the
former. The proper ordering of the outer world depends upon the proper
ordering of the inner world. The irrational organisation of the outer world, the
escape of external forces beyond rational control, is the product of inner
inadequacy. It was this perspective that lay behind Mumford’s attack upon the
‘myth’ of the megamachine.
Although there are continuities, The Myth of the Machine is not a rewritten
version of Technics and Civilisation . Mumford is concerned in this latter work
to trace the history of technology to a much deeper level, far back into the pre-
history of Paleolithic and Neolithic periods.
At every stage man’s inventions and transformations were less for the
purpose of increasing the food supply or controlling nature than for utilizing his
own immense organic resources and expressing his latent potentialities, in
order to fulfil more adequately his super-organic demands and aspirations ..
To consider man, then, as primarily a tool-using animal is to overlook the main
chapters of human history. Opposed to this petrified notion, I shall develop the
view that man is pre-eminently a mind-making, self-mastering, and self-
designing animal; and the primary locus of all his activities lies first in his own
organism, and in the social organisation through which it finds fuller
expression.
In The Myth of the Machine, Mumford set out to subvert the foundations of
technological domination. He directly challenges the conception of homo
faber, the idea that human beings are tool-making animals. This conception,
Mumford argues, sustains the total commitment to – and dependence upon –
technology in the modern age. The overemphasis upon the importance of
tools and weapons in the evolution of early human society distorts
perspectives of human culture and nature and serves to rationalise the
megamachine.
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could be invented man had to lay a basis for it in the expressive use of his
entire body; so if man was anything fundamentally, he was a dancing, acting,
mimicking, ritual-making animal” (LM-HM no date, HMC).
Mumford’s approach permits the recovery of the everyday social life world
of reciprocity, interaction and exchange between creative, discursive
individuals It is play rather than work that made human beings human. The
dreams and fantasies, magic, rituals, totems and taboos contribute as much
to human development as do tools.
Certainly, the discovery of fire and the making of weapons, then tools,
made powerful contributions to human development. Even more powerful
contributions were made by ritual, religion, social organisation, art, and, above
all, language. Human development took place through a long process of
evolving the social heritage. In the brain, human beings possessed the most
important tool of all, one which made human beings human and which could
be used to humanize the world. The brain denotes a capacity for self-
transcendence and this means that, regardless of the existence of a
technological determinism, the future always remains there to be created. The
megamachine that Mumford proceeds to attack is the product of the mind
and, since this is so, can be exposed as myth and have its power overthrown.
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the modern age. This represents an inadequate view of technics and human
development from Mumford’s perspective.
Mumford argues in The Myth of the Machine (1967) that the human being
is more than a tool-making animal but is ‘pre-eminently a mind-making, self-
mastering and self-designing animal; and the primary locus of all his activities
lies first in his own organism and in the social organisation through which it
finds fuller expression’. Mumford thus went beyond the hard facts of
technology, associated with the human being as homo faber, to identify the
mental processes that conceived them (Roszak 1968).
Mumford thus sets about replacing homo faber with homo symbolicus. In
this view, human beings are signifying or symbol-making animals. The mental
equipment of the human body is a much more significant instrument for the
development of technics than hard functional tools.
Human beings, then, are the controlling figures in evolution. The problem
is that human beings are both superrational and deeply irrational. Mumford
thus identifies the soul as subject to an eternal struggle between the
constructive, life-enhancing rational nature of human beings and the
destructive, life-denying irrational nature of human beings. The quintessential
human problem is how to manage this ambivalence. Before humanity can
master technology it will have to master itself.
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To seek to escape from the past into an unknown future, all in the name of
‘progress’, is an ‘excellent prescription for sending mankind to the loony bin’
(Mumford, review of Carl G Jung’s Memories 1964:185). The problem with
‘progress’ conceived on instrumental or technocratic lines is that the
supporting features which enable human beings to maintain balance – familiar
faces and landmarks, shared norms and values, vocational duties – were
rapidly being eroded through the obsession with growth.
Blocking the evolution of the organic way of life is the megamachine, the
incarnation of mechanisation. The development and extension of large,
complex technological systems – specifically the military-industrial-
governmental complex, and the use of science and pure physics to perfect the
technology of mass destruction, registered to Mumford the suppression of the
life insurgent. The modern megamachine promised to bring civilisation to an
end. Whether that end was slow or quick was an open question.
then the great labor machine was in every aspect a genuine machine: all
the more because its components, though made of human bone, nerve
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and muscle, were reduced to their bare mechanical elements and rigidly
standardized for the performance of their limited tasks. The taskmaster’s
lash ensured conformity. Such machines had already been assembled if
not invented by kings in the early part of the Pyramid Age, from the end of
the fourth Millennium on.
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the idea of a human order whose rulers partook of godlike attributes, the
megamachine was born. The megamachine represented the fusing of the
natural order of the earth with the supernatural order of the heavens. Political
authority was vastly increased. With the pre-eminence of the Sun gods,
particularly Ra, at this point, Sun worship and political absolutism fused to
form the megamachine.
All the elements of the modern system of production were present in the
megamachine – the centralisation of technical knowledge, the regimentation
of the labour force, the external direction of labour, the interchangeability of
the parts. The modern megamachine, then, has its origins not in capitalist
industrialisation, as Marxists argued, nor in the Middle Ages, as Mumford
himself had argued in Technics and Civilisation (and which Weber and
Foucault also suggest). Mumford traced the problems of the modern age all
the way back to the very beginning of human history. Here, in the ancient city,
the megamachine had emerged as a power complex consisting of masses of
people accustomed to enduring forced, mind-numbing, repetitive labour for
the greater power, glory and well-being of an elite (MM 1967:188 199 211;
WD 1979:476; PP 1970:12).
