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Home Repair Book Store > Home Repair books beginning with C
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The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects |
Author: Lewis Mumford
Published: 1968-10-23 |
List price: $29.00
Our price: $19.14
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As of: November 21st, 2008 09:17:10 AM
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Customer comments on this selection.
 A must read book!
I couldn't find this book in Europe. They told me that it was finished it would never be reprinted again!
When I had the chance to buy it form Amazon, I took it in a minute!
Mumford's opinion for the "City" is so clear and yet so original that even people with no scientific intrest in this book, will enjoy reading it.
He has wonderful examples and detailed studies on the history of cities starting from Egypt, Greece Rome and Middle Ages.
Its a unique historical work that everybody should have it in their library!
 Too long, too clever, both by half
This is a canonical work, and perhaps deservedly so. By that I mean that it certainly covers a lot of ground, for which he deserves credit. Unfortunately, Mumford tries too hard to shove history into Karl Marx's neat little Hegelian theory and ultimately fails to bring his analysis close to a successful conclusion. And for something that pretends to be The History of The City, it certainly lacks the non-Western perspective, as if this was the work not of a world historian but of a well-traveled American or Englishman.
As an example of the first problem, his explanation of early cities leaves much to be desired. Here we have neolithic man living in villages and tending crops. Rather than simply offering a few suggestions as to how the city and king-based government came about, he forces the dialectic into the tale by bringing paleolithic man back and putting him in the place of the brutal warlord-king. Rex ex machina. It was truly bizarre and forces all of the explanations to be backwards from what is most likely the truth. Mumford seems to imply that the savage, paleolithic hunter-gatherers came back, built cities, and then forced the farmers to move into them when I suspect a much more organic process was involved in response to ... what? Marauding bands of warriors? What is the relevant scarcity that would have caused people to gradually transfer their own sovereignty to the king? Mumsford's treatment of the subject is unsophisticated.
As another reviewer has pointed out, he does seem to hit his stride when he comes to Classical Greece, has disdain for the Romans that makes you wonder whether he had been personally impacted by their city life, and then comes back into his stride when discussing the Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque periods. I actually found this to be an enlightening section of the book; it explains what I like about cities like Rothenburg, and what I dislike about Washington D.C. In fact, I think one could skip ahead to that part, and stop reading once you hit the early 19th century.
After that, the book becomes a one-sided discussion of the evils of capitalism. Once again, Mumford stops being a historian and tries to interpret everything through a Marxist lens. For a counterpoint to this, I would recommend some of the work of T. S. Ashton.
I tend, however, to agree with Mumford on his observations about the impact of the automobile, but not the cause of it. Capitalism, the belief that government should be confined to a night watchman role, is the opposite of a system which provides government subsidization of the automobile culture the way we do in the US. Prior to the railroads, many turnpikes were privately owned and operated, but Americans loved first the idea of the railroad and then the idea of a system that freed men from dependence on the railroad ... to which they had given birth just 60 years before. The result today is a system which we keep trying to control by ever larger public projects and programs.
In the end, Mumford fails to provide any substantive suggestion as to which way we should turn to create a more livable city. The suburbs and freeways, as unpopular as they are, seem to still be dominant, but I think a generation of people exposed to Mumford's description of the livable Medieval city are starting to do something about it. Unfortunately, the people who share Mumford's politics are now the defenders of the status quo, defending their own investments, opposing building, and forcing people to spend ever more time on the concrete-and-asphault shackles that bind our cities.
Mumford had a gift for writing, but this tome gets lofty
I'd agree with some of the other reviewers who found the first 3/4 of this book interesting and insightful and who were put off by the last portion. Mumford has a dexterous command of language and weaves prosaic citations and factual listings with poetic and metamorphic digestions. Though this book is an extremely long and at times a very dry 570 pages, I was rarely bored enough to put it down for too long. Mumford has a keen intellect and his pen touches on nearly every aspect of human development and interaction, even in contexts that one would think are not directly related to city life or urban growth. Here we see that city-man has cast an inescapable cultural legacy: religion, economics, epistemology/philosophy, politics & government and even biology are and have been in constant dialog with urban forces, dramatized by symbolic manifestations of rural and urban, man and woman, individual and communal, organic and mechanical. As a repository for cultural and historical development in the west, this book should have much more attention that it does nowadays.
