The Culture of Cities Forbidden Bookshelf Book 19 edition by Lewis Mumford Mark Crispin Miller Thomas Fisher Politics Social Sciences eBooks
Download As PDF : The Culture of Cities Forbidden Bookshelf Book 19 edition by Lewis Mumford Mark Crispin Miller Thomas Fisher Politics Social Sciences eBooks 
A classic work advocating ecological urban planning—from a civic visionary and former architecture critic for the New Yorker.
Considered among the greatest works of Lewis Mumford—a prolific historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and longtime architecture critic for the New Yorker—The Culture of Cities is a call for communal action to “rebuild the urban world on a sounder human foundation.” First published in 1938, this radical investigation into the human environment is based on firsthand surveys of North American and European locales, as well as extensive historical and technological research. Mumford takes readers from the compact, worker-friendly streets of medieval hamlets to the symmetrical neoclassical avenues of Renaissance cities. He studies the squalor of nineteenth-century factory towns and speculates on the fate of the booming twentieth-century Megalopolis—whose impossible scale, Mumford believes, can only lead to its collapse into a “Nekropolis,” a monstrosity of living death.
A civic visionary, Mumford is credited with some of the earliest proposals for ecological urban planning and the appropriate use of technology to create balanced living environments. In the final chapters of The Culture of Cities, he outlines possible paths toward utopian future cities that could be free of the stressors of the Megalopolis, in sync with the rhythms of daily life, powered by clean energy, integrated with agricultural regions, and full of honest and comfortable housing for the working class. The principles set forth by these visions, once applied to Nazi-occupied Europe’s razed cities, are still relevant today as technological advances and overpopulation change the nature of urban life.
Considered among the greatest works of Lewis Mumford—a prolific historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and longtime architecture critic for the New Yorker—The Culture of Cities is a call for communal action to “rebuild the urban world on a sounder human foundation.” First published in 1938, this radical investigation into the human environment is based on firsthand surveys of North American and European locales, as well as extensive historical and technological research. Mumford takes readers from the compact, worker-friendly streets of medieval hamlets to the symmetrical neoclassical avenues of Renaissance cities. He studies the squalor of nineteenth-century factory towns and speculates on the fate of the booming twentieth-century Megalopolis—whose impossible scale, Mumford believes, can only lead to its collapse into a “Nekropolis,” a monstrosity of living death.
A civic visionary, Mumford is credited with some of the earliest proposals for ecological urban planning and the appropriate use of technology to create balanced living environments. In the final chapters of The Culture of Cities, he outlines possible paths toward utopian future cities that could be free of the stressors of the Megalopolis, in sync with the rhythms of daily life, powered by clean energy, integrated with agricultural regions, and full of honest and comfortable housing for the working class. The principles set forth by these visions, once applied to Nazi-occupied Europe’s razed cities, are still relevant today as technological advances and overpopulation change the nature of urban life.
The Culture of Cities Forbidden Bookshelf Book 19 edition by Lewis Mumford Mark Crispin Miller Thomas Fisher Politics Social Sciences eBooks
Great book about how cities are constructed from medieval era to present. A little long winded but well worth the read.Product details
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The Culture of Cities Forbidden Bookshelf Book 19 edition by Lewis Mumford Mark Crispin Miller Thomas Fisher Politics Social Sciences eBooks Reviews
This book is a statement of Mumford's views on city planning. It begins with a 300-page history of European and American cities, from the Middle Ages through the 1920s. Following this, Mumford takes up a variety of topics in turn, including regional planning (and why he advocated for it), politics of regionalism, and miscellaneous topics such as agriculture, hygiene, museums, housing, and schools. The book is punctuated every 50 pages or so with pictorial features of black-and-white photographs or drawings together with paragraph-long analyses of these items related to topics from the main text. The book also includes a glossary, a 50-page annotated bibliography, and an index.
