(See front cover)
Last week Mr. Frederick Hudson Ecker, Chairman of the Board of great Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., made history of a particularly significant kind. Metropolitan Life, Mr. Ecker announced, has acquired 120 acres in The Bronx and will, during the next three years, erect thereon the largest Metropolitan low-cost housing unit in the U. S. (see p. 66). Mr. Ecker was not aware of it, but when he uncorked this bit of news its healthy pop! gave added point and timeliness to a book which literate U. S. citizens and their well-instructed children are likely to ponder long & hard.*
For an insurance company to invest in low-cost city housing on a community scale is something of a different order from an insurance company's praiseworthy but profitable interest in public health. It is something new in the world. In The Culture of Cities Lewis Mumford has linked together and illuminated new things of this nature for all the hope that lies in them. Against a perspective of city life as comprehensive as most current views are squinty, he has anatomized the old and young tissues of modern cities, diagnosed their fevers and shown with fluoroscopic sharpness the outlines of cities yet unborn. Author Mumford's method is not Utopian but scientific; his faith is not so much in the Future as in a growing Present. His guiding principle is that the City is not only a form of life but, through its layout and architecture, a form of art— potentially the form of forms.
For sheer informative candlepower most readers will rank The Culture of Cities with Author Mumford's classic Technics and Civilization (TIME, May 7, 1934). Hardbitten critics may still object that though Author Mumford has correctly judged he has not fully reckoned with such intractable traditions as ward politics or such highly advertised difficulties as class war. Others will find Mumford's description of Hell on the Subway more than adequate, will believe he has put first things first in his diagram of the way out. The Culture of Cities will unquestionably open the eyes of many citizens and administrators to the vista in which modern citified society finds itself, with one foot in the Promised Land and the other in the grave.
Bio-Scholar. During the last five or six years the perception has gradually dawned on literary men that Lewis Mumford is an extraordinary, possibly a very valuable, certainly a new type of public figure. With The Culture of Cities this feeling will wax stronger if no less discreet. No specialist will attack the book without a prior examination of his specialist's conscience, for Mumford's authority usually equals his range. To many readers it will be apparent that Author Mumford is himself a new kind of specialist, in a field that might be described in his own terms as "bio-scholarship."