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When scrutinized more closely, the social results were, however, more
disturbing than the prophets of mechanical progress were willing to admit:
from the beginning in the fifteenth century blasted landscapes, befouled
streams, polluted air, congested filthy slums, epidemics of avoidable
disease, the ruthless extirpation of old crafts, the destruction of valuable
monuments of architecture and history—all these losses counterbalanced
the gains…. While the goods promised by mechanical invention and
capitalist organization were naturally more easy to anticipate than the
evils, there was one evil, more mountainous than all the rest put
together, which for lack of sufficient historic information at that period it
was impossible to perceive in advance or to forfend. This was the
resurrection of the mega-machine. Through the coalition of all the
institutions and forces we have just been examining, the way had been
prepared for the introduction of the megamachine on a scale that not
even Chephren or Cheops, Naram-Sin, Assurbanipal, or Alexander, could
have deemed possible. For the accumulation of mechanical facilities had
at last made it possible vastly to enlarge the scope of the megamachine,
by progressively replacing the recalcitrant and uncertain human
components with specialized mechanisms of precision made of metal,
glass, or plastics, designed as no human organism had ever been
designed, to perform their specialized functions with unswerving fidelity and
accuracy.
At last a megamachine had become possible that needed, once organized,
a minimum amount of detailed human participation and coordination. From
the sixteenth century on the secret of the megamachine was slowly re-
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The belief that the machine was ‘absolutely irresistible’ whilst in any case
being ‘ultimately beneficial’, so long as it was not opposed and so long as one
goes along with its imperatives, constitutes ‘the Myth of the Machine’. And
here is Mumford’s payoff. This myth need not be accepted. The
megamachine, contrary to impressions of its vast power, is not unbeatable.
The machine is not beneficial and is not concerned with the general good; the
machine is not irresistible and unbeatable. This is the ‘myth’ that Mumford
seeks to expose, encouraging people to shed their irrational beliefs. The
machine can be opposed and rejected; the machine can be beaten.
Mumford sought a way out of the ‘iron cage’ of modernity by rethinking the
character of reason and its relationship to freedom. This enabled Mumford to
rework the basic premises of rational modernity. In the process, Mumford
overcame the modern dualisms of public and private, reason and nature
formal and instrumental rationality. Throughout his writings, Mumford
challenged the assumptions of an automatic relation between the expansion
of reason and the production of freedom. In many respects, technological
progress had issued in human regress. Mumford’s various investigations
possessed a common thread in being concerned with modernity as a process
which narrowed purpose and scope as opposing to enhancing possibilities for
expression. In this respect, Mumford is original. He addresses the core ideas
of the sociological tradition but he does so from a position that denies the
inevitability of modernity and the necessarily progressive and emancipatory
character of modernity.
At the heart of Mumford’s sociological theory is the concept of life. Life, for
Mumford, is a bio-cosmic, transformative, insurgent and purposive process.
This challenges the self-alienation from life which characterises modern
society and social theory. Whereas other social thinkers regarded this creation
of a mechanical world beyond the organic conception of life as progressive,
Mumford saw the basis of human life being eroded. Mumford thus rejects the
dualism of reason or culture and nature, a dualism which is central to modern
notions of progress. And this makes him more sensitive to the destructive
aspects of the abstracting tendencies of modern progress.
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Mumford targets the central category of modern thought, the view that
human beings are autonomous, rational subjects capable of constituting the
rational society. This fundamental myth of the modern project is an anti-myth,
proceeding inexorably to the incarnation of self-alienation in the myth of the
megamachine.
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pushing forward of all these processes that had regimented and enslaved
mankind, and yet out of this he expected not only a liberation from the existing
dilemmas of society but a final cessation of the struggle.. Despite all Marx’s
rich historical knowledge, his theory ends in non-history: the proletariat, once
it has thrown off its shackles, lives happily ever afterward.. Historic
observation shows that there are many modes of change, other than dialectic
opposition: maturation, mimesis, mutual aid are all as effective as the struggle
between opposing classes’ (CM 1944:337 332; PP 1970:353).
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The outer world could not be corrected until the inner world was placed on
a proper footing. In this respect, Mumford’s organic, bio-semiotic body
emerges in all its true significance, a creative synthesis of ritual action,
symbolic communication and biology.
By means of ritual, I suggest, early man first confronted and overcame his
own strangeness, identified himself with cosmic events outside the animal
pale, and allayed the uneasiness created by his huge but still largely
unusable cerebral capacities At a much later stage these inchoate
impulses would come together under the rubric of religion. Actions still
‘speak louder than words’, and movements and gestures of ritual were the
earliest foreshadowings of human speech.. In short .. the ‘technology of
the body’ expressed in dance and mimetic movements, was both the
earliest form of any kind of technical order and the earliest manifestation of
expressive and communicable meaning.
MM 1967:62
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Mumford offers a unique perspective upon the renewed focus upon the
body in recent social theory, going against the conceptualised body based
upon the text to reinstate the organic, biological body. Mumford’s thought runs
contrary to the academicisation of the body, the way that academics theorise
the body and make it available to the megamachine.
Mumford offers a means for criticising those modern processes that serve
to inhibit rather than enhance essential human potentialities and which
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translate into life-denying structures. Mumford shows the path toward the
subversion of the megamachine. The human factor in the megamachine is its
Achilles heel. Whether in its reified institutional or conceptual manifestations,
the modern megamachine suffers from a tendency to mistake the human
parts as exhaustive of the whole human being, thus making the fatal error of
believing that deracinated intelligence or physical coercion alone are sufficient
to regulate social life. These express human power in its alien-rational form. A
more moral-material component of human being offers an alternative mode of
social regulation.
In the modern rationalised world, the human body has been commodified,
standardised and quantified, separated from its organic ontological and
anthropological potentialities and made to conform to reified power
imperatives. The progress that the modern age has achieved is premised
upon the denaturing of human beings and hurtles towards the greatest
denaturing of all – ecological holocaust. This is a process which is already in
an advanced state. Recovering a conception of human nature is actually
crucial to the attempt to halt ecological destruction. Essentialism has emerged
as a target in postmodern and postmarxist thought, denying essential natures
and inherent lines of development, denying organicist concepts. Nothing is
essentially anything anymore. There is no ‘truth’ in politics, nothing that is
necessary on ontological or anthropological premises. Human beings can be
anything that their elite rulers require them to be. The view that human beings
are essentially something or are something essentially establishes clear
ontological dimensions with respect to what constitutes a humane social life
and what does not. Stripped of this essentialism, human beings become clay
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in the hands of the megamachine, moulded this way and that by elite rulers
who are busy preparing the next phase of human self-sacrifice and
megamechanical murder and destruction.