Mumford's analysis of the development of western cities since the inception of agriculturally-based sedentary communities is for the most part highly critical of the social and organization manifestations of the cities of the ancient world. He waxes with a somewhat fair disposition on the democracy that gripped Athens in the 5th century, yet from then until the Middle Ages, he suggests a kind of downward spiral of avarice, destruction, homogeneity and inanity (i.e. Rome) A revival of his conception of beneficent communitas arises with the guild-guided Middle Age towns, but this is ultimately usurped by the emergence and domination of mercantilism and the contemporous rise of state politics and economies. The industrial revolution saw urban cityscapes that offered a cultural vibrance below even that of Rome. Today's cities according to Mumford are a cancerous legacy of these preceding few centuries, whose doom is intertwined with their insatiable appetite for growth through ecological imbalance and resource depletion.
One might think from the title and aim of this book that it would be a survey, yet Mumford's dissection of the most heinous eras in urban culture, Rome and the Modern Era (from c.1600) play into his deconstructionist framework which he uses to villify capitalism and industry and likewise acquaint the two with greed, luxury at the cost of inhuman exploitation. While this is fine, and he does make a number of interesting observations, it glosses over any contribution whatsoever these periods made to urban culture; the reader is given an unbalanced account of each era, and leads one to wonder if there were any positive contributions whatsoever.
Finally, Mumford's exhaustive treatise on the failures of civilization, the untapped creative potential of the human mind-which is basically what this book is about- in the end offers no real solid retort or solution. The two concepts he does point to for a model of regional civic interaction - the electrical grid and the interlibrary loan system do seem to have a modern syncrete in the Internet, a network of easily availble cultural capital. Mumford is undoubtably a humanist and several times yearns for cities to allow humans to unlock their full creative and biological faculties, followed by a stream of dreamy platitudes that do little to qualify what this kind of feeling or sentiment concretely would entail. This is perhaps the biggest disappointment in this otherwise well-written book.
 Good Until the Last Hundred or So Pages
After two hundred pages I wanted to give this book five stars, but after finishing it, I was almost ready to give it three stars.This book is what it says it is, "The City in History". Starting in the neolithic era, Mumford marches through all of recorded time and place (place being limited to the Near East, Greece, Rome, Europe and America) to bring, you, the reader, his thoughts on the role and "prospects" of the city. In the beginning, it's an exhilerating ride. Mumford is not shy about advancing bold arguments. Although the book starts with sections on the city in Ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, he doesn't really get excited until he gets to Ancient Greece. I'd say it's clear from the text that Mumford is a fan of Ancient Greece, particularly Athens between the 7th and 6th century B.C. Then it's off to Rome. Mumford is a harsh critic of Roman culture. His critique of the Roman method of burial (take bodies just outside city limits, dump, bury) contrains so much righteous indigination you might think the Romans were still pottering around when he wrote this book. After Rome, we get an equally stirring defense of the Middle (don't call them "Dark" around Mumford) Ages. Mumford is a big fan of the city in the late middle ages. As an example, Mumford uses Amsterdam. Specifically, what Mumford likes about this time period is the community involvement by the ruling elites. Like many other social critics, Mumford is not a huge fan of the impact that capitalism and industrialization have had on the modern city. Unlike some of the other reveiwers below, I don't really hold that against him. He was writing in the sixties, people!!! However, I do admit that by the last hundred or so pages, when Mumford starts despairing of the future of the city, the whole tirade started to get tired. I'm not sure I would recommend this for a general reader.
tricks
this book is fine. go get it from the library and learn the origins of the city. critique civilization and its facets with other books and never mind intellectual/acedemia. educate yourself. civilizations origins are the origins of humanity's current polarized state. "Computers serve as much more efficient storage centers for knowledge than all the libraries in any city ever could and the Internet has made the entire World into an interlocking community." you dont know how to hunt and gather do you? i wonder why he was so hellbent on technology when you sit here rambling off all the knowledge you assimilated from a urban system that taught you how to forget your genetic roots and what kept humanity alive for millions of years. nothing a computer will ever do or help regain. you know how to survive in the city and nothing more. you are tied to machinery like he stated. this is not community. you dont consider criminals part of your community yet civilization and urban wastelandscapes create them. jails are more efficient? farming is more efficent yet destroys how much top soil? at least you have 6 billion mouths to feed now. neo-luddistic? nope. just a solid fact.
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