A city is a collective artefact, made of many buildings and spaces designed by a variety of architects, builders, craftsmen, and patrons. In some cases, like Venice or Katmandu, cities have such a wealth of architectural expression that they strike one as total works of art (that is in fact the exact expression Marcel Duchamp used to describe Manhattan in 1913). This course is not specifically about how to appreciate a city as a work of art, though there will be many moments when it verges on the things that interest tourists. The course is more pointedly about something much more serious than the aesthetic value of urban form, which in itself is a serious matter--at the core, the course is about the ethical implications posed by cities and the responsabilities that go with them. Word clusters such as urban/urbanity, civic/civilization, polis/politics are indications of how deeply engrained the city is in the foundations of culture and society. The city is thus a collective artefact that is the site of cultural conditions, the setting for almost everything that will be remembered, and in this cities are inseparable from history.
This course might best be categorized as a survey of Urban History, which is an emerging field of study that hovers astride Geography, Sociology, Anthropology, and History, and is devoted specifically to the subject of cities. I have left out architecture in this consortium of urban history, you might notice, and so we should ask why is the course offered in an architecture curriculum, and now even required for architecture graduate students? Let us say that urban history is more than of passing interest to the architect, but also add that because of its economic, sociological, and political tangents should not remain the exclusive concern of architects, but in fact be a problem for all those who consider themselves citizens. (In the Chicago public High Schools during the first part of this century, the course in civics consisted called the Wacker Manuel that was a study of the Burnham Plan.)
If an architect's tasks can be ordered in this series of priorities: get a job, maintain an office, deal with contractors, deal with codes, design something of aesthetic value it would be leaving out an important imperative: respond to the city. The city is an aggregation of legal, social, and environmental complexities that necessarily condition all works of architecture, eventually even those outside of the city. Conversely, the form of the city is to some degree the mandate of architects, although the extent of this varies from place to place, and architects have a responsibility as form makers of affecting the nature of aa city's institutions, social relations, and cultural identity.
Rather than propose a "history of the city" ˆ la Lewis Mumford, I prefer to underline the fundamental differences that every city possesses despite any admissable formal or institutional similarities. As much as I admire Mumford, whose breadth of knowledge and use of language was among the richest of this century, the presentation of urban history as a logical development from one thing to the next contradicts the synchronic nature of cities: that is that urban events in different places do not occur in orderly sequences but in overlapping, simultaneous, or contradictory ones. Thus it is important to declare a certain interdependence between the cities and history, because the latter is most conventionally treated diachronically, where one thing inevitably follows the next.
Sigmund Freud in Civilization and its Discontents conjectured that the city of Rome might make a good analogue for the human mind, because like the mind it possesses the constant reference in simultaneity to different times and different realities. The city for Freud was like a theater of memory in which the palimsest-like architecture of Rome, with layer upon layer of history peeking through, was a way of visualizing the simultaneity of knowledge stuck in the memory. And all cities have this tendency to become a palimsest, even the most seemingly orderly and sterile new town. The flux of human existance and its political and technological impact on space occurs with such uncontrollable multiplicity, that a city is never coherent, it is never complete, its order is never respected, but instead it is constantly besieged by a set of simultaneous and contradictory transformations.
Still we might insist on studying urban history from the point of view of post cards because we are intrigued by the beauty of an urban setting such as Piazza Navona or the Dome of the Rock, and want to understand its form better. And there are a series of urban designs that belong to an architectural tradition, a canon if you like, that will be prominent in this course. Canonical works are important because they are important--this is one of those tautological curiosities, like Andy Warhol's interest in people who were famous just for being famous. The canonical works constitute a vocabulary of common references, where the initial aesthetic or historic value has become less important than the rhetorical value they have as something we all know about. The study of them in a merely formalist manner is helpful for such things as scale, dimension, materials, light, and organization, things that I feel are essential to an architect's background. But canonical works are always limiting, in both a formal and social way. Their prominence discriminates against other formal, and usually, class realities. So, while I will indulge in joyful descriptions of the Akropolis in Athens, the Piazza del Campo in Siena, the Washington Mall and other canonical spaces, I will insist that we try to peel behind the canon to expose other places.
What is a City?
We can define the word "city", without making reference to any particular city. The first suggestion is that it was a large concentration of people--a social entity. To this we might agree that it is also a physical entity as a collection of buildings, mostly dwellings. Then we might consider the city in terms of what it is not: it is not the country but separated from it usually by a defensive wall, and the people are not country people as they have diverse activities that corresponds to a division of labor. The city is also identified as a place that achieves its identity through monumentality. The architectural distinction of the city is in part a use and justification for its being the repository of the accumulation of surplus, for which it requires administration, laws, and language.
