Word: mumford
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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...
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...
...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...
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'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...