CITY DEVELOPMENT Books Bz Lewis Mumford
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CITY DEVELOPMENT Books bz Lewis Mumford THE STORY OF UTOPIAS 1922 STICKS AND STONES 1924 THE GOLDEN DAY · 1926 HERMAN MELVILLE 1929 THE BROWN DECADES 1931 MEN MUST ACT 1939 FAITH FOR LIVING 1940 THE SOUTH IN ARCHITECTURE 1941 CITY DEVELOPMENT 1945 I. TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION 1934 II. THE CULTURE OF CITIES 1938 III. THE CONDITIQN OF MAN 1944 CITY DEVELOPMENT Studies in Disintegration and Renewal BY LEWIS MUMFORD LO!'."DON SECKER & WARBURG 1946 CONTENTS.· . \ \ ' 'PAGE THE'CITY Jo7' !I"-:ltt_' TilE METROPOLITAN MILIEU' : • 26'' '1J.1 H; MASs-PROnucti6N' 'ANn' :Houstt-rd·' _- '!\_1 -_-1 . r" ••' ·· ·· ;, 1 . 1 · ·, '1 ,.,,_., . ,5J, REPORT '.ON HONO.LU..-LP ,,,7::3, I i "' • -!~·:. ,·•: ,·1.•_ 1, .. 1 '. 11 .:.' ·•··\. -~~ fP•')j~-, ~1·•:.· f" ·:;_,.)}?[J, THE SOCIALJ FQIJN.DA,';rl,Q~~- ,9J~,P9S1,'~'\\fA~ •• "'~ '· - ;BUIL:J:?I~G1 ._,p~g. '_) lil 1· THE PLAN OF LONDON' c •t65'" THE CITY The City was written for the symposium on Civili~ation in the United States, edited by Harold Stearns: 1_published in I9SZ:l. It was, I believe, the first historic ana!Jsis of its kind to be published in the United States ; and both in its perceptions and its omissions it bears witness to the current state of thought. · I was twenty-six when I,wrote that essay, and still had much to learn, both about that large part of the history of my country. which had hard!J been touched by any of the historians, and about the development of cities themselves : yet I am not ashamed to publish it along with my maturer work, even though it tempt some unfriend!J critic to remark how little I have learned since. _ Despite more than a glmeration of constructive e.Jfort towards the improvement of cities, led by Frederick Law Olmsted, the elder, one of the great artists of the nineteenth century, comparative!J little work had then been done in the detailed history of American ciry building or in a sociological ana!Jsis of the processes themselves. The advance of the Chicago school of urban sociologists had been somewhat tan gential, and such works as Carl Bridenbaugh's Cities in the Wilder ness, ~r John Coolidge's Mill and Mansion, still. lay in the future. For more than a generation, we had indeed had among us the most brilliant and penetrating critic of architecture America has yet pro duced, Montgomery Schuyler, one of the first to make a sound critical appraisal of the Roeblings, Richardson, Adler,· and Sullivan; but good though Schuyler was, his field was the individual building, not the corporate organi~ation and plan. , ' . .There are many points in my essay that would now have to be amplified ; and certain uninformed judgments remain, like that on Richardson, which I myself have since corrected in various other places ; still I leave it as it stands, because its errors have but little capaciry for mischief. In my contribution to the Survey Graphic's Regional• Planning Number, May I925, I made a somewhat different ana!Jsis of our urban growth, dividing it into an initial period of settlement, with three subsequent migrations, leading to the possibiliry of a fourth migration which would be in the nature of a wholesale resettleTTII.nt of the country. • Copyright 1922 by Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc. 7 8 CITY DEVELOPMENT Even before 1922 I had left behind the notion that metropolitanism was a mark of progress or a conclusive phase in the development of cities : hence my unsparing criticism of. the Regional Plan for New T'ork, sponsored by the·Rilssell Sage Foundation, whose naive premises I criticized at the very beginning of their work_ and whose final report · I ana(ysed in some detail in the New Rep1,1blic in 1!}32: '·The as sumptions about continued population growth and urban ·concentration · which the Russell Sage planners regarded as so eminently sensible • and unchallengeable have. now· been proved worthless; for the very civilization that suppQrted these beliefs is, in many areas; in an advanced stage of disintegration. · · Meanwhile these false premises · did ' great · harm ·by distracting attention from the real problems that.