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For a month I have had this great book (1) round my neck like an albatross. Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization and Culture of Cities, with Le Corbusier’s Vers une Architecture, were the source-books of my generation of architects, like the Architecture of Humanism for our parents and the Seven Lamps for our great-grandparents (our grandparents, the Edwardians, didn’t read books of this kind). If Le Corbusier was our Shaw and Frank Lloyd Wright our Lawrence, Lewis Mumford was our H. G. Wells: the confident polymath who had plotted the way forward. Now, like Wells at the end of his life, Mumford is at the end of his tether, and the tone is sombre.

     The theme of the whole work is the innate dualism of the human race, for ever oscillating between the still and silent female principle, life-conserving, loving, anti-rational, and the restless argumentative male principle, with its addiction to geometry, mass-organization and war. He sees the first in the neolithic farming community, the second in the roaming paleolithic hunter, and he sees the earliest cities as the re-assertion of the paleolithic: the soft village paying protection money to the gang chief. But Homo sapiens was not originally warlike. The earliest cultivators and inventors were women. ‘Round buildings antedated square ones.’

     The city began as the home of a god: ‘first a magnet, then a container’. In other words, its attraction as a source of awe and wonder preceded the realization of its economic power. But it was the compression that generated the power.

     ‘The many diverse elements of the community hitherto scattered over a great valley system and occasionally into regions far beyond, were mobilized and packed together under pressure, behind the massive walls of the city. Even the gigantic forces of nature were brought under conscious human direction: tens of thousands of men moved into action as one machine under centralized command, building irrigation ditches, canals, urban mounds, ziggurats, temples, palaces, pyramids, on a scale hitherto inconceivable.’

     But he is sceptical of the pretensions of Periclean Athens, with its chaotic layout and politics, its reliance on slaves and amateurs, and its bad drains, and he is puritanically aghast at Roman materialism, a ‘megalopolitan elephantiasis’ prophetic of our own. His nostalgia is reserved for the snug mediaeval town, with its closed vistas and back gardens and air full of the sound of bells, and he returns to the contrasting images of the winding mediaeval procession on the one hand, in which a man could ‘see himself in advance’ and participant and spectator were one, and the dead straight vanishing perspective of a Baroque parade, with the spectators in the gutter.

     ‘In walking, the eye courts variety, but above this gait, movement demands repetition of the units that are to be seen: it is only so that the individual part, as it flashes by, can be recovered and pieced together. What would be monotony for a fixed position or even in procession, becomes a necessary counter-poise to the pace of fast-moving horses.’

     ‘The esthetic effect of the regular ranks and the straight line of soldiers is increased by the regularity of the avenue: the unswerving line of march greatly contributes to the display of power, and a regiment moving thus gives the impression that it would break through a solid wall without losing a beat. That, of course, is exactly the belief that the soldier and the Prince desire to inculcate in the populace: it helps keep them in order without coming to an actual trial of strength, which always carries the bare possibility that the army might be worsted. Moreover, on irregular streets, poorly paved, with plenty of loose cobblestones and places of concealment, the spontaneous formations of untrained people have an advantage over a drilled soldiery: soldiers cannot fire around corners, nor can they protect themselves from bricks heaved from chimney tops immediately overhead: they need space to manoeuvre in. Were not the ancient mediaeval streets of Paris one of the last refuges of urban liberties?’

     These are characteristic insights.

     Technics and Civilization pointed the same kind of contrast between the clean pre-industrial ‘eotechnic’ age of windmills and canals, whose energy came from natural ‘income’, and the filthy ‘paleotechnic’ age of coal and iron and steam, whose energy came from the world’s stock of natural capital. But now both fall under the lash, the first for its pursuit of pleasure, the second for its pursuit of wealth. In the first age, cities that had been organic expressions of human interdependence were superficially smartened up, while behind the scenes the green gardens were built on and became slums; in the second, they were turned into immense and ever-expanding black barracks for the new wage-slaves. Moreover our own age (the ‘neotechnic’) which in the earlier books was to come to the rescue with electricity, aluminium and garden cities, is now just another failure, unable apparently to control the Gadarene descent into subtopian sprawl, traffic paralysis and, more likely than not, genocidal war.

     Hundreds of holes can be shot in this grandiose Toynbeean edifice. The first and most obvious is that a history ranging so widely in time and carrying such weight of generalization should surely range as widely in space. How do Peking and Moscow and Ahmedabad and Ibadan fit into the picture? It is surely worth noting that the neolithic village still survives in India, the mediaeval walled town in Africa, though neither quite comes up to the expectations one derives from their romanticized past. Even within Europe, if Rome was so hellish, what is one to say of Pompeii, and if Chipping Campdem and Bruges were so heavenly, what of mediaeval Milan, which before the Black Death had 200,000 inhabitants and three doctors? Mr Mumford invites this sort of low-grade tu quoque criticism by the doggedness with which he pursues his friends and enemies.

