CRYSTALIZATION OF THE

CITY:

The First Urban Transformation

LEWIS MUMFORD
The City in History

“ with a city that was, symbolically, a world; it

closes with a world that has become, in many
practical aspects, a city”
Implosion
(a sudden failure or collapse of an organization or system)
Led to the first great expansion of civilization: the creation of cities

Institution of “KINGSHIP”

A diverse and scattered elements of a civilization were compressed

into the boundaries of a city.
This contrast in the explosion in our own era, as boundaries
disappear and we become more of a global community.
 To understand the city in our own age, WE MUST STUDY
THE ORIGIN, FORM, FUNCTIONS AND
HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT

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.
LLOYD MORGAN AND WILLIAM MORTON
WHEELER

used the concept of the “ city” as it came as a definite emergent

in the Paleo-neolithic community.

Emergent Evolution

The introduction of a new factor does not just add to the existing
mass, but produces an overall change, a new configuration, which
alters its properties.
The old components of the village were carried along
and incorporated in the new urban unit; but through the
action of the new factors, they were recomposed in a
more complex unstable pattern than that of the village-
yet in a fashion that promoted further transformations
and development.

The human composition of the new unit likewise

became more complex. Out of this complexity the city
created a higher unity.
 what the city effected:

• A mobilization of man power

• A command over long distance transportation
• An intensification of communication over long distances
in space and time
• Outburst of invention along with a large scale
development of civil engineering
• Promoted a tremendous further rise in agricultural
productivity
 The urban transformation was accompanied, perhaps
preceded, by similar outpourings from the collective
unconscious.

• 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.
 Even the ancient village habits and customs
might be altered in obedience to divine command.

In the new urban society, the wisdom of the

aged no longer carried authority.
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, and of tension and release.

The city may described as a structure especially

equipped to store and transmit the goods of
civilization, sufficiently condensed to afford the
maximum space, but also capable of structural
enlargement to enable it to find place for the changing
needs and the more complex forms of a growing
society and its cumulative social heritage.
Urban Revolution
This term does justice to the active and critically
important role of the city

From the vantage point of our own age, seems to indicate

something like the same general shift occurred with our own
industrial revolution, with the same sort of emphasis on
economic activities.

The rise of the city, so far from wiping out earlier

elements in the culture, bought them together, bought them
together and increase their efficacy and scope.
 Rise of the Cities

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.

The city prove not merely a means of expressing

secular power, but in manner that went far beyond any
conscious intention, it also enlarged all the dimensions of life.
 Archaeologists have pointed out that there is even
a possibility that the earliest graingatherers, in the upland
of the near east, may have been hunters who gathered
the seeds in their pouch, long before they knew how to
plant them.

Hunters have special qualifications for confident

leadership. These traits were the foundation of
Aristocratic dominance, where individual audacity was
more viable than the slow communal responses that the
agricultural village fostered.
 Doubtless the hunter’s imagination, no less than
his prowess, was there from the beginning long before
either flowed into political channel.

Now, heroic exertions, once confined mainly to

the hunt, were applied to the entire physical
environment
What one singularly self-assured man dared to
dream of, under favor of the gods, a whole city
obedient to his will might do.
Aspects of Transformation: The Rise of
Civilization

• expansion of human energies,

• enlargement of human ego,
• for the first time detached from its immediate
communal envelope the differentiation of common
human activities into specialized vocations,
• expression of the expansion and differentiation at many
points in the structure of the city.
 To interpret what happened in the
city, one must deal equally with
techniques, politics, and religion, above
all 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

Surviving monuments and records show that this

general magnification of power was accompanied by
equally exorbitant images, issuing from unconscious,
transposed into the “eternal” forms of art.
 As we have seen, the formative stages of
this process possibly took many thousand of
years

The final outbreak of inventions that

attend the birth of the city probably happened
within a few centuries
 As far as the present record stands, grain
cultivation, the plow, potter’s wheel, the sailboat, draw
loom, copper metallurgy, abstract mathematics, exact
astronomical observation, the calendar, writing and
other modes came into existence at roughly the same
time, around 3000 b.C

This constituted a singular technological expansion

of human power whose only parallel is the change that
has taken place in our time.
 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 lived in fact in an exploding universe of
mechanical and electronic invention. This technical
explosion has produced a similar explosion of the city
itself.

The city has burst open and scattered its complex

organs and organizations over the entire landscape.
 Our civilization is running out of control,
overwhelmed by its own resources and opportunities,
as well as its super abundant fecundity.

Just the opposite happened with the first great

expansion of civilization: instead of an explosion of
power, there was rather a implosion.
 As an immediate outcome of the new
power mythology, the machine itself had been
invented:

The city was the container that brought about

this implosion, through its very form held together
the new forces, intensified their internal reactions, and
raised the whole level of achievement.
 This implosion happened at the very moment
that the area of intercourse was greatly enlarged.

Under pressure of one master institution,

kingship, a multitude diverse social particles, were
brought together in a concentrated urban area.
 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. This figure assumed superhuman
proportions: all his powers and prerogatives became
immensely magnified, while those of his subjects who
no longer had the will of their own or could claim any
life apart from that of the ruler, were correspondingly
diminished.
 The most important agent in effecting the change
from a decentralized village economy to a highly
organized urban economy, was the king , or rather, the
institution of Kingship.
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.

His rule made a decisive change in their form and

contents.