Lewis Mumford never finished a degree, which is one of the main reasons I am attracted to his work: after chronic illness interrupted his studies at the City College of New York, what became one of the twentieth century’s most complete bodies of critical thinking towards the city was built instead through reading, walking, and a long, formative correspondence with Scottish biologist and town planner Patrick Geddes, who taught him to see a city as a living regional system rather than a collection of buildings. Mumford wrote across an extraordinary range, but it was his book The Culture of Cities, published in 1938, that established him as an authority. He wasn’t the hero American urbanism wanted, but he certainly was the one he needed.
His central claim was stated a year earlier in the essay “What Is a City?”
“The city is, above all else, a theater of social action.”
When you see the city as a stage, everything an architect draws — the streets, the plazas, the facades, the sequence of arrival — Mumford treats as the stage-set, whose job is to make the human drama “more richly significant.” This is a different starting point than most planning documents still use, which sometimes tend to treat the social life of a place as an output of the physical design rather than the purpose the physical design exists to serve.
Also, Mumford wrote The Culture of Cities as a warning about the direction European cities were heading under rising fascism, copies were smuggled into occupied Europe and used by underground networks for training that was alternative to the official, politically-weaponised one. Mumford himself, decades later, said he’d been exactly right twice, like a broken clock: the first time was this book, warning about fascism; the second, in the early 1960s, was a warning about something far less dramatic and, in the long run, at least as corrosive. I’m talking about the automobile, and the urban infrastructure being built to serve it as a god. He watched this logic disintegrate cities, and used Greensboro, North Carolina — by then mostly a downtown organised around parking — as his example of what happens to a city built primarily to move cars through it. It stops being a theatre, in Mumford’s sense, and starts being closer to a corridor, a place things pass through rather than a place where anything is performed.
The lesson we take away from Mumford, I think, is this: to ask, before anything else, what social action a given piece of design is actually staging, and to treat the physical response as subordinate to that answer. A well-detailed plaza with no performance — no market, no protest, no idle gathering, no argument, no courtship — is, on Mumford’s terms, a stage with the lights on and no actors. The city never really means its buildings. It’s in the drama buildings were built to hold.
No Comments