The crucial question of the (post)modern age is how to re-unite reason and
nature in a postmodern rather than in a pre-modern form. Upon the resolution
of this question rests the possibility of re-connecting reason and freedom,
recovering the emancipatory, ethical, anthropological component of reason so
as to ensure that technological progress is also human progress rather than
human regress. The organic, biocosmic, life-affirming philosophy of Lewis
Mumford establishes the moral and intellectual foundations for addressing
and answering this question.
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The Pentagon of Power (1970) is volume two of The Myth of the Machine,
picking up the story on the modern megamachine from where it had been left
in volume one. Mumford is relentless in his criticism of the unreason of the
technological state and science. So conclusive is the evidence that Mumford
marshals against the scientific perversion of modern rationality that it is
possible to lose sight of Mumford’s big emancipatory claim – that human
nature is ontologically biased towards autonomy and biased against
submission to technology in whatever form. Mumford’s argument concerning
the megamachine is striking, going to the heart of the modern malaise. But
Mumford’s underlying argument is the more important, holding out the eternal
promise of human emancipation from technological domination.
For Mumford, The Pentagon of Power was not an attack upon science and
technology as such ‘but an attack upon the Power Complex’s threat to
undermine all human values and purposes, including those of science itself’
(Mumford New York Times Dec 5 1970, LMC).
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Mumford starts his tale with the return of the ancient sky gods through the
work of the astronomers. These found a machine-like order and regularity in
the heavens, in the regular revolution of the planets around the sun. And this
became the new earthly ideal, the foundation of political absolutism and
industrial discipline as with the first megamachine. Mechanistic thought
dominated as the approach of modern scientists fed into human affairs (PP
1970:4/34 51).
‘The period that opened at the end of the fifteenth century has been called
The Age of Exploration; and that characterization covers many of the events
that followed. But the most significant part of this new exploration took place
in the mind’. (Mumford PP 1970: 4). We are still living within this cultural New
World of mechanical order.
Between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries, the New World
opened by terrestrial explorers, adventurers, soldiers, and administrators
joined forces with the scientific and technical new world that the scientists,
the inventors, and the engineers explored and cultivated: they were part
and parcel of the same movement. One mode of exploration was
concerned with abstract symbols, rational systems, universal laws,
repeatable and predictable events, objective mathematical
measurements: it sought to understand, utilize, and control the forces that
derive ultimately from the cosmos and the solar system. The other mode
dwelt on the concrete and the organic, the adventurous, the tangible: to
sail uncharted oceans, to conquer new lands, to subdue and overawe
strange peoples, to discover new foods and medicines, perhaps to find
the fountain of youth, or if not, to seize by shameless force of arms the
wealth of the Indies. In both modes of exploration, there was from the
beginning a touch of defiant pride and demonic frenzy.
Mumford PP 1970: 5
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Mumford sees here the origins of a new Sun worship, one focused upon
mechanistic science and the promise of infinite material progress through the
rational mastery of Nature.
Heliocentrism was accepted slowly: indeed it had little effect upon the
learned world for a century after Copernicus: even today the common-sense
view, that the sun moves around the earth, suffices for most men. But the
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telescope and the microscope made a profound difference; for the infinite
and the infinitesimal, the macrocosm and the microcosm, ceased to be
merely speculative concepts: they revealed, at least potentially, the ideal
limits of significant visual experience.
These two artifacts of glass technics wrought a far more radical
transformation of human life than did the steam engine. What had once
been purely religious concepts attached to an after-life — infinity, eternity,
immortality—were now related to actual time and space. With that, the once
enclosed, self-contained and self-centered world of Christian theology was
no longer credible. But religion itself was not excluded: for a new religion had
in fact secretly come into existence: so secretly that its most devout
worshippers still do not recognize that it is in fact a religion.
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For its effective salvation mankind will need to undergo something like a
spontaneous religious conversion: one that will replace the mechanical
world picture with an organic world picture, and give to the human
personality, as the highest known manifestation of life, the precedence it now
gives to its machines and computers. This order of change is as hard for
most people to conceive as was the change from the classic power complex
of Imperial Rome to that of Christianity, or, later, from supernatural
medieval Christianity to the machine-modeled ideology of the seventeenth
century. But such changes have repeatedly occurred all through history;
and under catastrophic pressure they may occur again. Of only one thing
we may be confident. If mankind is to escape its programmed self-extinction
the God who saves us will not descend from the machine: he will rise up
again in the human soul.
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Mumford PP 1970:413
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values, rejecting the machine culture and ideology upon which the power
complex rests. Refusing to accept that destructive, authoritarian technology
was irrevocably in control, Mumford continued to invest his hopes in a
conversion of values leading to the era of a constructive technological culture.
Only a conversion at the level of values could overcome the destruction that
technology is currently wreaking on human society and the earth.
An age that worships the machine and seeks only those goods that the
machine provides, in ever larger amounts, at ever rising profits, actually
has lost contact with reality; and in the next moment or the next generation
may translate its general denial of life into one last savage gesture of
nuclear extermination within the context of organic order and human
purpose, our whole technology has still potentially a large part to play; but
much of the riches of modern technics will remain unusable until organic
functions and human purposes, rather than the mechanical process
dominate.
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the ‘organisation man’, the supine bureaucrat quite willing to sacrifice his soul
to the system in which he served as a mere cog (PP 1970:142).
Mumford could have been describing the regimes of the earl-mid twentieth
century, except that these appear as lesser megamachines in relation to the
full-blown thing. ‘The crisis arose and the implosion took place: but before that
happened, older and cruder models of the megamachine, energized by new
mechanical equipment, had come into existence and opened the way for the
final explosion of 'absolute' power.’ (Mumford PP 1970: 244).
The USA and Russia had developed megamachines which replaced the
human parts with the more reliable mechanical and electronic parts. They had
done so as a reaction against Hitler’s crude military machine. With the
invention of the atomic bomb, science and scientists earned a hallowed spot
in the new power complex, allied with a military elite who ‘fortified themselves
in an inner citadel [a Pentagon] .. cut off from inspection or control by the rest
of the community’. In these command centres, the supine organisation man,
serving power and obeying orders, becomes a threat to the survival of human
life (PP 1970:243 250/3; WD 1979:15).
