The City in History

The City in History is Lewis Mumford's attempt to tell the whole story of the city, from its origins in the burial grounds and shrines of the neolithic village to the sprawling metropolis of the twentieth century, and to ask at every stage what cities are for. Mumford's answer gives the book its moral force: the city exists to nurture human life and culture, and every urban form can be judged by whether it does. The medieval town, with its walkable scale and its cathedral, market, and guild bound into one fabric, comes off well; the baroque capital, built to display power along avenues made for parades and artillery, less so; the industrial city, which Mumford calls Coketown, is an indictment written in soot; and the suburban sprawl of his own America appears as an anti city, dissolving civic life into highways and isolation, drifting toward what he names Necropolis, the city of the dead. Mumford was not an academic historian but a critic of architecture and civilization, the New Yorker's Sky Line columnist, and he writes like one, in rolling, allusive, opinionated prose that ranges from Ur and Athens to Rome's sanitation and the London slum. Readers have argued with him for sixty years, and city planners have both canonized and rejected him, but no one has matched the sweep. The book won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1962 and stands as the summit of its author's four decade meditation on how the places people build shape the people they become.