The Culture of Cities

Lewis Mumford, Mark Crispin Miller

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781504031349
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

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.
 

CHAPTER I. PROTECTION AND THE MEDIEVAL TOWN

1: Stripping Off the Medieval Myth

Before one approaches the medieval town one must strip off the false wrappings in which successive generations have swathed this portion of the European past. The Middle Ages were defamed during the early Renascence for vices that actually belonged to their defamers: history offers many instances of the “transferred reproach.” Thus the earlier inhabitants of historic cities were vilified for demolishing precious Roman monuments that were not in fact destroyed until the very period that professed to value them, the age of the new humanists.

Let us depart, to begin with, from the notion that the period from the tenth to the sixteenth century was a compound of ignorance, filth, brutality, and superstition; for such a description does not altogether fit the life of Europe as a whole even during the worst parts of the Dark Ages, which still felt the civilizing influences of Celtic monasticism and the resolute order and economy of Charles the Great. This view of the Middle Ages is partly a product of the eighteenth century “Gothic Romances,” with their lurid pictures of torture chambers, cobwebs, mystery, and madness. No doubt such elements existed; but they no more characterized the civilization as a whole than the existence of armed gangsters and organized rackets and fascist pirates entirely characterizes our present civilization. One must not magnify the black spots in the past nor minimize those in our own day.

One must of course equally set aside the charming tapestry of the Middle Ages, composed by Pugin, Ruskin, Morris, and similar writers: they often treated intentions as if they were facts and ideals as if they were realizations. Above all, this version forgets that if the Middle Ages were governed by bold warriors and patient craftsmen, it was likewise a period of embryonic capitalist enterprise and audacious technical improvements: eager merchants, adventurous entrepreneurs, canny inventors: a period that invented the mechanical clock, made radical improvements in mining, sailing, and military attack, and learned to cast iron and manufacture glass spectacles and utilize physical energy on a scale never before achieved by any other civilization.

Our Middle Ages is far richer in detail than the earlier versions; and as respects the management of industry and the building of cities one finds even more to commend than did the most ardent early advocates of Catholic piety. There is a social kinship between our own age and the age of the guilds that parallels the relation I pointed out in Technics and Civilization between the eotechnic and the neotechnic complexes. And in the domain of cities, we have tardily begun to realize that our hard-earned discoveries in the art of laying out towns, especially in the hygienic laying out of towns, merely recapitulate, in terms of our own social needs, the commonplaces of sound medieval practice. Does this seem topsy-turvy? On the contrary: it was the myth that was baseless.

2: The Need for Protection

Between the date that symbolizes the fall of Rome and the eleventh century, when the cities of the West awakened to a new life, lies a period that is hard to describe but important to understand. It was out of the incurable misery and terror of this age that certain special attitudes toward life grew up which powerfully affected the development of all the dominant social institutions of the West—particularly the city. Five centuries of violence, paralysis, and uncertainty had created in the European heart a profound desire for security. When every chance might prove a mischance, when every moment might be one’s last moment, the need for protection rose above every other concern, and to find a safe haven was about the most one asked from life.

In Italy and France the old ways, it is true, had never entirely disappeared: hence the pagan undercurrents in that life: hence the twelfth century Renascence, so much more vital, both as continuation and as rebirth, than that which was to follow. But a disorganization and diminishment of the forces of civilization did characterize this period: the worst effects became visible only around the ninth century. Slavery, which had taken root in Roman agriculture, was introduced on a wide scale by the conquering barbarians; and the population, never far from famine, actually decreased. Military terrorism and its parasitic economy led to a devolution of the city: people left these stony wastes because they were driven to accept life at a subsistence level. Even when they remained in the neighborhood of an old city, like Mainz or Trier, it was no longer a meaningful part of their active life: only the shell remained. Its stones served as caves in the rock might have served—bare hiding places for those fleeing from the wrath to come.