‘The kind of group that speeded the invention of the atom bomb was,
accordingly, in some ways a model for any higher kind of organization,
which, if liberated from wartime secrecy, would seek to transcend the
megamachine's original limitations: the pattern, indeed, for a still unborn
United Nations organization, assembled to provide the maximum
interchange of knowledge or of energy, and eventually to exercise moralized
control over the demoralized, premature applications of half-baked scientific
knowledge.’ (Mumford PP 1970: 265).
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Lord Acton declared that "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts
absolutely." The atom bomb has inaugurated the age of absolute power and
absolute corruption. ‘In our age this corruption has sprung alike from the
nature of the nuclear weapons themselves, from the agencies that have
promoted them, and from the general demoralization brought on by the archaic
military megamachines, widened, indeed universalized, by the 'democratic'
governments that blindly copied their methods.’ (Mumford PP 1970: 264/5).
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As if this prospect was not bad enough, Mumford speculates that current
trends make it possible to envisage the technocratic elite being replaced by a
supreme ruler wholly lacking in human attributes – the central computer as
the ultimate decision maker, the sun god on earth. Mumford had once
considered electricity as a potential force for decentralisation, permitting
industry and population to disperse throughout the land. In The Pentagon of
Power, however, his attention is upon the electronic computer as a force for
centralisation, encroaching upon the personal lives and autonomy of
individuals. For Mumford, the computer is just another tool whose capacity is
overrated. As a tool, it is inferior to the brain. Nevertheless, it is a dangerous
tool. As the eye of the reborn sun god Atom-Re, the computer functions as the
private eye of the megamachine elite. This elite can demand and expect
complete conformity to the commands it issues since no action can escape
the all-scrutinizing eye. This extinguishes autonomy and leads to the
‘dissolution of the human soul’.
the themes I have developed are so well fortified with evidence and
because, far from over-stating my case against our runaway technology, I
show how much more beneficial its real improvements will be once we get
control of the whole system, and use it for our purposes, instead of letting
the megamachine use us for its purposes. As to the megamachine, the
threat that it now offers turns out to be even more frightening thanks to the
computer, than even I in my most pessimistic moments had ever
suspected. Once fully installed our whole lives would be in the hands of
those who control the system, much as the life of an American conscript is
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now in the hands of the Pentagon and the White House, and no decision
from birth to death would be left to the individual.
The joke of the whole business is that this miscarriage of technology has
been the ideal goal of almost all utopias.
The whirligig of time has gone round; and what James applied to
science applies equally to our compulsive, depersonalized, power-driven
technology. We now have sufficient historic perspective to realize that this
seemingly self-automated mechanism has, like the old 'automatic' chess
player, a man concealed in the works; and we know that the system is not
directly derived from nature as we find it on earth or in the sky, but has
features that at every point bear the stamp of the human mind, partly
rational, partly cretinous, partly demonic. No outward tinkering will
improve this overpowered civilization, now plainly in the final and fossilized
stage of its materialization: nothing will produce an effective change but
the fresh transformation that has already begun in the human mind.
Those who are unable to accept William James' perception that the
human person has always been the "starting point of new effects" and
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Mumford PP 1970:435
As against mechanistic natural science and the way it drives purpose, life
and spirit out of physical reality, Mumford affirmed the creative power of
human moral subjectivity as alone capable of investing the world with
meaning, the built and the natural environment together.
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But is this not the ‘Great Refusal’ of Herbert Marcuse, a political strategy
that failed to confront the centres and structures of power? Those refusing are
those who are the least materially and structurally important within the
system. Do they have the capacity to act to change the system? Where is the
material futurity crucial to an effective politics of social transformation? That
Mumford possibly realised that his call for withdrawal and conversion would
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Establishing its own special relations with its past, each generation creates
anew what lies behind it, as well as what looms in front, and instead of
being victimised by those forces which are uppermost at the moment, it
gains the ability to select the qualities which it values, and by exercising
them it rectifies its own infirmities and weaknesses.
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This concluding chapter establishes the point that the social philosophy of
Lewis Mumford creates space for agency, reciprocity, embodied experience
and an affirmative materialism.
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values. This is the neotechnic era in which individuals are no longer passively
subject to a technological determinism but are active creators of their
environment, exercising a conscious, constructive mastery of their
technological powers.
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If democracy alone is not the solution, then it is a necessary part of it. This
pertains to the extension of public spaces and, hence, of possibilities for
popular participation. In present circumstances, politics is conducted through
representatives working to other agendas. The general will of the citizen body
is not articulated actively, directly and continuously but is mediated by parties
and representatives working to their own agendas, often in alliance with
business elites and corporate and military power. Political defaults and
democratic deficits are built into such a system. The popular will, at best, is
noted but is not necessarily served. The democratic imperative is subverted
within elitist institutions by those possessing wealth and power. The values of
democracy are continuously affirmed by leaders within these institutions but
the political process is all the more elitist for that.
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completely dependent upon experts for its functioning. But this is not a
dictatorship of the clever. Rather, the experts are in the pay of the state which,
in turn, is structurally dependent upon capital. Expertise is in the service of
administrative power and exploitative wealth. This gives mastery over the
artificial environment in which the mass of people are condemned to live,
regardless of their personal choice.
The problems that afflict modern society are the result of a perverted
relationship between human beings and their environment, both natural and
self-made. Yet, in the modernist perspective, the problem is merely one
concerning the application of science. Rather than checking the
encroachment of expertise in the service of power and control, solutions are
sought in the extension of the administration of society and nature by
expertise.
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The inversion of means and ends, the exaltation of means into ends and
their consequent expansion means that the world has forfeited its human
scale. The result is that the instrumental means of human progress –
technology, production, science – are implicated in an ethos of impersonal
gigantism. Gigantism, thickly-structured expertise and the state-capital
symbiosis, has become the norm in the modern world.
