web Filtte : CLASIC- READINGS IN URE PLAARING , ZMOZOTON E0TeO BY Ay STEN, ABA. CHIABD 200g Part I. Planning History and Theory 3 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 capabil- ‘The larger part of the world’s pop- ulation never in fact responded to this challenge: until the present period of urbanization, cities con- tained 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, Potentialities that could not be rec- ‘ognized in the pre-emergent stage, like the possi- bility of organic life developing from relatively stable and unorganized “dead” matter, then for the first time become visible. So with the leap 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 exis- tence: 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 enor- mous expansion of human capabilities in ever << 34 Classic Readings in Urban Planning 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 off cers, 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. Elders, supported Gilgamesh when he proposed to attack Kish instead of surrendering to the demands of the ruler of Kish. Though family con- nections 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, expression and repression, of tension and release, whose outward manifestation has been the his- toric city. 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 th ‘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 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: agri- culture itself in Summer, for example, continued to bbe practiced on a large scale by those who lived permanently within the new walled towns. compulsory by the strict enclosure of the city wall, the already well-established parts of the proto- city—shrine, spring, village, market, stronghold— participated in the general enlargement and con- centration of numbers, and underwent a structur- al differentiation that gave them forms recogniza- ble 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 italso enlarged all the dimensions of life. Beginning as a representa- tion 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 origi- nal constitution, and precisely because it first took form as an ideal projection, it brought into exis-tence realities that might have remained latent for an indefinite time in more soberly governed small econ sea cine cal oferta unwilling to make exertions that transcended both their workaday habits and their mundane hopes. in this emergence of the city i aR iere 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 domi- nance. Faced with the complexities of large-scale asada Taine 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 seri- ‘ous crises that called for prompt action, under uni- fied command, the hoarded folk wisdom born solely of past experience in long-familiar situation ‘was impotent. Only the self confident and adven- eae fin vores Genres otoal Wess aces 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-mov- ing, overcautious council of elders to a single fig- ure 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 ene eralasitsse Nimeer cate was Gee Part I. Planning History and Theory 5 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 sin- gularly 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 hhard 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 enlarge- ments 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 t he city, were all aspects of a Single tansformation, aa we cannot follow this change at the moment it occurred, for, as Teilhard de Chardin notes of other evolutionary changes emerging foms that ave no ecard behind. Bt later crystallizations clearly point fo the nature of the earlier evolution. To interpret what happened in the city, one must deal equally with technics, politics, and reli- gion, above all with the religious side of the trans- SES ose eet oS monuments and records show. that this general magnification of power was accompanied by equally exorbitant images, issu- ing from the unconscious, transposed into the “eternal” forms of art.6 Classic Readings in Urban Planning 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 over- grown 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 lat- est datings are correct, and those of the Sumerian ities 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 sug- gested 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 unlock- ing of atomic power. As far as the present record stands, grain cul- tivation, the plow, the potter’s wheel, the sailboat, the draw loom, copper metallurgy, abstract math- ematics, exact astronomical observation, the calen- dar, writing and other modes of intelligible dis- course 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 differ- ence between the first urban i and our own. The walled urban con- tainer indeed has not merely been broken open iD eames ce aa totalitarian states see ruthlessly to impose control are much the vie- tim of their clumsy brakes as the seemingly freer economies coasting downhill are at the mercy of their runaway vehicles. Just the opposite happened with the first great expansion of civilization: ‘The many diverse elements of the community hitherto scat- tered over a great valley system and occasionally into regions far beyond, were mobilized and packed together under pressure, behind the mas- sive 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 com- mand, building irrigation ditches, canals, urban mounds, ziggurats, temples, palaces, pyramids, on a scale hitherto inconceivable. As an immedi- ate outcome of the new power mythology, the ‘machine itself had been invented: long invisible to archaeologists because the substance of which it was composed—human bodies—had been mantled and decomposed. QR) WasihGEOR oS ae losion happened at the very moment that the area of intercourse was greatly enlarged, through raidings and tradings, through seizures and commandeerings, through migrations and enslavements, through tax-gatherings and the wholesale conscription of labor. Under pressure of one master institution, that of kingship, a multi- tude of diverse social particles, long separate and self-centered, if not mutually antagonistic, were brought together in a concentrated urban area. As with a gas, the very pressure of the moleculeswithin that limited space produced more social collisions and interactions within a generation than would have occurred in many centuries if still isolated in their native habitats, without boundaries. Or to put it in more organic terms, lit- tle communal village cells, undifferentiated and uncomplicated, every part of performing equall every function, iat made this concentration and mobiliza~ tion of power possible? What gave it the special form it took in the city, with a central religious and political nucleus, the citadel, dominating the entire social structure and giving centralized direction to activities that had one been dispersed and undi- rected, or at least locally self governed? What I am going to suggest as the key development here had already been presaged, at a much earlier stage, by the apparent evolution of the protective hunter into the tribute-gathering chief: a figure repeated- ly attested in similar developments in many later cycles of civilization. Suddenly this figure assumed superhuman proportions: all his powers and pre- rogatives became immensely magnified, while those of his subjects, who no longer had a will of their own or could claim any life apart from that of, the ruler, were correspondingly diminished. Part I, Planning History and Theory 7 Now I would hardly be bold enough to advance this explanation if one of the most brilliant of modem archaeologists, the late Henri Frankfort, had not provided most of the necessary data, and ‘unconsciously foreshadowed if not foreseen this Covsin. What L would supgest tha the most ‘commercialization we now associate with urban growth was for centuries a subordinate phenome- non, probably even emerging later in time: the very word merchant does not appear in Mesopotamian writing tll the second millennium, “when it desig- nates the official of a temple privileged to trade abroad.” Going beyond Frankfort, I suggest that one of the attributes of the ancient Egyptian god, Ptah, as revealed in a document derived from the third millennium B.C—that he founded ciies—is the pa and all but universal function of : > formed old country towns that had long been a- building, placing them under the authority of his sernors: Towns, Time and Tradition: The Legacy of Planning in Frontier America John Reps Copyright: Reps, John W.; Town Planning in Frontier America. Copyright © 1965, 1969 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press, pp. 422-429. ‘Town Planning in Frontier America is a shortened version of John Reps's longer and more detailed book, The Making of Urban America (1965). In these books, Reps covers city plans from the first European settlement at St. Augustine in 1565 to the frontier planning experiences of the middle of the nineteenth century. In this section, Reps examines nineteenth-century frontier planning and discusses the obstacles involved in transferring planning knowledge from England to her former colony. Finally, he summarizes the planning failures and achievements of the era. He focuses on the lessons that can be learned from our frontier development-planning experiences and applied to the challenges of modern urbanization.