If the Saracen encirclement of the Mediterranean hastened the passage from the uniform organization on the old imperial lines to a feudal economy of local production, barter, and consumption, under special local customs and local laws, the final blow was given at the other end of Europe by the invasions of the Norsemen in the ninth century. The final blow—and the first move toward recovery. These Norse raids were conducted in small boats that pierced the heart of the countryside between Brittany and the Elbe: no district was immune to their sacking, burning, slaying. The terror of these visitations must have created a new community of interest between the feudal lord and his dependents; but it also showed the technical inferiority of the local war-band in opposing attacks carried on by more audacious, perhaps more highly specialized, opponents.

Sheer necessity led to the rediscovery of an important fact. In the crude state of Western military technics in the ninth century, the strength and security of a fortified stronghold, perched on some impregnable rock, could be secured even for the relatively helpless people of the lowlands provided they built a wooden palisade or a stone wall around their village. Such a wall, particularly when surrounded by a moat, kept the attacker out, and made his weapons ineffective. In terror of the invaders, the inhabitants of Mainz, for example, restored at last their dilapidated Roman wall. Under commissions from the German emperor, Henry I, walls were built even around monasteries and nunneries to guard them from attack. And in Italy, too, walls were built again at the end of the ninth century in order to repel the Hungarians and other invaders.

This discovery, fortunately, proved to be double-edged. If the wall could protect the town from outside invasions more successfully than the feudal war-band, could it not also protect the community from the invasions and usurpations of these greedy and arrogant “protectors”? By means of the wall, any village could become another stronghold: people would flock to that island of peace, as originally they had submitted in desperation to the feudal gang-leaders or had given up the hopes of domesticity to find protection in a monastery or a nunnery. Life in the open country, even under the shadow of a castle, ceased to be as attractive as life behind the urban wall. Stockades, such as one still sees in Lucas Cranach’s woodcut of the siege of Wolfenbüttel in 1542, were a cheap price to pay for such collective security of life and property, such regularity in trade and work, such peace in thought and worship.

Note the sequence. First the cowering countryside, with its local production and mainly local barter: social life gathered in little villages or in “suburbs,” as the agricultural settlements that nestled under the castle’s walls were called. Then a deliberate physical reconstruction of the environment: the wall: protection made permanent and regular. In this security from outside raids and impositions, local craftsmen and peasants and fishermen, under privileges wrung from their local lord, came together for a regular weekly or fortnightly market: presently they sought permanent quarters for themselves in a spot that combined so many advantages in living. It is significant to note that, as Hegel points out, the new quarter of Regensburg, in the eleventh century—as distinguished from the royal and the clerical quarters—is that of the merchants. As social life became more solid and compact, this industrial and merchants’ quarter, the suburb, became the town center; and the seats of feudal and ecclesiastical power tended to become more suburban.

This urban movement was a chequered one. It marched under various banners, issued out of different circumstances, and produced diverse results. Sometimes urbanization was deliberately promoted by the feudal lords; often it was opposed by them, particularly by the princes of the Church, above all, when the rights of political and economic independence were claimed by the new townsmen. In some countries, as in England and France, municipal freedom was promoted by a temporary coalition with the central power, as a means of weakening the feudal nobles who challenged the king’s dominion. But, opposed or helped, the population flowed into these protected centers, built and rebuilt them, and in a few centuries created perhaps the highest type of urban civilization that had been known in Europe since the fifth century in Greece.

3: The “Increase of Population and Wealth”

The revival of trade is often taken, even by eminent scholars like Pirenne, as the direct cause of the city-building and civilizing activities that took place in the eleventh century. But the fact is that this urban renascence and its characteristic agents date from the previous century: their locus is not the isolated market, but the monastery.

Up to the time of the Norse invasions, the monasteries had served as a secure haven amid all the stormy uncertainties of life. In fact, the monastery had during this period performed the functions of the city in transmitting, if not greatly enlarging, the social heritage. Thanks to the knowledge the Benedictines preserved, sometimes even of Roman agricultural practice, it was many levels above the state of the surrounding countryside. Here the arts of building flourished and the technics of glass manufacture and decoration were carried on; above all, it was here that the written record was preserved and manifolded. In facing the new conditions of life in the ninth century, the monasteries were not in the least backward. The nunnery of Gernrode in Germany was called Kloster und Burg; and this meant something more than that the place was fortified.

