'The City in History'... the Romans

Wow, Mumford sort of hates them... he grudgingly acknowledges their technical brilliance at engineering and the manipulation of huge masses - of people, commodities and cultures, but his vitriol for the Roman state and the moral collapse that went with it is aggressive.
The early Roman city was not so different from other conurbations at the time, among the many Greek colonies spread through Italy and the Etruscan settlements they followed.  It was later that the might of the Imperial Empire had spread around the Mediterranean that Rome really developed it uniqueness and originality in the ancient world - the city of the Colosseum and the Circus Maximus.

Rome acted as a huge magnet, dragging in people, ideas, food, commodities and even victims for the gladiatorial shows.  Mumford says that it quickly became a parasitic relationship, with Rome - the focus of the Empire - leeching from the productive gains around its regions.  The population of Rome, the mob, were largely housed in horrific tenements up to 10 stories high, the product of profiteering land owners.  Mumford argues that as the metropolis grew, engorging itself on the feast of Empire, the conditions for many of its inhabitants worsened as the density increased.  These vast tenements blocks fermented anger, resentment and revolt periodically and the ruling elite, rather than solve the fundamental problems with social equality, better housing and genuine justice, (predictably) opted to buy the population off with bread, circus entertainment and glamourous shows of military might.

Mumford's argument is that the brutalising affects of the urban metropolis lead to a culture that revelled in seeing other's humiliation, torture and death as a distraction from their own.  While your life may be horrific, at least you're not being torn apart by lions...  It was also a visceral experience which allowed the population to experience a touch of the 'real' as a distinction from the shallow materiality of Roman existence, which glorified the body and little else.  He also likens this to today's culture - again considering he was writing in the 1970's - of searching for visceral experience in sport, violent films, porn... and the gratuitous and hypocritical exposition of people in tabloid press.  We all love to hear and read about people's humiliations and failings..."they deserve it"... why is that?

So, as with the decaying Greek cities, which increased in grandeur as their moral life collapsed, Rome glorified itself with stadia and circuses, and other incredibly dominant public buildings as the vitality and energy which had originally propelled it to expand, died away.  

'The City in History', Lewis Mumford - part 2, The Greeks

He leaves the walled citadel cities of Mesopotamia and the riverine open cities of Egypt behind and moves on to Greece.  Among an incredible array of references and concepts, he analyses how and why the Greek poleis of the 6th and 5th centuries were able to create such a wealth of exceptional figures, which he points out, has probably only been equalled by Renaissance Italy.

It is very difficult to summarise the analysis of the Greek poleis in such a short piece, but among the points he makes is that, as the cities grew, and the connection of the citizens to one another began to break down through sheer weight of numbers, certain reforms failed to materialise which would have allowed the society and the city to adapt.  This allowed despots and tyrants to assume power and led to the ancient predilection for monumentalism and kingships to creep back in.  Knowledge and learning shifted from active experience, face to face aggressive discussion and argument, testing of ideas through practice to theoretical development, the natural sciences and mathematics.  Classifications and technical possibility.
This meant the death of a fulsome communal life in the later Greek cities, while the appearance of the cities grew in monumental appearance and style.  Mumford basically says that the vibrant, organic hotchpotch of 6th/5th century BC Athens was the ultimate apogee of Greek culture, over the hollow moral shell (but outwardly far more advanced and impressive) of Periclean Athens.
He builds these points brilliantly and very succinctly and introduces absolutely killer comparisons to today's (writing in the 1970's) Western culture.  You can't help but agree with his images of moral wasteland but technical mastery of environment that we now live in - a society flapping beneath the surface for a firm foothold to get some direction.

The sense you get from him of the inevitability of the rise and fall of societies is genius, and the connections to how the city can shape this, and also how this shapes the city is brilliant.

'The City in History', Lewis Mumford - the bible of Urbanism

Part 1 - Prehistory

The book begins with an exploration of the absolute depths of human history, a collection of pre-historic assumptions that he puts in an extremely plausible way with the little or no evidence available... he admits that there are such vast gaps in the historical record that it is impossible to judge correctly but he seems to 'reverse engineer' human society.  Using contemporary (and known ancient) examples, institutions and structures, he tracks back, creating suppositions as to how human society developed, in the very first instances of settlement and transition from ranging animal hunter packs.
He examines what kind of a situation must have occurred for the very first people to settle and develop a fixed abode, and what kind of society would develop from such early sites.  The development of kingship, which he supposes comes from a kind of hunter/shepherd figure who would protect the agrarian farmers from wild beasts and other dangers, springing from an original physical prowess, is examined and how it would become necessary to entrench power through the development of a religious mysticism.
One of his fundamental theories is that these early leaders, developed the first citadels which would necessarily predate the first cities.  Villagers would initially pay a powerful hunter to protect their crops/herds from dangerous beasts with food, and this exchange for services -  'protection' - gradually developed into a tribute, and finally into a tax.  The institution of kingship would also predate cities as this powerful elite established citadels.  A focal point for their power.

He also makes the point that cities predate war.  Organised, state warfare can only follow the development of urban centres he argues, as the 'original' village lifestyle (even under the 'protection' of an early king) would have been too dominated with the importance of generating enough food and shelter for the community to worry about others.  Such small communities would have enough commodities around them to satisfy their own needs, but not enough man power to spare for other activities, and their use of these commodities would be so low as to not impact on other communities, say, in the next valley.  It required the development of a city, with spare population capacity, wealth generation and religion to create war, he argues.

The link between kingship and religion is fundamental to the development of the ancient city, but also the relationship which most damaged its advancement, limiting it to thousands of years of internecine warfare.  To a certain extent this is still the case.

All the P's

Since my brother's wedding on the 16th July, every weekend has been off 'doing'.  Now don't get me wrong, I am not complaining, it's been great, but by the end of the 'city break' in Prague I was just looking, not taking in.  A brief respite follows but after that there's Portugal then Paris.  I'll grit my teeth.
However, all this moving around is giving me a chance to finally get to grips with the epic "City in History" by Lewis Mumford, a tome that no normal person would have the chance to read from cover to cover without some serious time spent sitting in airport lounges.  This is not a book to read on the loo, you need to spend some serious time on it, but so far its been worth it, and I'm only just up to the Romans.

Disturbingly for my architecture career, I had more enjoyment just building a log stack in my back garden just now than trying to take in all the long and varied history of Prague, in all its gothic glory.  It was either the total swamping of the place in Starbucks, H&M, even Marks and Sparks, or it was just a very well constructed log stack.

Bit of a pile