Henry George, Progess and Poverty

Henry Georeg's giant book, which I didn't read in its entirety, isn't super-full of useful stuff, but his thesis is definitely worth getting right. George, writing in the 1870s, is famous for wanting to abolish private property. The reason comes from this formula: Production - Rent = Wages + Interest (171). I didn't quite follow the interest stuff, but for now we can stick with Production-Rent= Wages.

George is trying to solve the problem: why do the richest areas also have the most poverty? (6,9). The answer is that, when land is free, production will equal wages, because people will be their own bosses or work for whoever will pay them as if they were their own boss. However, when land gets built up and production increases, rent goes up. Rent doesn't have to be paid to the landlord; the landlord and the employer can be the same person, and the owner-operator takes the same chunk the operator would have to give to the owner. Based on our formula, now that land is very expensive and all land is owned by someone and workers can't become their own bosses, most of the money produced now goes to the landowner. This means the bottom falls out of wages. Solution: end private property so that labor, which produces capital, can access the capital which it produces, rather than having it sucked up in rent (328) (See also 213, 6).

Other important points George makes:

On Malthus, he argues that Malthus fails to understand how, if we just used the resources we used to make, say, diamonds to feed people, human society could always feed everyone (142). He also points out that larger groups of people generally have more, not less, productive power. George also notes that Darwin called evolutionary theory the application of Malthus to the natural world, meaning we have it backwards when we call the application of Darwinism to humanity "social Darwinism." It would be better put that Darwinism is "biological Malthusianism." The relevant quote is on page 101.

Also, George notes that Malthusian makes the rich feel good, because poverty is the natural mechanism by which population growth is stopped (96, 98). Cue the Ebenezer Scrooge quote about reducing the surplus population here.

Two tiny notes: George mentions the great Chicago fire on p. 148 and the power of railroads (more The Octopus than The Financier) on p. 192.

Ebenezer Howard's "Garden Cities of Tomorrow"

Howard's Garden Cities of Tomorrow wasn't that interesting, perhaps because Mumford loves it so much that he'd already told me all the interesting stuff. Most of this slim volume is just explaining how the Garden City would work - how it would raise funds, etc. That wasn't interesting. Here's what is important:

First, in Mumford's intro, a couple more awesomely Mumfordian tidbits: he makes the obvious (to a Mumford reader) but controversial otherwise statement that a Garden City is not a suburb but an "anti-suburb" (35). Also, he connects the urge to utopian city planning with shaker communities in the US, a connection I had not yet made (39).

The best thing to get out of Howard's book is just an understanding of what a Garden City is. As expressed on page 48, both the town and the country have strengths and defects. The town has great society but no scenery or fresh air; the country is bright and clean and devoid of human beings. The solution is the "Garden City," not a city made of gardens but a city inside a garden. In other words the garden city is on 6,000 acres: 1,000 acres of actual city and 5,000 acres of farmland (the so-called "Greenbelt") surrounding the city. Thus, within that 1,000 acres is a coherent community - residential, commercial, and industrial built around a park and the hospital, musuem, library, town hall, etc. It's pleasant, walkable, and mildly dense (brownstone level, according to Mumford (p. 519 of "The City and History). And since it's surrounded by rural areas it cannot ever get built up and overrun (these specs are on p. 51-53).

The second and vital part of this plan is the idea of "Social Cities." Garden Cities must be restricted from growing, but growth will occur. Howard calls for a series of garden cities linked together by high speed rail and highways (142). Mumford expands this idea, but it is certainly the key to whole thing - this plan would let the entire world urbanize and keep its green space.

Mumford, The City in History, Part 3

The final sections of Mumford's "The City in History" seemed slightly less useful, perhaps as he advanced beyond the time period that is my focus. There are still plenty of relevant and interesting points, however. One of Mumford's most insistent observations is that the so-called "Megalopolis" is actually no such thing, but in reality an "anti-city," a conurbation of ever-expanding suburbs with no centrality (505). In contrast to the doomed megalopolis and the suburban conurbation, Mumford praises Ebenzer Howard's garden cities (515-onward) asserting that they are far more successful than they have ever been given credit for, and that their true genius is lies not in their garden nature but in their ability to create a series of small urban centers which provide for a walkable life but also connect with one another to achieve cultural significance.

