Patrick Geddes - Cities in Evolution

Geddes, Mumford's primary inspiration (to the point that he named his son "Geddes") was a biologist who wrote more or less one book on city planning. This copiy of "City in Evolution" is a version of that book.

Geddes has a number of interesting and provocative ideas about cities. The one I think is most important is the idea of city in evolution. In other words, Geddes constantly uses biological metaphors to describe the growth of the city: he describes London as an "octopus" or "polypus," ever-expanding, and also as a "man-reef," a particularly apt metaphor as the reefs are more or less concrete structures built by the creatures who live in them (9).

One of Geddes' biggest concerns is that, as "conurbation" occurs and chokes the life out of the cities, no municipal body is prepared to govern it. Looking at a map of London, Geddes asks "Do we not see, and more and more clearly as we study it, the need of a thorough revision of our traditional ideas and boundaries of country and town?" (11). Geddes suggests that industrial growth has created "a new heptarchy, which has been growing up naturally, yet almost unconsciously to politicians, beneath our existing, our traditional political and administrative network; and plainly not merely to go on as at present, straining and cracking and bursting this old network, but soon surely to evolve some new form of organisation better able to cope with its problems than are the present distinct town and country councils. What are the new forms to be?" (19). Geddes doesn't answer this question, but I would like to suggest that perhaps private industry - Cowperwood at least - are what stepped up to the task. Also, heptarchy refers to an ancient grouping of 7 Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, now replaced by 7 conurbations (West-Riding, London, Tyne-Wear-Tees, etc). Geddes, in these names, suggests that a simple town or city name is no longer enough, and we need to recognize that we are in the presence of regions.

A few other notes: In regards to the industrial revolution, Geddes is adamant that what looks like "progress of wealth and population" is just the rampant march of coal "to produce cheap products to main too cheap people" and the industrial revolution has created cities which look like mold spores on jam - rapidly devouring all available resources and then dying out once the jam/coal has been consumed (26). Geddes does note that there is a new hope: electricity which can do everything coal does more cleanly (31 - a 2nd industrial revolution) and he praises the nordic system of wind and hydroelectric power for allowing humans to spread out in a line, not in a giant clump.

Democracy and Social Ethics - Jane Addams

Ok, there's tons of useful stuff in this little book, although perhaps not quite as much as I'd hoped. Some highlights from Anne Firor Scott's introduction: We get the importance of Darwin to Addams on p. xiv, some information about the radicalization of Addams on p. xxxix, a quick rundown of Hull House accomplishments on pp. xxxvi-xxxvii. We also have, on page xxv, the acknowledgment that Dreiser, Norris, and Garland were on the same path as Addams, Henry George, and Emma Goldman: all of them were expressing bitterness about the social conflict taking place in the gilded age.

The biggest thread to follow in the introduction - a thread that is also the biggest thread within the larger work, but is never hit quite so hard as in this intro - is Addams belief that humanity in the industrialized society needs to develop a new form of ethics. In Scott's words: "It was no longer sufficient to fill responsible for the well-being of one's own family, friends, and social equals. A new social ethic would have to evolve which would be based on responsibility to the whole community. This is [sic] essence was the purpose of Hull House..." (xxvi). This is the biggie in the whole book - the idea that an ethical evolution needs to take place, where a newly interconnected world requires a newly expanded ethics (this also sounds alot like Rorty's insistence that to be a liberal is simply to be a bleeding heart).

A few other related notes from the introduction. Addams/Scott diagnoses the problems of capitalism quite succinctly by noting that "an inherently social effort was used for individual gain" (liv). In other words, in true Marxist fashion, Addams doesn't understand why the work of the many enriches the one. She does, however, note (in p. 270 of the text, quoted on p. lvii of the intro) that the boss can be more moral than the reformer, for although he is corrupt he nevertheless is "democratic in method" while the technocratic reformer "believes that people must be made over by 'good citizens' and governed by 'experts.'"

The text itself has plenty of highlights, such as her description of the new ethics as "an affinity for all men" (9), but is most useful for me in two chapters: the chapter on industrial reform and the chapter on political reform.

The industrial reform is chock full of useful stuff about Yerkes/Cowperwood. Addams begins by noting that we are in a new era of association, but committees nevertheless often struggle, and the decisive individual still has the best of it in terms of getting things done (137-138). This seems to backup my idea that Cowperwood's ruthlessness is better for the community in the long run. Addams also mentions the Chicago strike of 1894 (140), something I should be thinking about. Finally, she mentions that the factory owners are not yet aware of this new era of association and are stuck back in the old squid/lobster way of thinking (148).

In the political passage, Addams first attacks wealthy reformers who seek only to fix the political machine so that it is no longer corrupt without trying to actually better the lives of people. For them, politics and life are separate, something that the workingman and the Hull House worker know to be totally untrue (222). She also again mentions, on both p. 224 and p. 240, that a corrupt alderman might do more for the community than a highminded reformer, because the alderman is at least integrated into the praxis of daily life. Although he is stealing a few pennies from the people's pockets in streetcar fares every day (p.252-253), the alderman is a "manifestation of human friendliness," far better received than the reformer who only embodies "honesty of administration" (240). Obviously, Hull House attempts to bridge this gap with both honesty of administration and manifestation of human friendliness.

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.