The Crystallization of the City:

The First Urban Transformation

-Lewis Mumford
Lewis Mumford
• was an American historian, sociologist,
philosopher of technology, and literary critic.
Particularly
noted for his study of cities and urban architecture, he
had a
broad career as a writer. Mumford was influenced by
the
work of Scottish theorist Sir Patrick Geddes.
• He studied at the City College of New York and The
New
School for Social Research
• but became ill with tuberculosis and never finished
Lewis Mumford

• The City in History

• In the introduction of the book he observes
that the book begins “with a city,
symbolically, a world; it closes with a world
that has become, in many practical aspects, a
city” (p.xi)
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.
The First Urban Transformation
• 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.
The First Urban Transformation
• 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
• Until the present period of urbanization,
cities contained only a small fraction of
mankind
Paleo-neolithic Community

C. Lloyd Morgan William Morton Wheel

Emergent Evolution
• Was the hypothesis that, in the course of
evolution, some entirely new properties,
such as mind and consciousness, appear
at certain critical points, usually because
of an unpredictable rearrangement of
the already existing entities
• The introduction of a new factor does
not just add to the existing mass, but
produces an over- all change
The First Urban Transformation
• Potentialities that could not be recognized in the pre-
emergent stage , for the first time became visible
• On the new plane, old components of the village 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 First Urban Transformation
• 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

• Out of this complexity the city created a

higher unity
The First Urban Transformation
• The new urban mixture resulted in an enormous 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.
The First Urban Transformation
• 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 First Urban Transformation
• 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
• In the new urban society, the wisdom of the aged no
longer carried authority
The First Urban Transformation
• The City
– From its origins onward may be
described as a structure specially
equipped to store and transmit the
goods of civilization
– Sufficiently condensed to afford
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 First Urban Transformation
• 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
The First Urban Transformation
• 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.
• 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 state of dynamic tension and
interaction.
The First Urban Transformation
• The City
– Proved not merely a means of expressing 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.
The First Urban Transformation
• Archeologists
– Pointed out that there is even a
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
These traits were the foundations of aristocratic
dominance
• The hunter’s exploratory mobility
• 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
• 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
The First Urban Transformation
• Neolithic “togetherness” was not
enough.
• For surely there is more commanding
esthetic sense in the Paleolithic hunter’s
cave that there is in any early Neolithic
pottery or sculpture.
• What one singularly self-assured man
dared to dream of, under favor of god, a
whole city obedient to his will might do
The rise of civilization
• 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, where all aspects
of a single transformation
• 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
• 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.
• Henri Frankfort, suggests that “the most
important agent in effecting the change
from a decentralized village economy to a
highly organized urban economy, was the
king”, who evolved from the Paleolithic
hunter.
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
• Ours has been largely demagnetized, with the result that
we are witnessing a sort of devolution of urban power
into a state of randomness and unpredictability
• In short, our civilization is running out of control
overwhelmed by its own resources and opportunities, as
well as its super abundant fecundity
Difference between the first Urban
Epoch and Our own
• Just the opposite happened with the first
great expansion of civilization: instead of an
explosion of power, there was rather an
implosion
• This implosion happened at the very
moment that the area of intercourse was
greatly enlarged, through raidings and
tradings, through seizure 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 multitude of diverse social particles,
long separate and self-centered, if not mutually
antagonistic, were brought together in a
concentrated urban area.
The First Urban Transformation
• According to Mumford:
– He would suggest that the most
important agent in affecting the
change from decentralized village
economy to a highly organized urban
economy, was the king, or rather, the
institution of Kingship
– The industrialization and
commercialization we now associate
with urban growth was for centuries a
subordinate phenomenon
The First Urban Transformation

• According to Mumford:
– In the urban implosion, the king stands at the center:
he is the polar magnet that draws to the heart of the
city and brings under the control of the palace and
temple all the new forces of civilization
– Sometimes the king founded new cities; sometimes
he transformed old country towns that had long been
a building, placing them under the authority of his
governors: in either case his rule made a decisive
change in their form and contents.