Classic Readings in Urban Planning

Jay Stein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351177801
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

This new edition of "the best anthology in planning" includes 33 selections by many of the profession's most respected thinkers and eloquent writers. Returning editor Jay M. Stein chose the articles, about half of them new to this edition, based on suggestions from colleagues and students who used the first edition, recommendations from planning scholars, awards for writing in the field of planning, and his own review of recent planning literature.

Classic Readings in Urban Planning

offers an unparalleled depth of coverage and range of perspectives on traditional aspects of planning as well as on important contemporary issues.

This is an exceptional main or supplementary textbook for advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate level students in urban and regional planning. As a general overview of the field of urban planning, it is also an excellent choice for planning commissioners, practicing planners, and professionals in related fields such as environmental and land use law, architecture, and government.

An abstract introduces each reading, and each section includes suggestions for additional readings suitable for more extensive study. Many of these are also "classics" that could not be included as a main selection.

PART
I
Planning History and
Theory

The Crystallization of the City: The First Urban Transformation

Lewis Mumford

Copyright: “The Crystallization of the City” from The City in History: Its Origin, Its Transformation, and Its Prospects, copyright © 1961 and renewed 1989 by Lewis Mumford, reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc., pp. 29–54.

In the introduction to The City in History, Lewis Mumford observes that the book begins “with a city that was, symbolically, a world; it closes with a world that has become, in many practical aspects, a city” (p.xi). Although it took many decades to realize this transformation, it is nevertheless a remarkable one. The selection included here, “The First Urban Transformation,” is the opening section of the chapter, “The Crystallization of the City.” Here, Mumford describes the “implosion” that led to the first great expansion of civilization: the creation of cities. Under the leadership of the new “institution of Kingship,” the diverse and scattered elements of a civilization were compressed into the boundaries of cities. This contrasts to the explosion of our own era, as boundaries disappear and we become more of a global community. Mumford argues that to understand this process—and to understand the city in our own age—we must study its origins, form, functions, and historical development.

In view of its satisfying rituals but limited capabilities, no mere increase in numbers would, in all probability, suffice to turn a village into a city. This change needed an outer challenge to pull the community sharply away from the central concerns of nutrition and reproduction: a purpose beyond mere survival. The larger part of the world’s population never in fact responded to this challenge: until the present period of urbanization, cities contained only a small fraction of mankind.

The city came as a definite emergent in the paleo-neolithic community: an emergent in the definite sense that Lloyd Morgan and William Morton Wheeler used that concept. In emergent evolution, the introduction of a new factor does not just add to the existing mass, but produces an over-all change, a new configuration, which alters its properties. Potentialities that could not be recognized in the pre-emergent stage, like the possibility of organic life developing from relatively stable and unorganized “dead” matter, then for the first time become visible. So with the leap from village culture. On the new plane, the old components of the village were carried along and incorporated in the new urban unit; but through the action of new factors, they were recomposed in a more complex an unstable pattern than that of the village—yet in a fashion that promoted further transformations and developments. The human composition of the new unit likewise became more complex: in addition to the hunter, the peasant, and the shepherd, other primitive types entered the city and made their contribution to its existence: the miner, the woodman, the fisherman, each bringing with him the tools and skills and habits of life formed under other pressures. The engineer, the boatman, the sailor arise from this more generalized primitive background, at one point or another in the valley section: from all these original types still other occupation groups develop, the soldier, the banker, the merchant, the priest. Out of this complexity the city created a higher unity.

This new urban mixture resulted in an enormous expansion of human capabilities in every direction. The city effected a mobilization of manpower, a command over long distance transportation, an intensification of communication over long distances in space and time, an outburst of invention along with a large scale development of civil engineering, and, not least, it promoted a tremendous further rise in agricultural productivity.

That urban transformation was accompanied, perhaps preceded, by similar outpourings from the collective unconscious. At some moment, it would seem, the local familiar gods, close to the hearth fire, were overpowered and partly replaced certainly outranked, by the distant sky gods or earth gods, identified with the sun, the moon, the waters of life, the thunderstorm, the desert. The local chieftain turned into the towering king, and became likewise the chief priestly guardian of the shrine now endowed with divine or almost divine attributes. The village neighbors would now be kept at a distance: no longer familiars and equals, they were reduced to subjects, whose lives were supervised and directed by military and civil officers, governors, viziers, tax-gatherers, soldiers, directly accountable to the king.