Mumford had many interesting definitions for the city, including calling it a "symphony". In The Culture of Cities (1937) he said it was "The point of maximum concentration for the power and culture of a community...the form and symbol of an integrated social relationship: it is the seat of the temple, the market, the hall of justice, the academy of learning." Giedion Sjoberg defines it without any reference to form as "a community of substantial size and population density that shelters a variety of non- agricultural specialists, including a literate elite." Arnold Toynbee thinks of it in more functionalist terms "a cluster of buildings with a dense population unable to raise its own food but able to supply goods and services to those in the country in exchange for food." Max Weber, one of the founders of modern sociology, distinguished Western cities from eastern (I believe erroneously) by explaining they had a fortification, a market, an independent court of justice, a related adminstrative hierarchy, and some form of political autonomy. One important point that you will read about in Kostof's definition of the city is that it is never alone, but part of a series of cities in which it fits according to hierarchical order.
Almost every serious definition of the city arrives at a point when it must be considered as both a social and a physical phenomenon. The ancient Roman terms for it give us the two intersecting categories of Urbs and Civitas: the first referring to morphology, the second to the social institutions. Put in more recent language, Kevin Lynch explains: "City forms, their actual function, and the ideas and values that people attach to them make up a single phenomenon." The other important ancient term,polis, although it derived from the word for fortress came to signify the administrative coherence of a city with its dependent countryside, better known as the citystate.
The Urban Process:
Spiro Kostof, who was my teacher and the one who has written the majority of the things you're going to read in this course, led me to a new understanding of the city. Rather than referring to it as a static thing, he often referred to it as a living process. The urban process was for him the way things change over time, but I have expanded on his term to try to catch every aspect of the city, and I would like to recite it to you in a fairly pedantic way as something we will rely upon throughout the course.
I find that every good definition has five points, one for each digit, and these are the five points of the Urban Process: 1) Geographical destiny 2) Socialization 3) the historic wave 4) spatial knowledge 5) built knowledge. By Geographical destiny I mean that the position of a city in terms of land and water forms and its spatial relationships to other cities determines its possibilities. The choices of how to deal with those possibilities are mostly resolved through the process of socialization, the way that people organize themselves and the institutions they invent to manage the distribution of surplus. But almost as uncontrollable as geography is the historic wave, the flux of events, such as wars, plagues, earthquakes, religious conversions, and such that are usually beyond the control of a city. As a form the city adapts to the dictates of its site but is shaped consciously by a knowledge of spatial precedents in a system of solids and voids. And the solids of this system are made according to local and sometimes external precedents of typologies, architectural elements, and materials, a lexicon of built knowledge.
So far these definitions of the city and the five points of the Urban Process do not satisfy a deeper understanding that we might call the "feeling" of the city. I know that from the suburbs of San Francisco I looked longingly at the city as a place of greater meaning, a place to belong to, a place that would give my soul a test of its validity. So, I am sympathetic to Mumford's more aulic definition of the city: "a product of time...the molds in which men's lifetimes have cooled and congealed giving lasting shape, by way of art, to moments that would otherwise vanish with the living and leave no means of renewal or wider participation behind them." That may sound a little preachy (and of course we shouldn't forget that Mumford left Manhattan and moved to a small town on the Hudson about the time this was written), but Mumford's concern in the 1950s, which parallels my own concern today, is that with the disappearance of the conventional forms of the city, we also risk losing collective civic, and even private ontological, values. Every history is impelled by some moral dilemma, and this is mine: to determine to what extent urban values can survive with new forms of urbanization. I have to recognize my own reliance on a metaphysical center in this study which is devoted to the theoretical ideal of justice produced by the polis, and at the same time admit that at this moment in time there can not be any such center but only its trace.
Origins of the City:
Any time you set out to define something you almost always defer a simple definition by seeking some explanations in its origins. Origins play a strange role in our system of knowledge, almost as if the discovery of a primeval state will link up with some residue of them that we carry in us; perhaps we ascribe to the evolutionists proposal that phylology or the development of the species, recapitulates ontology, the development of the being. Thus the conviction about origins usually becomes a legitimating projection on to the past about a present condition: the Flintstones if you like. This is particularly so in the case of cities since the origins of cities are mostly mythical. When I suggest that the origins of cities are mostly fictions, it may be of some comfort to consider that cities and written language appeared at the same time. The fact that one phenomenon serves the other has a certain symmetry. Aside from ancient archaeology, which can only reveal some things about which we can make educated guesses, we must rely on ancient literature to reconstruct the origins of cities.
The first thing that strikes you about the origin of the city is the antithetical presentation of it as an almost unfortunate necessity. In most ancient mythologies, the golden age was set in the pre-urban past: the garden of Eden, the Elesian fields, and other natural paradises came before cities. The illud tempus, for classical civilisation was pastoral, gathering acorns and drinking honey mead: these were times before cities, before writing, and before social strife; probably boring times, with no history, but allegedly very peaceful. The pre-urban golden age is a mythological synopsis of the memory of the neolithic hunter-gatherer existence.
