07-01-2022, 11:49 PM
I've been reading Lewis Mumford's "The Culture of Cities". I'm about halfway through, so I can only comment on the first half.
He's basically reviewed the last 800 years or so of urban planning, and what he thinks is good or bad in each era. He claims that Medieval cities were fantastic, with fairly high living standards, civic institutions that generally operated for the benefit of the people, plenty of open space, access to nature, strong social networks. It's been down hill ever since. Renaissance-Baroque cities were constrained by their more complex walls, causing overcrowding and overbuilding; increasing state power removed authority from civic institutions; architecture was more concerned about making a statement about the state's power than being beautiful and functional. Industrial cities were polluted hell-holes, and modern (late 19th-early 20th century) cities strip away all human elements to serve the centralizing state.
It's quite interesting, and his (frequent) scathing denunciations are fantastic to read, but much of what he says doesn't seem to meet with what I see in cities today.
It's also very difficult to find a copy of, I checked all the used book stores in KW and half a dozen in Toronto before just getting a epub from Library Genesis.
He's basically reviewed the last 800 years or so of urban planning, and what he thinks is good or bad in each era. He claims that Medieval cities were fantastic, with fairly high living standards, civic institutions that generally operated for the benefit of the people, plenty of open space, access to nature, strong social networks. It's been down hill ever since. Renaissance-Baroque cities were constrained by their more complex walls, causing overcrowding and overbuilding; increasing state power removed authority from civic institutions; architecture was more concerned about making a statement about the state's power than being beautiful and functional. Industrial cities were polluted hell-holes, and modern (late 19th-early 20th century) cities strip away all human elements to serve the centralizing state.
It's quite interesting, and his (frequent) scathing denunciations are fantastic to read, but much of what he says doesn't seem to meet with what I see in cities today.
It's also very difficult to find a copy of, I checked all the used book stores in KW and half a dozen in Toronto before just getting a epub from Library Genesis.