General media thread for architecture, urban planning and design

[jwilliamson]

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.

Do you mean 20th/21st? I’m just wondering because most of the best parts of the cities with which I am familiar were built in the late 1800s or early 1900s, whereas most of what has been built after World War II is somewhere between mediocre and atrocious.

Without reading the book, I must admit to being a bit skeptical of the “to serve the centralizing state” bit. Are modern suburbs really designed to serve the centralizing state? I think they’re designed on the severely flawed assumptions that everybody should have a car and that everything should be separated from everything else. I don’t think there is a need to invoke something that starts to look more like a conspiracy theory.

It was published in 1938; so definitely 19th/20th.

I think "centralizing state" was a poor choice of wording on my part. Mumford would probably instead say that metropolitan interests (the state, but also large capitalists, financial interests, publishers, industrialists) all have an interest in concentrating activity in one area, and in formalizing it.

Regarding suburbs, they are clearly designed to centralize activity within the city. Why build a suburb? Because downtown businesses need workers and customers, and people can live in the suburb while still orienting their life towards the city. The suburb doesn't need its own businesses, its own newspapers, its own festivals; it can simply consume whatever is produced in the city.