The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 30 June 1999
by Lewis Mumford
This is a brilliant, dense, intense, broadly political, and deeply researched history of cities going back to the very beginning, way back in paleolithic times (we all remember those days, don't we?). Published in 1961, this tome still serves as a standard by which all other urban research should be measured. Mumford takes the reader on an awesome journey beginning almost from the days of cave dwellers, through Mesoptamia, Babylon, ancient Greece and Rome, through the Middle Ages and down to the modern city at the middle of the 20th century. The epic story is acutely detailed. Often, it is colorfully lurid. And almost always, it is relevant and probingly revealed. This is a long and engrossing book, surely required reading for city planners and architects alike. Mumford is unashamedly political and personal in his writing. Some readers will want to toss the book aside for what seem to be overly liberal, or even Marxist, viewpoints. But the author doesn't hold any politial system sacred. What he reveals here is that the sociology of urban habitation directly and inevitably shape the built environment.
At the time of its writing, the world was living under the dangerous nuclear threat of the Cold War (as opposed to today's nuclear threat of terrorism, and ecological threat of climate degradation). Mumford was sensitive to this, and repeatedly urged that any advances in the urban culture of humans will require a new outlook on life that does not include impending destruction. He convincingly presents the conditions that made the early Middle Ages, for him, a shining moment in the development of urban design and culture. Though we haven't slipped into the darkness, we still have certain urban pathologies that have yet to be cured. Mumford looks ahead cautiously, and one is left to wonder what he would have thought at the end of the Cold War (no doubt much sooner than he would have expected) and the development of decentralized society based partly on the Internet.
(For this book, Mumford was awarded the National Book Award in 1962.)
Also by Mumford: [The Golden Day] [Sticks & Stones]
See also: [Sidewalk Critic]