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.

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 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.