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industrial progress. And how easily a public dependent upon paid employment
falls in with totalitarian logic of an irresistible progress. It is indicative of the
perversion of values that has taken place that the reaffirmation of the basic
principle that communities exist for the health and happiness of those who live
in them is somehow considered to be backward looking, nostalgic, opposed to
progress. It is not. It merely makes the point that any ‘progress’ worthy of the
name possesses an ineradicable moral, spiritual, aesthetic and
anthropological dimension. Progress is much more than property values,
profits and jobs. ‘The economy’ – as capitalism is euphemistically called – is
not an autonomous entity whose systemic imperatives human beings are
obliged to serve. It is only the determinism which accompanies capitalist
dehumanisation which makes it appear autonomous of the human agents who
create and reproduce economic processes.
The main effect on politics that science has had has been the reduction of
social affairs to objective order, the quantification, standardisation and
bureaucratisation of human life. The vision of society as totally controlled
originates in the rise of science. In this respect, reason comes to refer to
something very different, losing its necessary connection with human
happiness and fulfilment. The vision of a totally quantified society populated
by totally predictable automatons represents the oldest ideal of the scientific
imagination. Science is developing the means for bringing that nightmare
vision to life.
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The framework for this concluding chapter is taken from the one that
Mumford outlined in Technics and Civilisation (1934). Mumford distinguishes
between three successive phases of development. The eotechnic phase is
the age of wood, wind and water; the paleotechnic phase is the age of coal
and iron; the neotechnic phase is the age of electricity and alloys. To these
three phases, Mumford would later add another to account for the
development of nuclear power and the silicon chip. The implications of this
new phase of development are profound. For Mumford conceived the
domination of machine culture as representing the denial of the organic and
the living. With the development of nuclear power, this culture had now
reached its highest expression in the ‘cult of death’. Mumford considered the
ever looming threat of nuclear war to be the ‘supreme drama of a completely
mechanised society’ (FTC 1986:58).
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which extend to more than this would have to be satisfied by direct effort.
‘Basic communism’ entails the obligation for all to share in the work of the
community. There is also an emphasis upon the quality of work in this
argument. Work is to be attractive, performed by an amateur rather than by an
automaton. ‘Not work, not production for its own sake or for the sake of
ulterior profit, but production for the sake of life and work as the normal
expression of a disciplined life, are the marks of a rational economic society’
(FTC 1986:159).
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FTC 1986:162
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leads beyond the capitalist order, something which may involve overthrowing
and displacing the existing administrators of industry (FTC 1986:171).
FTC 1986:171
The internal organisation implies the transformation of the trade union from
a bargaining organisation seeking special privileges apart from the
industry or the working class as a whole, into a producing organisation,
concerned with establishing a standard of production, a humane system of
management, and a collective discipline which will include every member,
from such unskilled workers who may enter as apprentices up to the
administrators and engineers.
FTC 1986:167
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FTC 1986:175
With the proper use of technology on the basis of a scaled, functional self-
management, creative activity becomes the practice of all rather than the
preserve of an elite few.
FTC 1986:175
The question that Mumford posed here has become all the more pressing
over time. Far from producing health, freedom and happiness, technics is part
of an inverted social order that systematically generates their opposite. And,
with technological advance, this is the case on an ever increasing scale.
Mumford’s words have lost none of their power and relevance.
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FTC 1986:175/6
FTC 1986:179
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these have now become the critical and all-important problems of modern
civilisation. To face these problems, to evolve appropriate social goals and
to invent appropriate social and political instruments for an active attack
upon them, and finally to carry them into action: here are new outlets for
social intelligence, social energy, social good will.
FTC 1986:182
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FTC 1986:182/3
Mumford concludes that ‘the next step toward re-orienting our technics
consists in bringing it more completely into harmony with the new cultural and
regional and societal and personal patterns we have co-ordinately begun to
develop’ (FTC 1986:183).
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planning will come. Need I recall again that the vast increase of the
number of playgrounds in Manhattan was not a result of financial
prosperity: it was the outcome of deflation, failure to pay taxes,
bankruptcy, and loss of population.
Existing cities must eventually participate in the re-urbanization of the
modern environment: but before they can become regional cities,
capable of sustaining a well-balanced environment for their now
miserably housed masses, the metropolitan regime as a whole must be
progressively liquidated. In the process of urban development, social
values and financial values are in decisive conflict: pecuniary canons of
success have produced an environment destructive to life, and similarly,
biotechnic standards of achievement must produce a system of values
destructive to metropolitan finance. Our whole program of re-urbanization
and housing demands a definite choice. That choice may not be
revolutionary in the sense of implying a complete break and an
overpowering catastrophe: but it is revolutionary in the sense that when,
by steady pressure and day-to-day movement, it has achieved its end, the
metropolis and the insidious pecuniary values of metropolitan life will be
obliterated, and a new set of working institutions, more consonant with
a humane scheme of values, will have taken its place. Planners who are
not aware of these implications are sociologically too unsophisticated to
be trusted with important functions: instead of helping to define an
adequate public policy, they can only obfuscate the issues and
sabotage a sound social program.
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Mumford’s preference for the medieval city is once again pertinent here:
‘what gave the early medieval town a sound basis for health was the fact that,
though surrounded by a wall, it was still part of the open country.. Nor were
the towns, for centuries to come, wholly industrial [or commercial]: a good part
of the population had private gardens and practised rural occupations’ (CC
1938:42). Mumford thus affirmed the relationship between town and country
as cultural, economic and ecological. This relationship gives urban inhabitants
a sense of identity that is grounded in place, incorporating rather than
excluding the surrounding countryside. A regional consciousness encourages
a reciprocal engagement between urban and rural spheres.
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Although Mumford valued parks and romantic suburbs for the way that
they helped to ‘break up the .. clotted urban massing of the great metropolis’
(CC 1938:221), it was organicism and regionalism that was Mumford’s real
end, not pastoralism. Regional planning incorporates organicist principles
which ground the built environment in geography. This creates an ecologically
sound system of production, a geo-economy. Mumford was concerned to
transform the way of life, restructure the differentiation of urban space so as to
move from the industrial to the garden city. The garden city is not a means of
creating green space within urban space but of recontextualising urban space
with regard to holistic social, cultural and ecological goals. Regional planning
expresses a sense of place which grounds a socially and ecologically
responsible practice, which reorders the relation between technique and
participation.
