The Culture of Cities.

Rating:
Summary: more great analysis and history
Review: I really enjoyed this book because of the parallels to his previous book, the history of cities. if you enjoyed that, you'll enjoy this a lot.

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

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

Rating:
Summary: Epic work
Review: 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.