Mumford’s many specific views on the history of cities and urban planning may perhaps have become outdated, but his insights into the essence of the city and its meaning are something we cannot get around.
Mumford has discussed what a city is from two angles. He pointed out that a city is “a special container for storing and transmitting information” and “the theater of social activity.”
By way of comparison, we can look at how modern dictionaries explain the word city. The Oxford Dictionary, for example, says that a city is a large and important town; as for town, it refers to a place with many houses, shops/stores, etc. where people live and work. It is larger than a village but smaller than a city. The explanation in the Xinhua Dictionary is similar: “larger in scale than the countryside, with a population more concentrated than in the countryside…”
These entries reflect the usual modern understanding of the city—it is nothing more than a place where people gather together. As for how people gather together, it is nothing more than a matter of scale and density: if the scale is large and the density high, it is called a city; if the scale is small and the density low, it is a village. But exactly how high must the population density be before it counts as a city? There seems to be no standard either. A village in China’s Jiangsu-Zhejiang region may well have a population density much higher than that of a city in Northern Europe; how, then, are we to define it?
The vagueness of the concept of “city,” if we dig deeper, actually reflects our state of disorientation throughout the entire process of modernization. We keep talking about pursuing “modernization,” and in many cases modernization is basically equivalent to “urbanization”; for example, we often define “developing countries” and “developed countries” by their rate of urbanization. But if we have never even made clear what the word “city” means, then what exactly is the “development” we pursue? What, after all, does modernization mean? Wouldn’t all of this be ambiguously unclear? If a city is nothing more than “a place where the population is more concentrated than in the countryside,” then does our pursuit of modernization amount to nothing more than hoping that human beings will live ever more tightly packed together?
In a sense, reality does seem to be exactly that. The development of many large cities today seems to be moving only in this direction; residents of these concrete jungles do not feel that life is becoming increasingly ideal, but instead have to endure ever more crowded traffic, ever harsher competition, and ever worse environments.
The process of modernization, or rather the development of cities, has lost its direction and become a matter of concentrating for the sake of concentrating, developing for the sake of developing. This is precisely because people only know how to understand cities in terms of scale, and have forgotten to reflect on the meaning of the city as city. In this situation, under Mumford’s inspiration, reexamining the origins and evolution of “the city” from historical and philosophical perspectives is the pressing task at hand.
Mumford pointed out that historians (and, of course, ordinary people as well) usually investigate the origin of cities only from the standpoint of their physical form, or material remains, understanding the city as a collection of visible buildings; in fact, this puts the cart before the horse. What is truly crucial are precisely those invisible aspects, namely human life and interaction. These buildings and districts are all stages for human social activity. A “theater” becomes a “theater” because of drama; the center of a theater is neither the seats nor the curtain, but the performance.
Of course, a theater can gather people together, but in essence, people ought to be attracted and brought together because of wonderful and rich performances; the magnificent stage and comfortable seats are also material arrangements designed to make the performance better. Yet in modern metropolises, this obvious truth has been completely reversed. People gather merely for the sake of gathering; the design of stages and seats is also only about cramming in more people, no longer about the quality of the performance. Drama too has lost its variety; every “theater” is all the same, differing only in size, while the culture of the city, or rather the content of its drama, grows increasingly monotonous and repetitive.
People gather together originally in order to communicate more fully and to have a richer and freer space for life. The earliest cities often developed on the basis of centers of communication such as “markets” or “altars”; the reason people gathered was to exchange with one another.
But in modern metropolises, communication between people is poorer than in the countryside. In the countryside, one household may have several mu of land, whereas in a city, hundreds of households may live in a high-rise on just half a mu of land; yet the communication among those hundreds of households may be less than the communication between two traditional farming households separated by several li. If that is the case, why on earth should so many people be concentrated together?
In the industrial age, the center of the city was no longer the market or the altar, but the factory, and the factory assembly line of the machine age was precisely a place that required only simple population aggregation, not human communication. On a typical factory assembly line, workers need only perform their own functions like screws and nails; each person, without saying a word, can efficiently complete the work at his or her station. Like the market, altar, school, parliament, and so on—the key places of the ancient city—the factory calls people to gather, but unlike them, the factory requires only the gathering itself and no longer promotes communication.
So it is the modern city, where population grows ever denser while communication grows ever poorer, that is a special product of the industrial age. But what about after the industrial age? When decentralized modes of production such as crowdsourcing replace the assembly line, when information technology and the internet replace machinery and factories and become the axis of people’s production and life, how should the city develop?
Those cities that gathered around the altar were already marginalized in the industrial age; so will cities governed by the logic of the factory assembly line also be eliminated in the information age?
It is hard for us to see through the future of the city, but in any case, the city in the information age should set things right and reverse the absurd tendency of industrial cities to gather for the sake of gathering, allowing the city to return to its basic function of “storing information and transmitting information,” with human communication (rather than mere aggregation) as its guiding aim.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
Leave a Reply