     It seems doubtful whether cities, compared with houses or small towns, are in fact the reliable cultural indicators that they are required to be for the author’s purposes. For one thing, as we know too well, an age doesn’t get the cities it deserves or achieve those it can visualize. London can have changed very little between the Wars of the Roses and the Armada, yet in that century the spirit of the British people was transformed. Nor perhaps should our own age take all the rap for the congested conurbations we are stuck with and struggling to clean up: we would no doubt prefer to be judged by Stockholm and San Francisco and Brazilia and even little Cumbernauld, none of which get a mention.

     The truth is that cities are not organisms and are not classifiable in the biological terms Lewis Mumford took over from Patrick Geddess forty years ago. They are human artefacts, conditioned by infinitely variable sets of ends and means — of human desires modified by economic facts. In every age, dreams of wealth and happiness have brought great multitudes together and produced congestion and plagues as a rough corrective; in every age there have been many sleepy and cosy old towns and villages and a few neat and elegant new ones. Our own problems have been aggravated by the population explosion and the intervention of the motor car, but then we are better equipped to tackle them. The qualitative changes in the character of urban life can be exaggerated. Great cities have always inspired mixed feelings of excitement and frustration, wonder and horror; small towns have always been snug but dull. Even the suburban dream was charmingly put into words 500 years ago by Alberti. ‘There is a vast deal of satisfaction in a convenient retreat near the town, where a man is at liberty to do just what he pleases.’

     But Mr Mumford cannot take this cool and no doubt flat view of the city in history, firstly because he is haunted by Orwellian dreams of the past and nightmares of the future, and secondly because he is impelled by an Emersonian compulsion to preach. It is his myth that somewhere in time or space there was a City, not too small or too big, not too open or congested, where all the senses were elated and life was lived in joyous harmony with nature. Finding no such place in his experience, he places it in the period from which least evidence survives to contradict him: the Middle Ages.

     ‘Slowly, the life of the old towns dried up, their walls hollow shells, harbouring institutions that were also hollow shells. Today it is only as it were, by holding the shell quietly to one’s ear, as with a sea shell, that one can catch in the ensuing pause the dim roar of the old life that was once lived, with dramatic conviction and solemn purpose, within its walls.’

     Beside it he sets New York, the modern equivalent of Rome, and blind to its exhilarating beauty and drama, he overwhelms us — as his ponderous style formidably equips him to do—with the nightmare potentialities of Megalopolis, Motopolis and final Necropolis. Only at the very end of his great book, in a lucid moment, he sees the eternal role of the great city as ‘the best organ of memory man has yet created’, where the past and the present of the whole world are gathered together and made available on demand to the remotest up-country subscriber.

     ‘The mixture of divinity, power, and personality that brought the ancient city into existence must be weighed out anew in terms of the ideology and the culture of our own time, and poured into fresh civic, regional and planetary moulds.’

     A writer whom one finds oneself in a few paragraphs comparing with Wells, Toynbee, Orwell and Emerson is no light-weight. Lewis Mumford is the last of the great late-Victorian and post-Victorian social moralists, who laid the philosophical foundations of our welfare services and town and country planning, such as they are. But those last four words are the point. Further progress along the line of argument Mr Mumford mapped out for himself and relentlessly pursued is unnecessary, even if it were conceivable. Our problems are those of realization. Even in the rich countries, slums and urban blight are created faster than we can replace them, and in the poor countries there seems no hope at all of catching up with the population explosion. It is not merely a question of diverting what we spend on armaments; if it were, Tokyo and Sydney would be the most civilized cities on earth. Nor is it a question of diverting what we spend on advertising and gambling; if it were, post-revolution Moscow and Peking would not be the soul-destroying places they are. It is a question of bringing together the humane vision possessed by some people with the economic power possessed by others.

     In the depressed silence that must greet such a far-fetched proposal, one must add that the tragedy of Lewis Mumford and his whole generation of reformers is that their ideas, which if they are anything at all are on the side of life, have come to seem life-denying. The interwar ‘garden-city-enthusiast’, in his homespun and sandals, and the faceless post-war ‘planner’, inherited from Ebenezer Howard and Patrick Geddess (via Mumford) a high-minded distaste for the beery old squalors and black dangers of city life that were part of its rich brew of fun and filth. In the search for workable equivalents, for solutions realizable in a reasonable gia is reserved for the snug mediaeval mare vision of the problem gives very little guidance. Our mood has changed. Nowadays, if a writer takes up the theme of the City of Dreadful Night, it is to tell us what a good place it was.