Even the ancient village habits and customs might be altered in obedience to divine command. No longer was it sufficient for the village farmer to produce enough to feed his family or his village: he must now work harder and practice self-denial to support a royal and priestly officialdom with a large surplus. For the new rulers were greedy feeders, and openly measured their power not only in arms, but in loaves of bread and jugs of beer. In the new urban society, the wisdom of the aged no longer carried authority: it was the young men of Uruk, who, against the advice of the Elders, supported Gilgamesh when he proposed to attack Kish instead of surrendering to the demands of the ruler of Kish. Though family connections still counted in urban society, vocational ability and youthful audacity counted even more, if it gained the support of the King.

When all this happened, the archaic village culture yielded to urban “civilization,” that peculiar combination of creativity and control, of expression and repression, of tension and release, whose outward manifestation has been the historic city. From its origins onward, indeed, the city may be described as a structure specially equipped to store and transmit the goods of civilization, sufficiently condensed to afford the maximum amount of facilities in a minimum space, but also capable of structural enlargement to enable it to find a place for the changing needs and the more complex forms of a growing society and its cumulative social heritage. The invention of such forms as the written record, the library, the archive, the school, and the university is one of the earliest and most characteristic achievements of the city.

The transformation I now seek to describe was first called by Childe the Urban Revolution. This term does justice to the active and critically important role of the city; but it does not accurately indicate the process; for a revolution implies a turning things upside down, and a progressive movement away from outworn institutions that have been left behind. Seen from the vantage point of our own age, it seems to indicate something like the same general shift that occurred with our own industrial revolution, with the same sort of emphasis on economic activities. This obscures rather than clarifies what actually occurred. The rise of the city, so far from wiping out earlier elements in the culture, actually brought them together and increased their efficacy and scope. Even the fostering of non-agricultural occupations heightened the demand for food and probably caused villages to multiply, and still more land to be brought under cultivation. Within the city, very little of the old order was at first excluded: agriculture itself in Summer, for example, continued to be practiced on a large scale by those who lived permanently within the new walled towns.

What happened rather with the rise of cities, was that many functions that had heretofore been scattered and unorganized were brought together within a limited area, and the components of the community were kept in a state of dynamic tension and interaction. In this union, made almost compulsory by the strict enclosure of the city wall, the already well-established parts of the protocity—shrine, spring, village, market, stronghold— participated in the general enlargement and concentration of numbers, and underwent a structural differentiation that gave them forms recognizable in every subsequent phase of urban culture. The city proved not merely a means of expressing in concrete terms the magnification of sacred and secular power, but in a manner that went far beyond any conscious intention it also enlarged all the dimensions of life. Beginning as a representation of the cosmos, a means of bringing heaven down to earth, the city became a symbol of the possible. Utopia was an integral part of its original constitution, and precisely because it first took form as an ideal projection, it brought into existence realities that might have remained latent for an indefinite time in more soberly governed small communities, pitched to lower expectations and unwilling to make exertions that transcended both their workaday habits and their mundane hopes.

In this emergence of the city, the dynamic element came, as we have seen, from outside the village. Here one must give the new rulers their due, for their hunting practices had accustomed them to a wider horizon than village culture habitually viewed. Archaeologists have pointed out that there is even the possibility that the earliest grain-gatherers, in the uplands of the Near East, may have been hunters who gathered the seeds in their pouch, for current rations, long before they knew how to plant them. The hunter’s exploratory mobility, his willingness to gamble and take risks, his need to make prompt decisions, his readiness to undergo bitter deprivation and intense fatigue in pursuit of his game, his willingness to face death in coming to grips with fierce animals— either to kill or be killed—all gave him special qualifications for confident leadership. These traits were the foundations of aristocratic dominance. Faced with the complexities of large-scale community life, individualistic audacity was more viable than the slow communal responses that the agricultural village fostered.

In a society confronting numerous social changes brought on by its own mechanical and agricultural improvements, which provoked serious crises that called for prompt action, under unified command, the hoarded folk wisdom born solely of past experience in long-familiar situation was impotent. Only the self confident and adventurous could in some degree control these new forces and have sufficient imagination to use them for hitherto unimaginable purposes. Neolithic “togetherness” was not enough. Many a village, baffled and beset by flooded fields or ruined crops, must have turned away from its slow-moving, overcautious council of elders to a single figure who spoke with authority and promptly gave commands as if he expected instantly to be obeyed.

