(3 of 5)
"What is the City? How has it functioned in the Western World since the loth Century, when the renewal of cities began, and in particular what changes have come about in its physical and social composition during the last century?" The first 300 pages of The Culture of Cities answer these questions. In the medieval town, focused in a church and market square and bounded by a wall, "one was either in or out of the city; one belonged or one did not belong." If one belonged, one also belonged to an association, religious, trade or craft. The city and its social life had form. Contrary to general belief medieval towns were laid out in rectangular patterns when the site allowed it. Otherwise they usually conformed to the irregular contours of the land. The narrow streets were essentially footways for getting from one group of buildings to another; their narrowness saved money on paving and protected shop fronts from the wind. Gardens, orchards and open spaces were more common than in any cities since. The medieval town was quiet, its air was fresh, its buildings were in the human scale. "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."
With the medieval city of the best period, like Middleburg, Holland (see cut p. 43), as his working norm, Arthur Mumford finds that the next age transformed the city impressively but to no great purpose, began its degradation through overcrowding. Serving a centralized State, baroque architects cut through the capital city with long, expensive radiating avenues for the king's triumphal parades, built palaces for him and barracks for the new institution of the standing army. The new institution of the proletariat they lodged in the first tenements, built over the medieval garden spaces. Sanitation fell behind as congestion increased. Yet in this age of luxury and disease two admirable forms arose: the scrubbed Dutch town with its wide windows and leafy canals, by which barges loaded with vegetables and flowers came in from the country, and the 17th Century New England village. In the growth of Amsterdam through its semicircular web of canals (see cut) Author Mumford finds a nearly perfect example of organic city planning.
Coketown. Lewis Mumford's indictment of the "paleotechnic" (coal & iron industrial) age concentrates the eloquence of generations of reformers, the enlightenment of generations of thinkers, besides his own exceptional talents for raking up the coals. For the social chaos and loss of architectural form which overcame the city during the 18th and 19th Centuries the only excuse was the speed of industrial expansion and the colossal rise in the population of Europe. "It was a period of vast urban improvisation: makeshift piled upon makeshift. . . . Until 1838 neither Manchester nor Birmingham even functioned politically as incorporated boroughs: they were man heaps, machine-warrens, not organs of human association."