C O N T E X T 1 5 0 : J U L Y 2 0 1 7 39 Towns and cities in history Notes from the chair The year 1961 was a propitious one for sustainable urbanism. It saw the publication of three important books with several characteristics in common: Lewis Mumford’s The City in History, Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities and Gordon Cullen’s Townscape. All three were highly influential at the time; they have all remained relevant to the present day to the extent that anyone involved in urbanism, urban politics, urban planning or urban design should consider them essential reading. Very readable they all are, being accessible to professional urbanists and the general reading public alike. A fourth common feature is the authors’ demonstration, in three contrasting ways, of how much historic urban environments can teach us about urban planning. All three expose the faults of post-war urban theory and practice which have, nonetheless, tended to continue in use to the present day. This rather sad fact means that to me, at least, all three might now be read somewhat pessimistically; and doubly sad because the standpoint of all three authors in 1961 was optimistic. The City in History is a tour de force. It is written in an engaging narrative style from the perspective of the personal experience of the author, making its arguments highly compelling. One thread, running through the whole book, is of particular importance for the present day. The successful city rises by its success as a marketplace and ultimately falls by the congestion that the successful marketplace brings. Mumford’s final paragraph on the fall of Rome gives rise to a sobering thought: ‘whenever crowds gather in suffocating numbers, whenever rents rise steeply and housing conditions deteriorate... these are symptoms of the end: magnifications of demoralized power, minifications of life… Necropolis is near.’ Thus successful urbanism must ultimately be based on the management of both the marketplace and congestion. Post-war urban theory had two schools of thought: centralist, which sought to accept the inevitability of the growth of the marketplace and to deal with urban congestion on the basis of predict and provide; and dispersalist, which sought to spread the marketplace to far-flung locations. Both approaches were tainted with futuristic visions such as those set out by Le Corbusier in The City of Tomorrow, despite the dispersal model also having roots in Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of To-morrow. Both models suffered from inadequate answers to the problems of congestion, particularly
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