(4 of 5)
The factory and the slum together composed the "non-city," and no authority existed by which they could be segregated. "Workers' houses . . . would be built smack up against a steel works, a dye plant, a gas works or a railroad cutting." Hanley, England (see cut) is an example. In workers' housing the one-family room became standard from Dublin to Bombay. Coketown (Mumford's name for the industrial city taken from Dickens' Hard Times), was so shrouded with smoke that "the black stove pipe hat was almost a functional design."
Cities were and are laid out in indefinitely expanding grids of rectangular blocks with regard neither to topography nor function, opening the way for "fat pieces of 'honest' municipal jobbery in the grading and filling of streets." Hilly San Francisco was platted as if it were a prairie town, to the perpetual economic loss of its citizens. Arterial highways were made too narrow, residential streets too wide.
Megalopolis is Author Mumford's word for the 20th Century city. In its analysis he uses the Mendelian classification of biological traits into dominants and recessives, adds two other categories: survivals and mutations. In Rome the Christian Church was a mutation, in the medieval city a dominant, in the 17th Century capital a recessive, in the metropolis a survival. The pure industrial order was a dominant until about 1890, after which it became a recessive in the dominant metropolitan order, built on monopoly capitalism, credit finance, pecuniary prestige and the national culture of national advertising. "No human eye," says Author Mumford, "can take in this metropolitan mass at a glance. No single gathering place except the totality of its streets can hold all its citizens. No human mind can comprehend more than a fragment of the complex and minutely specialized activities of its citizens. There is a special name for power when it is concentrated on such a scale: it is called impotence." One proof of impotence is that almost every step the metropolis has taken to deal with congestion has actually increased it. Subways route millions of people a day to the city's centre, in New York cost the city 3¢ over every 5¢ fare. Such transportation improvements as Wacker Drive in Chicago, which cost $22,000,000 a mile, tax the properties benefited and automatically produce a rise in rents, which becomes capitalized in the form of higher land values. End result: more intensive use, further traffic congestion.
Author Mumford's analysis of the present pathology of metropolitan culture ticks it all off, from the paranoia of the ruling class to the servility of the crowd: "A million cowards upon whose blank minds the leader writes: Bravery." But he does not gloat over the threatened exhaustion of the city or its extinction in war. There are in society powerful mutations of thought and art pointing to a healthy future, and though "it needs a terrific exertion of social force to overcome the inertia, to alter the direction of movement," Author Mumford throws his weight with them.