Doubtless the hunter’s imagination, no less than his prowess, was there from the beginning, long before either flowed into political channel: for surely there is a more commanding esthetic sense in the Paleolithic hunter’s cave than there is in any early Neolithic pottery or sculpture. Nothing like the same superb esthetic flair as we find in the Aurignacian caves came back till the stone-and-copper age. But now heroic exertions, once confined mainly to the hunt, were applied to the entire physical environment. Nothing the mind projected seemed impossible. What one singularly self-assured man dared to dream of, under favor of the gods, a whole city obedient to his will might do. No longer would wild animals alone be subdued: rivers, mountains, swamps, masses of men, would be attacked collectively at the King’s command and reduced to order. Backbreaking exertions that no little community would impose on itself, so long as nature met its customary needs, were now undertaken: the hunter-hero, from Gilgamesh to Herakles, set the example in his superhuman acts of strength. In conquering hard physical tasks every man became a bit of a hero, surpassing his own natural limits—if only to escape the overseer’s lash.

The expansion of human energies, the enlargements of the human ego, perhaps for the first time detached from its immediate communal envelope the differentiation of common human activities into specialized vocations, and the expression of this expansion and differentiation at many points in the structure of the city, were all aspects of a single transformation: the rise of civilization. We cannot follow this change at the moment it occurred, for, as Teilhard de Chardin notes of other evolutionary changes, it is the unstable and fluid emerging forms that leave no record behind. But later crystallizations clearly point to the nature of the earlier evolution.

To interpret what happened in the city, one must deal equally with technics, politics, and religion, above all with the religious side of the transformation. If at the beginning all these aspects of life were inseparably mingled, it was religion that took precedence and claimed primacy, probably because unconscious imagery and subjective projections dominated every aspect of reality, allowing nature to become visible only in so far as it could be worked into the tissue of desire and dream. Surviving monuments and records show that this general magnification of power was accompanied by equally exorbitant images, issuing from the unconscious, transposed into the “eternal” forms of art.

As we have seen, the formative stages of this process possibly took many thousands of years: even the last steps in the transition from the Neolithic country town, little more than an overgrown village, to the full-blown city, the home of new institutional forms, may have taken centuries, even millennia; so long that many institutions that we have definite historic record of in other parts of the world—such as ceremonial human sacrifice— may have had time both to flourish and to be largely cut down in Egypt or Mesopotamia.

The enormous time gap between the earliest foundation in the Valley of the Jordan, if their latest datings are correct, and those of the Sumerian cities allows of many profound if unrecorded changes. But the final outbreak of inventions that attended the birth of the city probably happened within a few centuries, or even, as Frankford suggested of kingship, within a few generations. Pretty surely it took place within a span of years no greater than the seven centuries between the invention of the mechanical clock and the unlocking of atomic power.

As far as the present record stands, grain cultivation, the plow, the potter’s wheel, the sailboat, the draw loom, copper metallurgy, abstract mathematics, exact astronomical observation, the calendar, writing and other modes of intelligible discourse in permanent form, all came into existence at roughly the same time, around 3000 B.C. give or take a few centuries. The most ancient urban remains now knows, except Jericho, date from this period. This constituted a singular technological expansion of human power whose only parallel is the change that has taken place in our own time. In both cases men, suddenly exalted, behaved like gods: but with little sense of their latent human limitations and infirmities, or of the neurotic and criminal natures often freely projected upon the deities.

There is nevertheless one outstanding difference between the first urban epoch and our own. Ours is an age of multitude of socially undirected technical advances, divorced from any other ends than the advancement of science and technology. We live in fact in an exploding universe of mechanical and electronic invention, whose parts are moving at a rapid pace ever further and further away from their human center, and from any rational, autonomous human purposes. This technological explosion has produced a similar explosion of the city itself: the city has burst open and scattered it...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Table of Contents
• Part I. Planning History and Theory
• Part II. Comprehensive Planning, Land Use and Growth Management
• Part III. Economic, Political, Social, and Strategic Issues in Planning and Development
• Part IV. Infrastructure: Housing and Transportation
• Part V. Design, Place, Form and the Environment
• Part VI. International Planning
• Part VII. The Profession and Practice of Planning
• About The Authors
• Index