What interrupted the happy idyll, and when was the first city built? Archaeologists can point to Jericho a stone-walled cluster of mud buildings that housed several thousand people around 8000 BC and Catal Huyuk an even larger settlement of mud buildings in Anatolia which flourished in the next millenium. The Bible on the other hand already invests the origins of the city with the ethical problem by attributing it to Cain, who was also the first farmer, and was sent off to build cities after murdering his brother Abel. It is generally agreed upon that the formation of cities was preceded by 1000 years of agricultural development and mastering of animal husbandry, the so-called agricultural revolution. The city is inconsciable without this first factor of agricultural surplus. But it is also inconsciable without this other factor we can call discord. Cain was the first founder of a city, which is an act of defense of surplus, which was a paranoid act in his case since he was the aggressor against his hunter-gatherer brother. The city's origin is steeped in fratricide (a pattern that will be repeated in Rome), a consequence of the sort of discord that only humans are capable of.
This brings us to that embarassing possibility that the city might be a negative development in human history. Despite the beauty and culture of cities, there are many times that this fratricidal heritage reemerges--causing us to spurn the cities for their injustice, filth, and corruption. Jean Jacques Rousseau in his Discourse on Inequality, (1755) considered natural man versus urban man, and social reformers ever since, including Marx, have based their amelliorative assumptions on the superiority of pre-urban settlement, when the values of community were strongest. Our own culture has produced one of the most compelling anti-urban tracts, Thoreau's Walden, and my own generation in the 1960s experienced a significant exodus back to the land with the hippie communes: community is good, but cities with their pollution, exploitation, and politics are bad. As the dirty dishes piled up, however, the civilizing structure of the city reasserted itself, and the hippies came back to sell real estate or teach courses in urban history.
Archaeologists, independently of the Bible and other legends, continue to shift the dates and sites of the earliest settlements: the remote past seems almost as uncertain as the remote future. Different types of cities began independently in at least 6 or 7 places around the globe: the already Jericho and Catal Huyuk around 8000-7000 BC; around 3,500BC in Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley, known as the fertile crescent; 2,550 in the Indus valley; 2000 in China; 1,500 in pre-colombiian America; and 1000 in Black Africa (notice that Europe is missing--it was the product of later colonization). Most of these primordial cities were linked to a river. Some of them served purely religious functions. All of them existed because of a surplus, and created a class to administer and defend that surplus, the heirs of Cain, from whence the eternal cycle of inequality and fratricide plagues us.
The origin of cities is about as arbitrary as the origin of language: one is always caught in the dilemma of whether thought preceded language or whether language is necessary to produce thought. I like to believe, in my fictional pre-historic city, that the first coherent sentences were connected to courtship rituals. There can be no doubt that it is in matter of sexuality, that humans distinguish themselves from all other species. We are the only ones that can, and in some cases do, have sex all year round-- the only ones who take pleasure in it, and the only ones to have found ways of prolonging the pleasure. We are also the only ones who can think about it...plan it...even talk ourselves out of it. What did our proto- linguistic forebears think about?...I'd say, and so would Fred Flintstone probably, the same thing that we do (this goes for sexual repression as well, when we are thinking up ways of not thinking about sex--we nonetheless are thinking about it).
The City of Women:
After the long process of hominization was concluded about 25,000 years ago, we could envision a matriarchal society, a theory of human development according to a refeminized version of prehistory first proposed by Johan Jacob Bachofen in the mid-19th century in his study called Mother Right, and popularized in Robert Graves's hallucinatory dip into mythology inThe White Goddess, but more recently codified in books like When God was a Woman by Merlin Stone. This theory of matriarchy is corroborated by depictions of the great Mother, or the great Goddess, found in most neo- lithic cultures until around the third Millenium BC. The powerful role of the great goddess might be a remembrance of the female's primary role in the move toward the sort of settlement we call civilization which was dependent on the transformation of human sexuality (something discovered by Jane Goodall in her study of apes): by gaining control of the estrus cycle, and being able to stay in heat all of the time, the neolithic woman extended her control over men through perpetual availability, and brought stability, through the steady squeeze, to establish the social unit.
