Soc.

203 Urban Sociology

Lewis Mumford
(1895 – 1990)

The City in History (1961)

Chapter One:
SANCTUARY, VILLAGE, AND STRONGHOLD, pp. 3 -28

What is the city? (a living organism)

How did it come into existence?
What processes does it further: what functions does it perform: what purposes does it
fulfill?

 In paleolithic times the dead were the first to have a permanent dwelling

The city of the dead antedates the city of the living (Necropolis)

 Paleolithic man and the cave.

More important than its use for domestic purposes was the part that the cave played in art
and ritual (ceremonial centers).

For who can doubt that in the very effort to ensure a more abundant supply of animal food
—if that was in fact the magical purpose of painting and rite—the performance of art
itself added something just as essential to primitive man's life as the carnal rewards of the
hunt.

 the pyramid, the ziggurat, … the Christian crypt all have their prototypes in the
mountain
cave. Both the form and the purpose played a part in the ultimate development of the city.

In going back so far for the origins of the city, one must not of course overlook the
practical needs that drew family groups and tribes together seasonally in a common
habitat, a series of camp sites, even in a collecting or a hunting economy.

 villages at its base.

 note that two of the three original aspects of temporary settlement have to do with
sacred things, not just with physical survival:

they relate to a more valuable and meaningful kind of life, with a consciousness that
entertains past and future, apprehending the primal mystery of sexual generation and the
ultimate mystery of death and what may lie beyond death.

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As the city takes form, much more will be added: but these central concerns abide as the
very reason for the city's existence, inseparable from the economic substance that makes it
possible.

 Thus even before the city is a place of fixed residence, it begins as a meeting place to
which people periodically return: the magnet comes before the container, and this
ability to attract non-residents to it for intercourse and spiritual stimulus no less
than trade remains one of the essential criteria of the city, a witness to its inherent
dynamism, as opposed to the more fixed and indrawn form of the village, hostile to
the outsider.

 The first germ of the city, then, is in the ceremonial meeting place that serves as the
goal for pilgrimage: a site to which family or clan groups are drawn back, at
seasonable intervals, because it concentrates, in addition to any natural advantages it
may have, certain 'spiritual' or supernatural powers, powers of higher potency and
greater duration, of wider cosmic significance, than the ordinary processes of life.

 The first condition for an ample, reliable food supply arose in the mesolithic period,
perhaps fifteen thousand years ago.

 At this point the archaeologist begins to find definite traces of permanent

settlements, from India to the Baltic area: a culture based on the use of shellfish and
fish, possibly seaweed, and planted tubers, doubtless supplemented by other less
certain supplies of food. With these mesolithic hamlets come the first clearings for
agricultural purposes: likewise the earliest domestic animals, the household pets and
guardians…

 This process of settlement, domestication, dietary regularity, entered a second

stage, possibly ten or twelve thousand years ago. With this came the systematic
gathering and planting of the seeds from certain grasses, the taming of other seed
plants, like the squashes and the beans, and the utilization of herd animals, the ox,
the sheep, finally the ass and the horse.

 By one or another of these creatures, food, pulling power, and collective mobility
were increased.

 Neither phase of this great agricultural revolution could have come about, in all
probability, among chronic nomads: it needed something like the permanent
occupation of an area, prolonged enough to follow the whole cycle of growth, to
prompt primitive folk to have an insight into natural processes and to duplicate them
more systematically.

 Perhaps the central event in this whole development was the domestication of man
himself, itself an evidence of a growing interest in sexuality and reproduction.

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  What is called the agricultural revolution was preceded, very possibly, by a sexual
revolution: a change that gave predominance, not to the hunting male, agile, swift of
foot, ready to kill, ruthless by vocational necessity, but to the more passive female,
attached to her children…

 neolithic communities: Domestication in all its aspects implies two large changes:
permanence and continuity in residence, and the exercise of control and foresight
over processes once subject to the caprices of nature. With this go habits of gentling
and nurturing and breeding. Here woman's needs, woman's solicitudes, woman's
intimacy with the processes of growth, woman's capacity for tenderness and love,
must have played a dominating part.

 With the great enlargement of the food supply that resulted from the cumulative
domestication of plants and animals, woman's central place in the new economy
was established. Certainly 'home and mother' are written over every phase of
neolithic agriculture, and not least over the new village centers, at last identifiable in
the foundations of houses and in graves.

 In form, the village, too, is her creation: for whatever else the village might be, it was
a collective nest for the care and nurture of the young.

 By communal sharing of the care of the young, larger numbers could prosper.
Without this long period of agricultural and domestic development, the surplus of
food and manpower that made urban life possible would not have been forthcoming.

 And without the forethought and conscious moral discipline that neolithic culture
introduced in every department, it is doubtful if the more complex social co-
operation brought in with the city could have emerged.

