LOOKING FORWARD TO LOOKING
BACKWARD
Meyer Schapiro
I
N THE PRESENT
slump of socialist theory and with the revival of re–
formist programs, Mumford's
Culture of Cities*
has been welcomed
as a major contribution to knowledge and to social thinking. The vast
scope of the book, its boldness and breadth of statement, the abundant
esoteric documentation, the palatable mixture of social argument and
art criticism, the rampant healthiness of the author's tastes, the won–
derful timeliness of his appeal for new homes and regional planning,
so close to the avowals of the government, all these considerations–
secondary to truth and practicality--elevate the book in the minds
of its ·reviewers as a monument of social prophecy and a tonic for
discouraged men of good will.
The Thesis.
Mumford traces the history of cities since the middle
I
ages in order to formulate the possibilities of the good city of the
future. He believes that the mediaeval town was socially and hy–
gienically better than has been supposed, and still offers invaluable
suggestions to-day not only as an example of sound urban planning,
but also in its democratic communal life; the interests of all classes
were harmonized then through their common enjoyment of the rites
and pageantry of the church. It was at the end of the middle ages,
with the rise of machine technology, despotism, militarism and capital–
ism, that the city began to assume its present unhealthy and hypertro–
phied forms. From the "will-to-power" Mumford derives the militar–
ization of the city plan, the great boulevards, the architecture of pomp,
the mechanical and unsocial regularity; from capitalist greed and
indifference to biological needs, the "insensate" industrial town and
the pollution of the whole environment. But during the last seventy–
five years a reaction has set in. And in the newer ideals of regionalism,
conservation and the garden city, all related to the emerging "biotech–
nic economy," patterned on the organism, Mumford foresees a new
*
THE CULTURE OF CITIES.
By Lewis Mumford. Harcourt Brace. $5.
12