A regular market worked to the advantage of the feudal lord or monastic proprietor. Considerably before the grand revival of trade in the eleventh century one finds under Otto II (973–983) that permission was given to the Widow Imma, who was founding a cloister in Kärnten, to provide a market and a mint and to draw taxes there-from: typical characteristics of the new urban foundations. In the time of Otto, according to Hegel, most of the market privileges were granted to religious proprietors rather than to temporal lords. These markets, under the supervision of the monastery, were probably older than the walls which later provided security of a more material order; for as early as 833 Lewis the Pious in Germany gave a monastery permission to erect a mint for a market that was already in existence. The market peace, symbolized by the market cross that stood in the market-place, could not be broken without suffering heavy penalties. Finally, under this royal aegis, a special market law, applying to fairs and markets, with a special court having jurisdiction over traders, came into existence. The various forms of security offered by religion, by jurisprudence, and by standard economic practice entered into the foundation of medieval towns.

The revival of trade in the eleventh century, then, was not the critical fact that laid the foundation of the new medieval type of city: many actual foundations antedated that fact. Commercial zeal was rather a symptom of a far more inclusive revival that was taking place in Western Civilization; not least, it was a mark of the new sense of security that the walled town itself had most potently helped to bring into existence. If trade is one symptom, the political unification of Normandy, Flanders, Aquitaine, and Brandenburg is another; and the land reclamations and forest clearance of the monastic orders, such as the Cistercians (founded in 1098), is a third. The confusion scholars have fallen into here derives partly from the fact that they read present motives back into past situations, and partly because they have not distinguished carefully between local, regional, and international markets. Local merchants, as distinguished from craftsmen who sell their own goods, could have played only an insignificant part in the eleventh century revival.

In general, the early trade revival on semi-capitalistic lines was confined to the luxury wares that entered into international commerce. This was incapable of fostering the growth of towns until the towns themselves had come into existence. Moreover, the special international market was the Great Fair, held usually once a year: there merchants from all parts of Europe would come together. But this type of merchant, with his caravan and his armed guards and his special treaties for political protection moved from place to place: he was a glorified peddler, more like the Yankee merchant captain of the early nineteenth century than like an urban business man. To fancy that these wandering international traders were responsible for the original growth of the medieval town is to put the cart before the horse.

It was rather a revival of the protected towns that helped the reopening of the regional and international trade routes, and led to the inter-European circulation of surplus commodities, particularly those of little bulk, wine from the Rhine, spices and silks from the East, armor from Lombardy, woolen goods from Flanders, leather from Pomerania, across the footways and waterways of Europe. Cities formed stepping stones in this march of goods: from Byzantium to Venice, from Venice to Augsburg, from Augsburg over the Rhine—and so, too, from Baltic cities, down to the Mediterranean.

The great fairs of the Middle Ages no doubt laid the foundation for the international capitalism of the sixteenth century, localized earlier in Florence and Augsburg, and later in Antwerp and Amsterdam, before it finally crossed in the eighteenth century to London. No less than the Crusades, the Fairs furthered the interchange of regional modes and patterns of life. But if the cultural importance of international trade was high, its economic importance—particularly as a source of urban growth—has been grossly exaggerated for the early Middle Ages. The fact is that even at a later period than the eleventh century the merchants with their retainers accounted, according to von Below, for only a small part of the town’s population: far smaller than today. For the producers in the early medieval town composed about four-fifths of the inhabitants, as compared with two-fifths in the modern city.

Once the food supply was enlarged, once urban settlements became secure, commerce did serve as a powerful stimulus to growth: above all because it was necessary to pay for luxuries in money. As the demand for finery grew, and as more money was needed for the equipment of the feudal soldiery, the feudal lords had a special incentive to transform their holdings into urban areas which brought in a large return in cash rent. Urban rents may not have exclusively provided the funds for capitalist enterprise, but capitalist enterprise certainly stimulated the desire for urban rents. This gave the feudal landlord an ambivalent attitude toward the city. As power ceased to be represented in his mind in purely military terms, he was tempted to part with a modicum of control over his individual tenants and dependents in order to have their responsible collective contribution in the form of cash payments: demands the land-bound serf could not meet. This was an important secondary stimulus to the building of towns.