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A central theme of the argument presented in this thesis concerns the role
of physiology in Mumford’s approach to the recovery of the centrality of the
human habitus of everyday experience.
Mumford was thus critical of the ideal society’s projected by both liberalism
and socialism. Despite their differences, both liberalism and socialism
premised the good society upon universal material abundance. Both accepted
the eternal promise of capitalism to expand wealth to unprecedented levels.
To Mumford, this expansion was a problem rather than a solution. What was
required was an awareness of limits, the kind of awareness that John Stuart
Mill had sought to develop with reference to the stationary state. Whereas the
liberal and the socialist ideal presupposes universal abundance achieved by
developing modern technique and organisation alongside a change in political
regime and economic ownership, redistributing the fruits of economic success
more equitably, Mumford places more emphasis upon the need for limits upon
growth. Whereas liberalism and socialism premised their ideal upon
continuing economic growth, differing over distribution, the point for Mumford
concerns how to reorder social purposes so as to attain balance, harmony
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and form. Mumford thus reaffirms the classical Athenian ideals of measure,
balance and self-sufficiency against the notion of endless economic growth.
Like the Greeks, Mumford believed that the task of attaining the good life
entailed much more than modifying political and economic institutions.
Although institutional transformation is certainly necessary, this was simply
the external expression of a more fundamental transformation in human life
and consciousness. Mumford called for a total transformation to overcome the
mechanistic mode of life which entailed the psychological submission to the
machine process and the power state and had generated a new personality
type, bureaucratic man. Against the mechanistic mode, Mumford proposed
the organic mode of life, a ‘new humanism’ that recognises ‘the inner and the
outer, the subjective and the objective, the world known to personal intuition
and that described by science [as] a single experience’. This generated a new
mode of thinking and acting. This transformation was not, as political radicals
thought, a consequence of revolution. For Mumford, this transformation of
consciousness was the revolution (Mumford ‘Toward a Humanist Synthesis’
1921:583/5; SU 1922:247; ‘A Modern Synthesis’ April 12 1930:920/1; May 10
1930:1028/29).
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programs for the reconstruction of a paper world’, the survey generates the
missing element, localised knowledge (Mumford-Geddes July 31 1922 PGC;
SU 1922:281). Moreover, the survey method avoided narrow specialism by
synthesizing the work of a number of investigations from a number of fields.
With this approach, Mumford offers the moral and intellectual means for
uprooting the life-inhibiting rationalisation theorised by Max Weber and lying
at the heart of modernity.
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Marx wrote eloquently on this subject: ‘In our days, everything seems
pregnant with its contrary. Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of
shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking
it. The new fangled sources of wealth, by some strange weird spell, are turned
into sources of want. The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character.
At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become
enslaved to other men or to his own infamy.. All our invention and progress
seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in
stultifying human life into a material force’ (Marx 1973:299/300). Marx relates
this antagonism between modern industry and science and modern misery
and dissolution to the ‘antagonism between productive powers and the social
relations of our epoch’. ‘Progress in industry’ results in a ‘regress in politics’.
To resolve this antagonism, ‘the new fangled forces of society’ need to be
mastered by ‘new fangled men’ through a social and moral revolution (Marx
1973:299/300).
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The scale of these forces has grown enormously since Marx wrote those
words in 1856. The antagonism between productive and technical powers and
social relations has a destructive potential far in excess of what Marx
envisaged. In the contemporary world the environment is threatened by
nuclear holocaust, ecological destruction and global collapse. The nature of
the antagonism is the same, basically an inversion of means and ends
ensuring that technical progress issues in human regress. But the scale of the
problem has expanded to unprecedented levels. Power of this magnitude
cannot be allowed to remain out of control. The question relates to the kind of
control that comes to be instituted.
With this holistic approach, Mumford was able to establish the organic
interconnection of problems and their solutions. For Mumford, the everyday
social lifeworld is the human habitus for the embodied experience which offers
the basis for the dissolution of the abstracted rationalism detached from life.
Mumford seeks life-affirming structures to contest, subvert and ultimately to
replace the life-denying structures of the megamachine. These life-affirming
structures are located in the everyday life world, defining Mumford’s civic
public as a community of life. Mumford develops the foundations for criticising
the megamachine as abstracted institutionalised power raised over the life
world, as knowledge over the body. Mumford contests the artificial system
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This study has emphasised the extent to which Mumford offers a life
philosophy of the habitus of the everyday world of real, interacting, individuals.
The reciprocal relationships of everyday life are revalued against the mega-
structures of institutional formation which regiment the practical life activity of
human agents. Mumford was a life philosopher whose perspectives challenge
the repressive apparatuses of the megamachine. He attacked the way that
those abstracted apparatuses over-regulated life, suppressing spontaneity,
creativity and individuality. Mumford argued against all theories and concepts
which were in the service of the megamachine. Mumford’s critique of
irresponsible, overscale, destructive power has to be seen in the context of
American society and politics, although his argument has wider relevance.
Mumford develops a critical approach to the relationship between knowledge
and power taking shape in the form of mega-structures supporting abstract
institutional force.
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CONCLUSION
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within the sphere of reason. The end of this praxis is the organic community
resting upon the pacified symbiosis of humanity, society and nature.
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House and village, eventually the town itself, are woman writ large... In
Egyptian hieroglyphics, 'house' or 'town' may stand as symbols for
'mother', as if to confirm the similarity of the indi vidual and the collective
nurturing function.
Mumford CH 1961: 22
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Mumford thus argues that ‘the prime need of our age is to contrive
channels for excessive energies and impetuous vitalities that have departed
from organic norms and limits.’ (Mumford 1966: 649).
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architecture was ‘the House of the Dead’, in modern culture, it is the ‘House of
the Living’, the dwelling house, ‘renewable generation by generation.’
But there is still another means, springing not out of life and its
renewing impulses, but out of death: a desire to wall out life, to exclude
the action of time, to remove the taint of biological processes, to
exclude the active care of other generations by a process of architectural
mummification. The primitive burial mounds, the big stones of the
Salisbury Plains or Brittany, the Pyramids and Sphinxes of Egypt, the
grandiose gestures of a Sargon or an Ozymandias, of a Louis XIV or a
Peter the Great: these represent that respect for death which is
essentially a fear of life.