·· confronted our cities ·.and by failing to work out any strategyfor dealing with these problems. As so often has happened during the last quarter· century, ·the self styled practical men turned out to be the weak irresponsible dreamers, tifraid to face unpleasant facts, while those of·us who were ·called dreamers have, perhaps, some little 'nght- ·to ·be· accepted~at least belated[y-,'-as practical men. · ·By now history has . caught up' with ·our most dire prophecies. That is at Ot)Ce the justification of our thinking .and the proof of its tragic failure to influence· our •con- temporaries. · . I .. PROVINCIAL AND COMMERciAL .ERAi{ : Around us; in the city, each epoch in America has· been .concentrated and crystallized. In bui!ding-·our cities we ·de fl.owered a wilderness. ·"To-day'more than one-half.th~ popu lation of the United States lives- in ·an environment which the jerry-builder, the real estate 'speculator; the paving con tractor, and the industrialist haye largely created .. · Have we begotten a civilization ? That is a question which a survey of the American city will help us to answer. · · · •· If American history ·is viewed froin the standpoint of the student ·or cities, it- divides itSelf roughly .into three parts. The fln:t was a pr()vincial period, which lasted from the foundation of Manhattan· down to· the opening up ·of ocean · commerce after the War of I8I2; This was followed'.by .a CC)!"__merf,i;~I: peri_od,' which began with the cutting of canals and ended with the extension of the railroad system across the continent, and an· industrial period; that gathered force ,-~~-- - THE CITY 9 on- the Atlantic seaboard in the 'thirties and is still the domin ant economic phase of our civilization. These periods must not be looked upon as strictly successive or exclusive : the names merely express in a crude way the main aspect of each era. It is possible to telescope the story of America's colonial · expansion and industrial exploitation by following the material growth and the cultural impoverishment of the American' city during its transformations. The momentum of the provincial city lasted well on to the Civil War. The economic basis of this period was agri culture and petty trade : its civic expression was, typically, the small New England town, with a central common around which were grouped a church-appropriately called a meet ing-house-a school, and perhaps a town hall. Its main streef would be lined with tall suave elms and bordered by ·reticent white houses of much the same design as those that dotted the countryside. In the growing towns of the sea board this culture was overthrown; before it had a chance to express itself adequately in either institutions 61' men, and it- bloomed rather tardily, therefore, in the little towns of Concord and Cambridge, between 1820 and the Civil War. We know it to-day through a largely anonymous architecture, and through a literature created by the school of writers that ·bears the name of the chief city. Unfortunately for the further development of what we might call the Concord culture,· the agricultural basis of this civilization shifted to. ''the wheat-growing West; and therewith channels of trade were diverted from Boston to ports that tapped a riche»; · more imperial hinterland. What remained of the provincial town· in New England was a mummy-case. The civilization of the New England town spent itself in the settlement of the Ohio Valley and the great tracts beyond. None of the new centres bad, as provincial towns, any fresh contribution to make. It had taken the culture of New Eng land more than three centuries before it had borne its Con cord fruit, and the story of theWestern movement is somehow summed up in the legend of Johnny Appleseed, who planted dry apple ·seeds, instead of grafts from the living tree, and hedged the roads he travelled with wild apples, harsh and puny and inedible. Cincinnati and Pittsburgh jumped from a frustrate provincialism into the midst of the machine era ; IO CITY DEVELOPMENT and so for a long time they remained destitute of the in stitutions that are necessary to carry on the- processes of civilization. West of the Alleghanies, the common, with its church and school, was not destined to dominate the urban landscape : the railroad station and the commercial hotel had come to take their place. This was indeed the universal mark of the new industrialism, as obvious in nineteenth-century Oxford as in Hoboken. The pioneer American city, however, had none of the cultural institutions that had been accumulated in Europe during the great outbursts of the Middle Age and the Renaissance, and as a result its destitution was naked and apparent. It is true that every town which was developed mainly during the nineteenth century-Manchester as well as Milwaukee--suffered from the absence of civic institutes. The peculiarity of the New World was that the facilities for borrowing from the older centres were considerably more liinited. London could export Madox Brown to Manchester to do the murals in the Town Ha:ll : New York had still to create its schools of art before)t had any Madox Browns that could be exported. With the beginning of the nineteenth-century market centres which had at first tapped only their immediate region began to reach farther back into the hinterland, and to stretch out ward, not merely for freights but for iminigrants, across the ocean.