What Is

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 Austin Williams

On the 75th anniversary of Lewis Mumford’s

rhetorical essay ‘What is a City?’, Austin
Williams asks whether we risk defining cities
out of existence.
It is 75 years since the great urban theorist and historian Lewis Mumford posed the
question, ‘What is a City?’, to which he replied that ‘in its complete sense [it] is a
geographical plexus, an economic organization, an institutional process, a theater
of social action, and an aesthetic symbol of creative unity’.1 In essence, it is a place
of movement and flux, reflecting temporal intangibility while at the same time
representing something indefinably sensate.
In 1905 the Modernist writer Ford Madox Ford posed a similar question. After
completing a number of forays into and around London – by bicycle, on foot, by bus
– he asked himself, ‘What is London?’, and replied, with remarkable candour, that
he still did not know. For all his exploration, he was none the wiser and could only
describe it as the ‘apotheosis of modern life’2 where change, the essence of the city,
was to be recognised, celebrated and embraced.
Contrary to Mumford’s celebration of movement and flux, it would seem that
the contemporary condition is one of stasis and risk aversion. And instead of Ford’s
joyous faith in modernity and its future orientation, today it is the modern world
that is frequently cited as the cause of society’s ills. After all, ‘future-proofing’3 is the
new urban buzzword, where the core concerns of the present seem to be to mitigate
the potential harms to come. The contemporary condition of being fearful of the
future and suspicious of our own motivations for wanting to get there is not the best
starting point to be able to change things for the better.
In Mumford’s classic The City in History4 he describes the city as a place
of civilisation. For him, cities caused humans to emerge from their barbarous
relationship with nature and develop an ordered, cultured, social stability. Compare
that with Alan Weisman’s more recent, misanthropic account that complains
that humans ‘vainly or disingenuously pretend’5 that civilisation has dominion
over nature. It seems that in a relatively short space of time, we have gone from
celebrating man’s ability to creatively transcend natural barriers, to a depressingly
widespread belief that human hubris is inherently, or inevitably, harmful.
As such, the physical environment has become deified; its abstraction reified.
One extreme variation of this tragic agrarian mindset are CJ Lim’s Smart-Cities6 that
envisage a form of spiritual salvation through urban agriculture. But even the more
mainstream concept of the ‘compact city’ reflects the environmental anxieties and
limits that dominate public debate these days.
With a less adventurous – or, some might say, a more fearful – frame of reference
taking hold in society since Mumford’s day, modern urban commentators and
practitioners prefer to wallow in the comfort blanket of their surroundings rather
than to challenge them.

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 This kind of Western defensiveness, materialist contrition or self-loathing concerning
modernity is also reflected in a reverence for the developing world which, we
are constantly informed, has much to teach us, particularly on the question of
our relationship to nature, our pace of life, and a general humility towards urban
development. Such naive romanticism is a common feature in writings about
ubiquitous sustainable developments. Musheireb, a new town in Doha, for example,
is heralded for being built at a sedate pace, and proudly looking ‘to traditional
wisdoms’.7 One commentator notes that Masdar City in Abu Dhabi is ‘not an
urban center but a sustainable village (that) employs low-cost, environmentally
sound technologies … to sustain what is essentially village life’.8 Ostensibly, these
comments signal an urban regression, not an urban renaissance. Development,
progress and mobility are meant to sweep away the reliance on custom, tradition
and the rootedness to ‘place’.
Unfortunately, Richard Florida hopes that such an infatuation with local simplicity
will increasingly exert a ‘powerful influence’ over ‘our “mating markets” and our
ability to lead happy and fulfilled lives’.9 The consequential dissolution of cities into
localisms – urban villages, sustainable communities, insular neighbourhoods, Big
Lunches and small changes – is a parochial slap in the face to the metropolitan
mindset needed to maintain the ambition of urban life as a dynamic going concern.
London is now a hotbed of insular communities, paranoid environmentalists,
anti-mobility advocates, conservation activists, defensive developers, austerity
counsellors, navel-gazing psycho-geographers and urban memory consultants; all
looking for certainty, but paradoxically merely reinforcing the concept of risk aversion
and limits to growth.10
It is all a far cry from Madox Ford’s celebration of uncertainty and life without
boundaries. ‘England,’ he said, ‘is a small country. The world is infinitesimal
amongst the planets. But London is illimitable.’11 If only we had such confidence
today, what cities we could build. 1

Notes
1. Lewis Mumford, ‘What Is a City?’, Architectural Record, LXXXII,
November 1937, p 94.
2. Ford Madox Ford, The Soul of London: A Survey of a Modern
City, Everyman (London), 1995, p 111.
3. John Punter, Urban Design and the British Urban Renaissance,
Taylor & Francis (London), 2009, p 350.
4. Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its
Transformations, and Its Prospects, Harcourt, Brace & World (New
York), 1961.
5. Alan Weisman, The World Without Us, Virgin Books (London),
2008, p 98.
6. CJ Lim and Ed Liu, Smart-Cities and Eco-Warriors, Routledge
(Abingdon), 2010.
7. Ibid, p 26.
8. Geeta Pradhan and Rajesh K Pradhan, ‘Hybrid Cities: A Basis
for Hope’, The Bridge: Earth Systems Engineering 31: 1, Spring
2001, p 22.
9. Richard Florida, Who’s Your City? How the Creative Economy is
Making the Place Where You Live the Most Important Decision of
Your Life, Basic Books (Toronto), 2008.
10. L Owen Kirkpatrick and Michael Peter Smith, ‘The
Infrastructural Limits to Growth: Rethinking the Urban Growth
Machine in Times of Fiscal Crisis’, International Journal of Urban
and Regional Research, Vol 35, No 3, May 2011, pp 477–503.
11. Ford Madox Ford, op cit, p 15.

ZEDfactory, BedZed, Wallington, 2002

Today, the Walking City refers to a city in
which one is forced to walk.

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 Ron Herron, Walking City, 1964
Here, the Walking City refers to an urban
future in which the city walks for us.

a City? Text © 2012 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images:

pp 66, 69 © Simon Herron; p 68 © BioRegional/
Marcus Lyon

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