Some of Mumford's observations which seem useful for a chapter on Cowperwood are:
520 - Howard believes that a single public figure must hold the planning power. Is this what Cowperwood did, from a private standpoint?
534- Mumford mentions the power of bureaucracy, but notes that it's not a government creation but a business one, imported to a less extent by government
536 - the banker is the central figure in the modern city - this is the "financier" model that cowperwood ultimately found to be untrue
544 - the urban economy is an ever-expanding "Maw" - this is how Cowperwood makes his money, by banking on this ever-expanding Maw to consider expanding.

Mumford, The City in History, Part 2

Mumford's description of "Coketown" gave me a series of ideas about writing about Chicago. The first and most important of these is his assertion that society gave up the Baroque art of city planning in favor of a "Darwinian" belief that laissez-faire attitudes were the right ones to take towards the creating of the city (453). This belief, which Mumford consistently but slightly confusingly labels "utilitarianism," "was an attempt to break through the network of stale privileges and franchises and trade regulations that the absolute state had imposed upon the decayed economic fabric and dwindling social morality of the medieval town" (453). This belief that harmony would emerge out of chaos (something that emphatically did not happen) led to the "natural expectation that the whole enterprise should be conducted by private individuals" (454). In other words, urban planning became a private enterprise because the state wasn't trusted with the responsibility. Thus "The very age that boasted its mechanical conquests and its scientific prescience left its social processes to chance, as if the scientific habit of mind had exhausted itself on machines, and was not capable of of coping with human realities" (470).

This is obvious the place to talk about Cowperwood - on the one had his actions are obviously a product of this laissez-faire approach to city planning, and thus he benefits from from this system, whereby "individual competition for ever-greater profits led the more successful to the unscrupulous practice of monopoly at the public expense" (453). But Mumford continues: "Design did not emerge" and Cowperwood is the living, breathing embodiment of design - he is a central figure who centralizes everything and sees the entire system - something which Taylor, in The Principles of Scientific Management, says is impossible. So perhaps there is a bit of slippage, a very interesting bit of slippage, between Mumford's conception that design did not emerge and the design that Cowperwood brought. Is this a throwback on Dreiser's part to a Baroque age? A special exception in the case of Cowperwood? etc.

If Cowperwood fits into Coketown, Addams fits into its response, the "counter-attack," whereby hygiene is newly valued (475) and "municipal socialization" finally steps in to provide that hygiene (476). Obviously, Addams is one of those who set out to effect that municipal socialization. Mumford also mentions settlement houses by name, stating that, since the laissez-faire city planning created cities with no municipal center, the settlement movement formed to give cities "an organizing social nucleus" through which to bring about political vitality (500).

Finally, I want to mention that Mumford praises Olmsted's suburbs in various cities for building workable green spaces into coherent communities (497).

Mumford, The City in History, Part 1

There are a number of interesting things to be gleaned from the roughly 50 pages of Mumford I read today, although none of it is necessarily a slam-dunk thing to be put into my dissertation. The main point from this portion of the book is Mumford's argument that the city (in a process beginning in the 16th century and accelerating in the 19th century) became a purely financial endeavor, one in which the primary unit is "the individual lot" and those lots are treated "without respect for historic uses, for topographic conditions, or for social needs" (421). In other words, the only parts of a city one can act on are little chunks, and those little chunks are dealt with purely financially. This makes municipal building nigh-impossible (424) and requires only a single municipal service: transportation (424-425). Transportation, notes Mumford, is at first helpful to the worker by allowing him to cheaply get to his place of work (429) but quickly just becomes another way to extend the city, making transportation as expensive as time-consuming as it was before by enlarging the city and increasing the distance the worker must travel (430). This transportation stuff should shield interesting results when considered with Cowperwood.

The most problematic part of this for me is how much Mumford hates density. He's right that density robs the city of that which the town has - air, light, green space, etc. But in "The Regimentation of Congestion" his attacks on density seem to leave out all that's good about density - he goes so far as to suggest that the "Paris flat" and other wealthy ways of living in dense areas suffer from much of the same problems as slums (433). I think that Jane Jacobs championing of the street as a place to play would be the exact opposite of Mumford's disgust at how cramped together people have become.