21JAN - Mumford & Jacobs

Lewis Mumford: What is a City ?

Jane Jacobs: The Uses of Sidewalks: Safety

Bara Safarova

Both Jane Jacobs (1916 - 2006) and Lewis Mumford (1895 – 1990) wrote about the city and what constitutes a city. They were both concerned with the quality of the cities of their times. Jacobs was a grassroot neighborhood activist, who caused near scandal when she published her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) in which she confronted the planning system and the large scale urban renewal projects of the time. Lewis Mumford was an American historian, sociologist, philosopher and literary critic who argued that those who designed the cities did not know what was the city's social function and thus created handicapped cities. Lewis in his article What is a City? travels back to Elizabethan London to find the definition of a city by 'an honest observer – not a city planner: City is where men by mutual society and companying grow to alliencies, commonalities and corporations.' He rephrases this to say that city is where primary groups (family) and secondary groups (companies, corporations, institutions) mutually economically support each other. Similarly to Jacobs, he finds that a 'social drama' is created and enacted in cities, not in rural areas. His main argument is that there is a limit to how many residences can feed on a social nuclei and that sprawl is damaging to the society.