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they write their boasts upon tombstones; they incorporate their deeds in
obelisks; they place their hopes of remembrance in solid stones joined to
other solid stones, dedicated to their subjects or their heirs forever,
forgetful of the fact that stones that are deserted by the living are even
more helpless than life that remains unprotected and unpreserved by
stones.
Mumford 1938:434/5
This point does not relate only to ancient times, with these priestly and
kingly cults taking new form within civic communities: ‘they, too, tended to
sacrifice life to the monument.’ Mumford’s point is general, arguing that from
classic times to our own day, civilisations have been ‘oriented toward death
and fixity: the immobilization of life.’ Mumford cites Heraclitus’ argument
that all things flow, and Lucretius’ argument that ‘man is a part of the
eternally changing cycle of nature’. However, ‘the aim of civilization was
permanence: its highest achievement in cities was the static grandeur of a
Pantheon or a Temple.’ The more shaky the institution, the more solid the
monument (Mumford 1938: 435).
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The permanence of built structures and the petrified hand of laws, rules
and regulations suffocate life, spontaneity and creativity. The hard shell
promises continuity, eternal life, but it achieves perpetuity only by sacrificing
the life within. Human beings have built civilisation as a shell to shield
themselves against the amoral indifference of Nature. But the permanence of
this shell is not the same as eternal life for its contents. In time, the shell
hardens on the back and suffocates the life contained within. The shell isn’t
real life, it is a substitute for it.
But the fact is that exterior form can only confirm an inner life: it is not a
substitute. All living beliefs, all living desires and ideas, must be
perpetually renewed, from generation to generation: re-thought, re-
considered, re-willed, re-built, if they are to endure. The blight of ancient
Rome upon the imagination of Italy in the ensuing ages bears witness to
the congealing strength of the monument: each generation mounts guard
on a cemetery, and repeats the password of its dusty challenge.
So long as human beings are wholly oriented toward death and the
timeless, the monument has meaning. Many civilizations have sacrificed a
good part of their life, their resources, their mental and physical energies to
the monument. Mumford argues that with the profound change in our
biological understanding of death and immortality, monumentalism has
been robbed of its main meaning. At this point, Mumford seems to restate
the inescapability of Nature’s biological necessity as against attempts to
achieve eternity through civilisation building. Mumford demands renewal
rather than change.
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for lower forms of life, like the amoeba: it is absent in the higher
organisms. Continuity for us exists, not in the individual soul as such,
but in the germ plasm and the social heritage, through which we are
united to all mankind and to all nature. Renewal comes through the
sacrifice of the parent to the child, of the having-lived to the living and the
yet-to-live.
Mumford 1938:438
Instead of being oriented, then, toward death and fixity, we are oriented
to the cycle of life, with its never-ending process of birth and growth and
renewal and death: a process we can neither halt nor limit by ideological
fixations or cunning inventions. The very stones of the ancient tombs are no
longer for us true symbols of eternity: we know their secret processes and
detect their faltering character: we see their civilizations, too, through the
perspective of time, perspectives that reveal the feebleness of their boasted
power and the frailty of their monuments. The forms that past cultures
have chosen for immortality seem to us as essentially childish as the rag doll
to which the infant playfully attributes life. Time is a bomb that splits the
most august temple open, if indeed the wanton savagery of men does not
anticipate death's weapon.
Mumford 1938 ch 7
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Mumford sees times changing in the modern world: ‘In most past civilizations
the activities of the living were not real until they could be transposed into terms
of death. In our emerging civilization death is meaningless until it can be
transposed into terms of the living. In the recent Christian culture life was a
probational period of preparation for death and the far more significant and
important state of after-life: for us, death is a making way for life, and all the
fixed and memorial processes, the written record, the painting, the sculptured
stone, the photograph, the recorded voice, are offerings to the living—to be
accepted, not out of duty to the dead, but out of loyalty to other remoter
generations who will also be capable of deriving life from these symbols.’
(Mumford 1938: 439).
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of urban life. ‘Why, for example, should each generation go on living in the
quarters that were built by its ancestors? These quarters, even if not soiled
and battered, were planned for other uses, other habits, other modes of living:
often they were mere makeshifts for the very purpose they were supposed to
serve in their own day: the best under existing limitations that now no longer
hold.’ (Mumford 1938 ch 7).
Mumford does indeed seem to be attempting to explore the potential offered
by neotechnics to return to the neolithic. He thus cites the example of the
pastoral nomad, who spared himself the sacrifice of the living to the dead
monument until he copied the ways of men in cities: he travelled light.
Civilization today, for different reasons, with different ends in view, must
follow this example of the nomad: it must not merely travel light but settle
light: it must be ready, not for merely physical movement in space, but for
adaptation to new conditions of life, new industrial processes, new cultural
advantages. Our cities must not be monuments, but self-renewing
organisms: the dominating image should not be the cemetery, where the
dead must not be disturbed, but the field, meadow, and park land, with
its durable cover of trees, its light boundary lines, its changing crops for
which the fields are plowed every year.
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Every part of the community's shell and equipment presents the same
dilemma. The wholesale investment in electric street railways in the
eighteen-nineties certainly retarded the development of automobile
transportation a generation later: the over-investment in subways in big
cities has made a stubborn enforcement of the pattern of congestion
almost a condition of municipal solvency. And it is very easily possible
that our present gigantic investments in sewage disposal systems,
including special treatment stations and sewage farms, may retard the
introduction of more simple apparatus that will liquefy and transform
sewage close to the point of origin: one of those inventions long
overdue.
It follows from this that every proposal to elaborate the physical shell of
the community should be critically examined, and social alternatives to the
mechanical means proposed should be sought. This means exploring
possibilities for simpler and lighter mechanical equipment—decentralized
rather than centralized, small rather than big. Always, Mumford emphasises
human dimensions, proportions and scale. Mumford opposes organicism and
socialisation to mechanical order.
