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).