This book was seminal in its time. It represented a massive scholarly undertaking, and many of its ideas are still relevant today, some 70 years later. The historical overview is interesting and informative. Mumford points out how residents of cities in the Middle Ages enjoyed freedoms not possessed by land-bound peasants, and how life in the cities of those times did not entail exile from natural surroundings. He goes on to describe how cities lost more and more of their green spaces as they become more densely developed, and how the air and water of industrial cities made these places quite unhealthy. He also describes the original Garden City concept, which aimed at building small livable cities for the working class. These Garden Cities were supposed to be economically self-contained, with several options for industrial employment within their boundaries. Nowadays, when we think of the Garden City concept however, we think of the birth of suburbs, towns in the country where people only keep their beds, and which they leave each morning to go into the big cities for work and shopping. Mumford had a strong distaste for such developments, calling them "dormitories", and he rails against time wasted in workaday commutes. His ideal would be small cities of 30,00-40,000 inhabitants, with dense efficient housing, plenty of green space for everyone, and workplaces within walking distance from home for all.
Mumford's organization of the volume barely conceals a strong underlying message- -that cities in the distant past were pretty good, then they got worse, and now (in the late 1930s) they are heading towards Armageddon. He views the enormous megalopolis of the Twentieth Century as leading inevitably to armed conflict and misery. Given the context of his time, such a belief is quite understandable. Within two years from the publication of the book, his predictions of dire destruction did seem to come true. Nevertheless, world society somehow got through the problems of the 1940s, and people seem perfectly capable of living peacefully with their neighbors in cities that are much larger than any Mumford discussed. Thus, the problems that he claimed to be inevitable with big cities were not inherent in the size of the cities themselves, but more likely were products of an unstable era.
As a scholar in the Western tradition of the 1930s, Mumford may have had little background or interest in cultures beyond Europe or North America. However, as a modern reader, I found his notion that the general history of cities began in Europe in the Middle Ages a bit disconcerting. European cities at that time were in contact either directly or indirectly with the great cities of the East, from Jerusalem to Istanbul, Cochin to Shanghai and beyond. Such a survey of the history of cities, if written today, would need to consider the elements of city life beyond Europe. By using a comparative approach and including the cities of the Incas and Aztecs, one might be able to deduce which factors affecting the development of cities are universal or inevitable, and which are culturally bound.
One additional weakness of Mumford's argumentation is that he relies on comparisons of cities across time to try to identify which elements go into healthy cities. He concludes from these comparisons that as a city gets older, life in the city tends to go downhill, and he tries to identify the factors that make it do so, such as increasing population density. He might have gotten more accurate results by comparing cities synchronically, cities that share the same time and culture, but were developed along different lines with varying results.
In general, Mumford's writing style is delightful to read- -from the first page, I could recognize that he was an author who took pride in his craft. Although some peculiarities of his argumentation do not stand the test of time, many of his ideas are still quite exciting and well worth discussing. It would be great to see an edited volume of this work, with the most important points condensed into a shorter text.
City planning is often a difficult subject to pin down. While it has only been around as a distinct profession for a little more than 100 years, people have been living in cities for thousands of years. The form of their cities reflects their lives, and their lives reflect the form of their cities. A detailed discussion of can be maddening because it bleeds over into so many other disciplines. City planning is often the confluence between numerous other forces and ways of thinking. Just as a city is interconnected actions and reactions of multiple parties, so is city planning. It is refreshing to see a classic text, with both the breadth and depth necessary to do the topic justice, republished for a new audience. We know that our urban places are changing into something humanity has not seen before. It makes it even more important to study the past, to know how we got to where we are, and cultivate the wisdom from the lessons we have learned. If cities are all your thing, put this on your list.
The book is part of a series called Forbidden Bookshelf. It is not clear why or what this means. Just as confusing is the introduction by Mark Crispin Miller, talking about “vanished books.” This introduction is followed by another by Thomas Fisher. This introduction is worth reading as it places the book into historical context as it was originally published in 1938. The book itself, written by Lewis Mumford is excellent. The first half of the book is about the history of cities and the second half about how Mumford saw that cities should develop. The history part is superb, although highly focussed on western Europe and the United States. Since the book was published in the 1930s, it was fascinating to read how Mumford saw cities developing and how they actually have. I am not sure that Mumford, if he were alive today, would be entirely thrilled. So even if parts of the book are dated, I still enjoyed it and recommend it as an interesting read.
now more relevant than ever
Great book about how cities are constructed from medieval era to present. A little long winded but well worth the read.
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