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Mumford 1938 ch 7
The economy of settling light does not merely consist in a lower scale of
investment and lower overhead: its value derives from the greater readiness
to take advantage of fresh improvements. Small cities, where people
continued to cycle or walk to work, were better prepared to take advantage of
motor transportation than cities that had invested heavily in trolley cars,
elevators, and subways. Under a biotechnic regime we shall attempt to get
by socialized planning what we have hitherto sought to achieve exclusively
by means of costly mechanical equipment.
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Whereas the civilisations we have created in the past are ‘cumbrous physical
shells’, future civilisation needs to be a ‘living environment, an organic body
capable of circulation and repair and renewal in every organ, member, and
tissue.’ Mumford uses that word ‘renewal’ yet again, indicating the need to
replenish the living social order through rediscovering those symbiotic
associations with nature and its life support systems. We no longer need
civilisation to be a shell protecting us from nature and from other communities.
The protective function of the city is merely the utilitarian side of the
metaphysical concepts of fixity and permanence characterising past civilisation.
That protective function has been ‘overdone’, its time is past. It is time to create
civilisation as a living environment, a biocentric civilisation infused with life. ‘For
living creatures, the only real protection comes through growth and renewal and
reproduction: processes that are precisely the opposite of petrification.’
(Mumford CC 1938:443).
Mumford condemns capitalist enterprise for a systematic misdirection of
effort, contriving free-standing, individual, manufactured houses, which could
be put on the market in the same fashion as the automobile. Such an effort
overlooks the critical fact that modern communal services and collective utilities
have made the cost of free-standing houses prohibitive: ‘they have sought
economy in the shell alone, without availing themselves of further economies
that rest upon community planning and community building.’ (Mumford 1938:
444).
Mumford returns time and again to the value of ‘renewal’.
When one stresses the factor of renewability one does not overlook the
fact that effective design involves the discovery of architectural constants that
do not have to be renewed from generation to generation: to discover and
establish these constants is one of the main tasks of the modern planner.
In every art there are forms so implicit in the process, so harmonious
with the function, that they are, for practical purposes, "eternal": the
safety pin has changed little in form since the later bronze age: the
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Whilst the modern city is to be renewed every generation, this means neither
that it will "grow" indefinitely and spread indefinitely nor that the processes of
demolition and destruction will continue to destroy every vestige of the
past. (Mumford 1938:445). On the contrary, renewal proceeds on the
basis of a recognition of natural limits and ecological norms, exercising a
inherent restraint upon overscale growth.
City life is now blighted by crime, noise, pollution, filth, aggression, danger,
worry, lack of privacy within a terrifying isolation and atomism. People live in
cities through the absence of financially attractive options. All over the world,
the city is in decline. Since cities are constituted by the people within them,
the quality of a city is fundamentally dependent upon the quality of the
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The accessibility of town and country life to all citizens ensures a vital,
spontaneous, healthy mode of life. Enforced, wholesale urbanisation,
centralising power and control in an anti-city is an impulse resulting from the
process of capitalist industrialisation. The continuation of the obsessive
pursuit of growth, generating the overscale that disfigures the contemporary
city, has nothing to do with population pressure or natural necessity but is the
product of the dynamic of accumulation in which capital must constantly
expand its values in order to survive. The equation of this nihilism – expansion
for the sake of further expansion – with progress is an obvious non-sequitur. It
is an absurdity. And yet this prejudice dominates modern urbanisation,
generating the overscale city that is now on the brink of collapse. Within
capitalist processes of accumulation, the city threatens to subjugate every last
natural space and resource to its insatiable imperatives. The artificial urban
environment will swallow the entire globe, imposing an apparatus of excess,
waste, dissipation and compulsive consumption. The pressure of resources is
not a pressure of natural necessity but is a purely artificial necessity, an
expansionary system that must continue to grow, expand value, accumulate
capital or die.
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This small study has attempted to make clear how extensive Mumford’s
concerns, ideas and solutions were. This comprehensive character of
Mumford’s body of work no doubt reflects his organicism and holism, affirming
the unity and inter-dependence of all life forms. Mumford wrote in so wide an
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
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The Moral Architectonics of Ecological Civilisation Dr Peter Critchley
The Plan of London County. Rebuilding Britain Series, No. 12. London
Faber and Faber, 1945.
Programme for Survival Abbey Press 1946
Regional Planning in the Pacific Northwest: A Memorandum. Portland,
Northwest Regional Council, 1939.
Sketches from Life: The Autobiography of Lewis Mumford. New York: Dial,
1982.
The Social Foundations of Post-War Building. Rebuilding Britain Series, No 9.
London: Faber and Faber, 1943.
Sticks and Stones: A Study of American Architecture and Civilization. New
York: Boni and Liveright, 1924.
Sticks and Stones: A Study of American Architecture and Civilization. New
York: Dover, 1955.
The Story of Utopias. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922.
The Story of Utopias. New York: Viking, 1962.
Technics and Civilization. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934.
The Transformations of Man. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1956.
The Transformations of Man. New York: Harper & Row, Torchbook edition,
1972.
The Urban Prospect. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968.
Values for Survival: Essays, Addresses, and Letters on Politics and Education.
New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1946.
My Works and Days: A Personal Chronicle. New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1979.
Whither Honolulu? A Memorandum Report on Park and City Planning. Prepared
by Lewis Mumford for City and County of Honolulu Park Board.
Honolulu, T.H.: The Author, 1938.
Manuscript Collections:
AGP Albert Leon GueYard Papers, Manuscript Division, Cecil H.
Green Library, Stanford University, Stanford, California.
AJNP Albert Jay Nock Papers, Yale University Library, Manuscripts
and Archives, New Haven, Connecticut.
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Mumford's Notes:
Personalia. Mumford kept several kinds of notes, one of which he labelled
Personalia. These are intensely personal notes. In the Lewis Mumford
Collection, University of Pennsylvania, Charles Patterson Van Pelt
Library, Department of Special Collections, Philadelphia.
Personalia, in the confidential portion of the Lewis Mumford Collection.
Random Notes. A species of notes, the most common in the Mumford
Collection. In the Lewis Mumford Collection, University of Pennsylvania,
Charles Patterson Van Pelt Library, Department of Special Collections,
Philadelphia.
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