Capitalism itself, however, was a disruptive rather than an integrating force in the internal life of the medieval city. It supplanted the old protective economy, based on status, mollified by religious precept, by a trading economy based on individual enterprise and the lust for gain: the economic history of the town is largely a story of the transformation of a group of protected producers living in a state of relative equality, into a small group of privileged merchants for whom the rest of the population ultimately toils. This change was already over the horizon when Chaucer wrote his wistful economium on the Former Age, when “ther lay no profit, ther was no richesse.” By providing a nest in which the cuckoo bird of capitalism could lay her eggs, the walled town made it possible for her own offspring to be crowded out by the boisterous newcomer it harbored.

Beneath the revival of industry that took place between the eleventh and the thirteenth century was a fact of more fundamental economic importance: the immense extension of arable land and the application to the land of more adequate methods of husbandry. Wooded areas in Germany, a wilderness in the ninth century, gave way to plowland; the Low Countries, which had supported only a handful of dejected fishermen, were taken over and transformed into one of the richest productive soils in Europe. As early as 1150 the first polders, land reclaimed from marsh or sea by means of dykes were created in Flanders. (Agricultural irrigation was practiced in Milan as early as 1179.) The breeding of horses, the invention of an improved harness and the use of the iron horseshoe, the spread of querns, water mills, and windmills—these improvements endowed the new communities with relatively vast sources of power. This not merely transformed mining and metallurgy: it removed the need for servile labor and added to the surplus of human energies that had always existed in the more favored regions.

In the course of three centuries the Europe we know today was opened or re-opened for settlement: a feat exactly comparable to the opening up of the American continent between the seventeenth and the twentieth century. Indeed, one may regard the American conquest as a continuation of the original process on a new soil, for the colonization of New England, at all events, was on medieval urban lines, as that of Virginia and South Carolina was on the typical feudal pattern.

This vast extension of the agricultural base and this enormous increase in power in turn made possible the increase of population. According to Boissonade, the region between the Rhine and the Moselle increased its population tenfold between the tenth and the thirteenth century. The English counties, which had numbered 1,200,000 souls in 1086 reached a total of 2,355,000 toward 1340. The birthrate was perhaps higher; the number of people who survived was certainly greater; and this fact was not confined to the newly exploited territories of the North. Italy had made such progress in its agricultural economy as to number at least ten million souls in the fourteenth century. Better established and more favorably situated with respect to the higher civilizations of the East, Italy was the leader in both the material and the spiritual revival. In the thirteenth century Venice was a magnificently organized municipality; and Venice and Milan each then had probably over 100,000 people.

The Germanic cities, with perhaps the exception of the old Roman bordertown of Wien, averaged a much lower population; but there was no lack of energy in the German colonization movement, or in the process of urbanization. For in the course of four centuries 2500 cities were founded; and the municipal framework then laid out lasted substantially until the nineteenth century: the very outlines of municipal territory often remained, though in the meanwhile the town had filled them up. During the peak years of the movement not merely did the number of cities multiply, but the rate of urban population growth, as far as it can be estimated, was roughly comparable to that recorded in the nineteenth century. At the end of the twelfth century, for example, Paris had about 100,000 inhabitants; and at the end of the thirteenth century something like 240,000. In 1280 Florence had 45,000 inhabitants, and in 1339 around 90,000.

Trade, industrial production, mechanization, organization—all these facts helped expand the life of the cities. But they do not account for the feeding of the hungry mouths. People do not live on coins, even if the local mint has the exclusive privilege of coining them; nor do they live on air, even though “city air makes people free” as the saying went. The thriving life of these towns had its origin in the agricultural improvement of the countryside: an improvement that was spotty, and vitiated ultimatel...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Series Introduction
• Introduction
• Preface to the 1970 Edition
• Introduction
• Chapter I. Protection and the Medieval Town
• Chapter II. Court, Parade, and Capital
• Chapter III. The Insensate Industrial Town
• Chapter IV. Rise and Fall of Megalopolis
• Chapter V. The Regional Framework of Civilization
• Chapter VI. The Politics of Regional Development
• Chapter VII. Social Basis of the New Urban Order
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Copyright Page