Fast, Huge, and Out of Control
According to a new history, Lewis Mumford got it wrong--a city can't be too big for its own good.
By Alex Marshall
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Cities in Civilization
by Peter Hall
Pantheon, 1,169 pp.
$40 |
We tend to experience urban life in fragments: the deeper logic of the city eludes most of us. It is left to urbanists (and, at their best, novelists) to take the longer view, to tell us how it all works. The British urban sociologist Peter Hall has been writing about cities for the last three decades, and Cities in Civilization, a tome of nearly 1,200 pages that begins in Athens and ends in the late-twentieth-century metropolis, is the culmination of his distinguished career. It's a summary of what he's learned and of what he believes about cities.
By virtue of its dazzling range and ambition, Hall's book invites comparison with Lewis Mumford's classic studies, The Culture of Cities (1938) and The City in History (1961). In those books, Mumford drew a gloomy portrait of urban decline. Cities, he feared, had grown large and unmanageable, assuming an unruly "gigantism" that clashed with the human desire for order and harmony. The Megalopolis led inexorably to the Necropolis.
Unlike Mumford, though, Hall is optimistic about cities--even big ones. While acknowledging that they are "not comfortable places at all," he sees their turbulence as a spark to human ingenuity. "The biggest and most cosmopolitan cities... throughout human history," he writes, "have been the places that ignited the sacred flame of the human intelligence and the human imagination." "Sacred flame": the tone is that of a fervent believer in the fire, the beauty, the purpose of cities.
Hall's book is a tribute to the creativity that flourishes in urban centers. He is less interested in the built environment than in what cities produce--their art, technology, science, and industry. Only near the end of the book does he address the nuts and bolts of urban development such as sewers, streets, water lines, and growth patterns.
Hall's thesis is that innovation in art, science, industry, and just about everything else usually originates in cities and does so in concentrated bursts that seldom last more than a generation or two. Instead of offering a chronological history of urban civilization, he provides richly detailed case studies of such moments. His examples range from sites of artistic and intellectual ferment like classical Athens and 1920s Berlin to business and technology pioneers like Manchester in the 1770s and Silicon Valley in the 1950s, to places that fall somewhere in between, like Hollywood and Memphis.
In each case, Hall seeks to "understand the precise conjuncture of forces that caused [the city] to burst forth as it did." He spent 15 years researching his book, and it shows. He writes knowledgeably on Athenian philosophy, Florentine painting, Berlin theater, Parisian art circles, Motor City auto manufacturing, the Hollywood studio system, shipbuilding in Glasgow, the birth of rock and roll in Memphis, the electronics industry in Tokyo, and the creation of social democracy in Stockholm.
The book's point is simple and irrefutable: While the scene of cultural revolution has perpetually shifted, it has largely remained an urban one. What is it about cities that makes them, in Hall's words, "cultural crucibles"? Again, Hall differs from Mumford, though not always for the better. Where Mumford rooted his analyses in the finer points of architectural design, population density, and city planning, Hall sometimes slights the particulars of the physical world, so enthralled is he by the heroic dramas of cultural creativity. In his chapter on Silicon Valley, for example, he fails to discuss whether the region's disjointed, sprawling topography contributed to its success. There is little sense here of cities as physical spaces that influence the events that unfold in them.
Still, Hall has an acute understanding of why creative people emerge in particular cities at particular times--the conditions that make for belles epoques. Like Marshall Berman, the author of the spirited paean to Modernism, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (1982), Hall is a romantic who embraces cities for their chaos and messy energy. Cities, he argues, foster experimentation because they are swirling, often violent places undergoing almost continuous change. And though he admits that the reasons for each golden age are ultimately mysterious, he thinks the most exciting cities are wealthy and cosmopolitan yet somehow unsettled, vaguely anxious places. While drawing economic sustenance from international trade and capital, they teem with foreigners and marginal groups and boast high levels of social tolerance. Hall writes admiringly of these cultural outsiders who "both belong and do not belong, and [who] have an ambiguous relationship to the seats of power and authority." Cities in Civilization is, in fact, a celebration of urban minorities such as the Athenian "metics" who founded modern medicine, the Viennese Jews who gave us psychoanalysis, and the Memphis black musicians who created rock and roll.
Hall is no stranger to the sadness that haunts belles epoques. Great creative epochs, he suggests, are like love affairs that erupt suddenly, gather speed and energy, and then quickly burn out. Nevertheless, Hall remains confident that the dialectic of urban transformation continues to operate. "Neither western civilization, nor the western city, shows any sign of decay," he writes. It's a comforting assertion, but also a strangely provincial one. The most remarkable urban development of recent years has occurred in third world cities like Rio, Mexico City, and Cairo--places Hall seems hardly aware of. Hall's nostalgia makes him a wonderfully energetic student of past urban glories, but for a glimpse of the future, one has to look elsewhere.
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