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.