Reviews for The City in History (Penguin History)

The average rating for The City in History (Penguin History) based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-09-04 00:00:00 Barbara Taylor Mumford is, in many ways, a total precursor to the postmodernists. He maintains a skepticism towards Enlightenment as well as a strong respect for the subjective, vital forces of humanity. Like any good contemporary social thinker, he recognizes that the parsing of culture into numeric bits and pieces is only one among many methods of attaining knowledge. There's a certain Eurocentrism which is to be expected for a writer from his era, but what troubles me more is what I deem "urbanocentrism." He has a way of viewing all history through the lens of the city, thus excluding the discourse of societies beyond the city-- which was, until a few years ago, most of the world's population-- and consequently only seeing a sliver of humanity. However, if we read Mumford as a meticulous analyst of the course of development of the Western city, we get a much stronger narrative.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-01-03 00:00:00 Robin Peace My first experience reading Lewis Mumford was a collection of his writings for The New Yorker, where he served as architecture critic, and which impressed me by exposing a way of looking at building design which I hadn't even considered before, in a way that was easy to grasp. (This 'ease' was facilitated by interest, of course--if one is immune to the charms of architecture and design, then it's doubtful his essays would appeal.) The New Yorker essays made me want to read more, and I was extremely happy to find a copy of his National Book Award winner The City in History--high expectations and anticipation no doubt contributed to much of my later disappointment. As the book's subtitle indicates, Mumford traces the origins of the city and describes the changes it underwent up until his own time of the early 60s. As it has to be, the origin of the city is based on conjecture--Mumford posits a mating of the masculine warrior society with the feminine hunter/gatherer village, which begins a cycle of domination where the players may have changed over time, but not the script. From the earliest indications of cities to the more advanced form they took in Mesopotamia and Egypt, he describes the structures that enforced entrenched power: the citadel, the city's walls, the temple, the palace. While this concentration of people in one place set humanity on the road to civilization, it also began to steadily erode the touchstones that made life worth living. A section on the early Greek polis delineates how there were opportunities to create a different kind of city and society, though many of the same mistakes crept back in, and ultimately proved too difficult to overcome. The Romans, on the other hand, took the worst aspects of the city and doubled down on them by creating an almost unlimited sprawl. The apex of city design and living, according to Mumford, came in the Medieval period: cities were organized along lines that promoted human interaction--they were places where life was worth living. But as soon as the absolute monarchs were able to consolidate their power, the aspects of the citadel returned. In what he terms the 'Baroque' design of city, he shows how the purpose was to portray power, regardless of ordinary human occupations. Perhaps it might help to picture Versailles at the time of the Sun King--meant to display wealth and power, dedicated to the luxury of the few; sterile, antiseptic. The next step is 'Coketown', the fictional setting of Hard Times by Dickens: here Mumford catalogs the ills of the industrial city and the appalling human toll, when the unregulated despotism of Baroque power is replaced by unregulated capitalism. Lastly he leaves us with the mid-century situation--sprawl and uncontrolled money interests and fear of nuclear devastation. What The City in History argues for at every point is a symbiotic relationship between people and the technology they use--or are saddled with. The very design of most modern cities, he argues, is intended to keep those in power in power, or is a direct result of serving technological and pecuniary interests rather than that of the common man. Instead of a technological scale, he emphasizes the human scale. This is, I think, what Mumford's book is best at--raising our awareness concerning the way we live. In the actual living of day-to-day, I think it's easy to ignore or dismiss the blight (of the city or of our lives), or, feeling that we may be powerless to stop or correct these abuses, to act out in ways which we feel we can affect other aspects of our lives. (This last is more what Mumford's book made be consider rather than anything specific he brings out). The City as a reflection of power and powerlessness. For its ultimate effect on me, I probably should rate the book higher, but, unfortunately it ended up being a slog. Perhaps another time, and I would have found it enthralling. But Mumford's style here seems bogged down by conjecture and repetition. And there are too many instances to count where the author gives us his opinion to buttress his argument as if they were facts. One example, picked more-or-less at random: this on the changing environment brought about by suburbia, Compulsive play fast became the acceptable alternative to compulsive work: with small gain either in freedom or vital stimulus. Accordingly, the two modes of life blend into each other; for both in suburb and in metropolis, mass production, mass consumption, and mass recreation produce the same kind of standardized and denatured environment. Maybe this is true. Maybe it is relatively true. Perhaps it was a solid fact in 1960. I myself might even believe this sometimes, but time after time the author leaves us with these kind of generalizations for support of his larger argument, and which I thought subtracted from the overall effectiveness, even as I was generally sympathetic to his points. Mumford gives us examples of superior city planning throughout the book, but, in the end, the solution to the much more prevalent ills is, essentially, that we must want something better and be willing to work for it. Like many philosopher/humanists before him, I think he overestimates human nature--he assumes the mass of humanity not only wants what he would want, but is actually willing to work toward that direction. This point, to paraphrase a quote from his essays in the New Yorker, is a matter upon which good men may differ.