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The city in history

By lewis mumford

Life of Lewis Mumford 2

LEWIS MUMFORD (18951990)

Lewis Mumford is one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century, making substantial
and original contributions to knowledge in a wide variety of fields architecture, city and
urban studies, literature, history, technology, sociology, and planning.
Beginning with the publication of his first book The Story of Utopias in 1922 and continuing

throughout a career that saw the publication of some twenty-five influential volumes,
Mumford made signal contributions to social philosophy, American literary and cultural
history, the history of technology and, pre-eminently, the history of cities and urban planning
practice.

He consistently argued that the physical design of cities and their economic functions were
secondary to their relationship to the natural environment and to the spiritual values of
human community. Mumford applied these principles to his architectural criticism for The
New Yorker magazine and his work with the Regional Planning Association of America in the
1920s and 1930s.

Life of Lewis Mumford 3

THE INFLUENCE OF PATRICK GEDDES
Mumford transformed the ideas he adopted from Geddes and made them serve his own
critical purposes.
Appropriating a myriad of insights from Geddess original approach, Mumford investigated
the city as a naturalist and a biologist, establishing connections and interrelationships,
situating buildings and neighbourhoods, roads and bridges within the ecological context of
the city region.
From Geddes, Mumford incorporated the Athenian ideal of civilisation as a balance of forces.
Where the equilibrium between tradition and innovation is disturbed, civilisation decays.
Mumford drew his philosophical inspiration from classical Athens, particularly from the Plato
of The Republic.

The lessons that Mumford learned from Plato and Aristotle remained with him for the rest of
his life. It says:
Community needs to be scaled to human dimension so as to permit a humane way of life.
Over scale entails an imbalance and disproportion which leads to an inhumane way of life,

frustrating the potential for growth and development

The city in history

THE CITY IN HISTORY
Mumford lays out his fundamental propositions
about city planning and the human potential,
both individual and social, of urban life. The city,
he writes, is a theatre of social action, and
everything else art, politics, education,
commerce serve only to make the social
drama . . . more richly significant.
From The City in History of 1961, he reflected on
the ways that the social life of the ancient city

established a kind of dramatic dialogue in

which common life itself takes on the features
of a drama.
Mumford emphasises control and discipline as

values for survival.

Summary of book
THE EVOLUTION OF URBAN CIVILISATION IN HISTORY
The Classical Polis
Rome
The Medieval City

The Baroque
Imperial City
Coke towns
Megalopolis

PRESENTLY IT CLASSIFIED TOWNS IN SOCIAL ORDER RATHER THAN PHYSICAL ITEMS.

Eopolis

Polis

Metropolis

Megalopolis

Tyrannopolis

Necropolis

Summary of book

He traces the city back to its origins. Before the city, there was the hamlet and the shrine and
the village.
VILLAGE-IN-THE-CITY

He believes that-If human beings take appropriate action, it is still possible to recover the
healthy influences of the village and the region and assert them against the destructive,
aggressive tendencies of the large modern cities and their power complexes.

Mumford shows the path beyond the modern city to the regional city by grafting the
evidence from the urban past into a coherent.

THE FIRST URBAN TRANSFORMATION

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

Summary of book

EMERGENCE OF 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.
Mumfords 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 in the polis and
proceeds through the agora, the common market or meeting place .
ROME
Mumford describes Rome as producing the most debased form of urban civilisation in history.
Mumford slams the obsession with geometric precision and uniformity.
CLASSICAL POLIS AND THE MEDIEVAL TOWN
The Medieval town represented an organic growth from the inside out. The urban forms which
Mumford most favours are the classical polis and the Medieval Town. It would be no
exaggeration to claim that Mumfords ideal future community is the (post)modern polis
democracy. Mumford describes the polis as the product of a devolution of power from the
citadel to the democratic village-based community.

Summary of book

THE BAROQUE CITY

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.
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 places of organisms.
CH 1961:344/74
The Baroque cities represented a mechanical order which was founded not upon blood or

neighbourhood or kindred purposes and affections but upon subjection to oligarchical power
and military and bureaucratic modes.

Summary of book

MEDIEVAL DISTRUPTION , MODERN ANTICIPATIONS

The replacement of the organic order by the mechanical order is an anticipation of
developments in the twentieth century. For Mumford, the contemporary world is dominated by
a mechanistic mentality, shaping a whole way of life according to an ideology of military and
bureaucratic power. This domination of mechanicism over organicism in the modern city finds
its most significant expression in the centralised nation state commanding nuclear weapons.
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, rocketplatforms, underground shelters, control centres. 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 mega machine 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.

Summary of book

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MEDIEVAL DISTRUPTION , MODERN ANTICIPATIONS

The replacement of the organic order by the mechanical order is an anticipation of
developments in the twentieth century. For Mumford, the contemporary world is dominated by
a mechanistic mentality, shaping a whole way of life according to an ideology of military and
bureaucratic power. This domination of mechanicism over organicism in the modern city finds
its most significant expression in the centralised nation state commanding nuclear weapons.
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, rocketplatforms, underground shelters, control centres. 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 mega machine 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.

CONCUSIONS

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CONCUSIONS
The City in History, Lewis Mumford offered two competing visions of alternative futures. In
the first vision, there is a perfected artificial environment constituted entirely by human
made forms. This city is a totally controlled, hermetically sealed, completely inorganic
environment. Against this vision projected by modern city planners .
Mumfords vision is neither anti-urban nor anti-technological. Mumfords point is that

urban industrial society needs to respect scale. The crucial thing is that urbanism and
industrialism should be integrated within a general mode of life, not be the dominant,
overarching forces within that mode.
Mumfords work makes clear, a city is not defined by its size but by its relations and

functions, by the quality of human interaction in securing mutual benefit. Size beyond scale
destroys city life.
The city can only be saved by a recovery of human scale through a process of deurbanisation.