 In primitive form, many urban structures and symbols were present in the
agricultural village: even the wall may have existed in the form of a stockade or
mound, if one can judge from much later evidence, as a protection against
marauding animals.

 Within such an enclosure children might safely play, otherwise unguarded; and at
night the cattle could rest unmolested by wolf or tiger.

 The order and stability of the village, along with its maternal enclosure and intimacy
and its oneness with the forces of nature, were carried over into the city: if lost in the
city at large, through its overexpansion, it nevertheless remains in the quarter or the
neighborhood. Without this communal identification and mothering, the young
become demoralized: indeed, their very power to become fully human may vanish,
along with neolithic man's first obligation—the cherishing and nurturing of life.

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  What we call morality began in the mores, the life-conserving customs, of the
village. When these primary bonds dissolve, …. secondary ties and allegiances
become too feeble to halt the disintegration of the urban community.

 With the village came a new technology: the masculine weapons and tools of the
hunter and miner

 The great fact about neolithic technics is that its main innovations were not in
weapons and tools but containers.

 Under woman's dominance, the neolithic period is pre-eminently one of containers:

it is an age of stone and pottery utensils, of vases, jars, vats, cisterns, bins, barns,
granaries, houses, not least great collective containers, like irrigation ditches and
villages. The uniqueness and significance of this contribution has too often been
overlooked by modern scholars who gauge all technical advances in terms of the
machine.

 With storage came continuity as well as a surplus to draw on in lean seasons. The
safe setting aside of unconsumed seeds for next year's sowing was the first step
toward capital accumulation.

 Mark how much the city owes technically to the village: out of it came, directly or by
elaboration, the granary, the bank, the arsenal, the library, the store. Remember,
too, that the irrigation ditch, the canal, the reservoir, the moat, the aqueduct, the
drain, the sewer are also containers, for automatic transport or storage. The first of
these was invented long before the city; and without this whole range of inventions
the ancient city could not have taken the form it finally did.

 Everywhere, the village is a small cluster of families... each with its own hearth, its
own household god, its own shrine, its own burial plot, within the house or in some
common burial ground.

 The embryonic structure of the city already existed in the village. House, shrine,
cistern, public way, agora—not yet a specialized market—all first took form in the
village: inventions and organic differentiations waiting to be carried further in the
more complex structure of the city.

 What holds for the general structure of the village also holds for its institutions. The
beginnings of organized morality, government, law, and justice existed in the village
Council of Elders.

 So with religion itself: it remained on the familiar, human level. Though each village
might have its local shrine and cult, common to all the neighbors, there was a further
diffusion of religious sentiment through totem and ancestor worship: each household

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 had its own gods as its true and inalienable property, and the head of the household
performed priestly functions of sacrifice and prayer.

 The gradations between neolithic villages and neolithic towns are so smooth, and the
points of resemblance so many, that one is tempted to take them as simply the
youthful and adult forms of the same species.

 This applies in large measure to its physical form, but not to its social institutions
may play an active part.

 we properly date the physical town from the later phases of neolithic culture, the
actual emergence of the city came as the ultimate result of an earlier union between
the paleolithic and the neolithic components. This union was brought about, by the
domestication of grains and the introduction of plow culture and irrigation.

 The final result was the coalescence of the whole group of institutions and controls
that characterize 'civilization.'

 Certainly the notion that paleolithic culture was wholly replaced by neolithic culture
is an illusion.

What, we must ask, happened to the paleolithic hunter when hoe cultivation
and tree culture made village settlement possible?

 Certainly coercion and persuasion, aggression and protection, war and law, power
and love, were alike solidified in the stones of the earliest urban communities, when
they finally take form. When kingship appeared, the war lord and the law lord
became land lord too.

 The city, was the union between neolithic and a more archaic paleolithic culture.

 This gave the city potentialities and capabilities that neither the hunter, the
miner, the stockbreeder, nor the peasant would ever, if left to themselves
in their regional habitat, have been able to exploit. Where hoe culture
supported hamlets, plow culture could support whole cities and regions.

 Where local effort could build only minor embankments and ditches, the
large scale co-operations of the city could turn a whole river valley into a
unified organization of canals and irrigation works for food production
and transport—shifting men, supplies, and raw material about, as need
dictated.

 Male symbolisms and abstractions now become manifest: they show themselves in
the insistent straight line, the rectangle, the firmly bounded geometric plan, the
phallic tower and the obelisk, finally, in the beginnings of mathematics and

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 astronomy, whose effective abstractions were progressively detached from the
variegated matrix of myth. It is perhaps significant that while the early cities seem
largely circular in form, the ruler's citadel and the sacred precinct are more usually
enclosed by a rectangle.

Each new component of the city, by the same token, has usually first appeared outside its
boundaries, before the city has taken it over.