In the refeminized version of pre-history, women were also the first farmers and the first architects and city-builders. The descent from the forest to the plains resulted in a mix of hunting and gathering and primitive agriculture. Women gave birth, built homes, and planted; men, from the start caught in the destiny of the Oedipus complex, were naturally inferior, uncertain of their role in the reproductive cycle, and as lonely hunters sought support in male bonding. They kept in motion, devotedly bringing back their catch in service to the stable great Mother--and their uncles, the castrated priests. This matrilineal culture continued for thousands of years in the slow transition from mixed sources of food to purely agrarian societies. Catal Huyuk, a great ceremonial center, was a city of 10,000 people, held sacred by these groups of hunters and gatherers in Anatolia (Southern Turkey) from 7,000-5,000 BC. It is a city at the transition from nomadic to stable agricultural. The religion was conservative, honoring the great Mother, and thus many would like to understand it as a stronghold of matrilineal society, a city of women. The city itself was non-agricultural and thrived on tribute. The houses, many containing votive shrines, were built one adjoining the next with contiguous walls, a continuous fabric of cells, so that there were no spaces left for streets in between the houses, and no doors or windows, one entered the house from the roof--such a configuration is in fact related back to the body and corroborates the feminine analogue in architecture that is found in many West African villages today--the houses of Catal Huyuk were like wombs. It is thus possible to have a city without streets, and without city walls (as Le Corbusier desired) and perhaps even a city without men, such as in the nearby agricultural town of Halicar, which produced only images of females.
With the ascendence of agriculture and the regular planting of grain crops, the hunters began to lose their function, males were now totally superfluous, and instead of hunting they took to marauding, to stealing the surplus production of other cities, to kidnapping and raping the women and making them their slaves--in effect they began to overcompensate for their obvious inferiority as non-childbearing members of society. The military leader of these brigands becomes the first Father, conveniently represented by the Giant of Cerne Abbis who is waving his shalaily while sporting a quite proud erection, and the aggressive theory of patrilineal superiority overthrows the supposedly peaceful reign of the great Mother. The values of the womb that had nutured society, were torn apart by the spear and other tools of the Bronze age. Phallocentric culture proceded irreversibly until the present.
Mesopotamia:
The first great urban culture, to which Western tradition clings tenaciously is that of the Semitic peoples in the Fertile Crescent. Cities moved down the Tygrus and Euphrates valley in search of more fertile and more peaceful surroundings. From 5000-3500 BC the practices of agriculture were refined, the plow introduced, irrigation rationalized, the means of transportation by sailboat and by cart regularized for trade, crafts such as pottery, metallurgy and weaving accompany this. These agriculturally based cities grew increasingly complex: leading to the stabilization of language: writing, math, the calendar, and observable natural phenomena such as astronomy were the outcome of new needs.
The increased specialization of language was necessitated by the new tasks developed in Mesopotamia. To insure successful crops two things had to be done: irrigation canals, requiring mass labor and planning, and the intervention of the city god, which required a specialized priesthood. Whether religion was the force that duped people to forego their individual gain for the collective or the consequence of their collective struggle cannot be proven. But the city will always be the site of a genius loci, a god of the place, who has a power greater than that of mere mortals. Language was now needed to consolidate and administer social relations. The map of Nippur ca.1500 shows the canal and walls that required collective effort. The depiction of Nimrud ca.900 shows the crafts specialization, the division of labor, in an idealization of city form--The city is represented as the crossroads in the circle, which was also the pictogram used by the Egyptians to represent the notion of city.
The source of language, the priesthood, was elevated above the rest of the built environment. And it is here in reconstructions of places like Kafaje that we can observe architecture used as a kind of language to express the order of the city. The priesthood was separated spatially by the walled precinct, or temenos, (as the Greeks called it), and their compound was distinguished by its special materials (baked brick) and the verticality of pleated walls. The political order of the early Mesopotamian citystates is often referred to as theocratic socialism: the temple controlled the agricultural surplus in a central granary, a superior class of priests decided how to distribute both wealth and labor. We know a little about societal organization from temple records at Lagash: 1200 people doing specialized tasks from religious services to crafts such as baking, weaving, and woolworking, were maintained by a larger population of tenant farmers, obliged by a feudal bond to the temple. In Ur, the dates of whcih range from 2800 BC-1700, the city allegedly had a population of 34, 000, and administered a territory of citystate had half million.
There were at least 11 cities with populations greater than 10,000 in 3rd millenium Sumeria. They each belonged to a god, the genius loci--according to some legends the god actually built the city. When priests began to be treated as kings, they did such things as communicate personally with the god to receive the plan of the temple or build the new walls. The city and its forms were legitimated by a holy covenant. The architecture helped turn the city into a system of communication in which religious ritual would reaffirm the necessity of the social order. As interpretted by Mircea Eliade the temple, such as the great Ziggurat at Ur, recreated a tangible vision of the cosmological order. The great ziggurat, an artificial mountain that recalled the sacred natural places of the hill people who had descended to the alluvial plains, establishes the center of the world, the axis mundi. From this high point, the dominant members of society have access to the city god, forging the necessary link between heaven and earth that will ensure that fertility and prosperity continues. Proximity to this center is relative to the social hierarchy, kings, highpriest, soldiers, artisans, slaves.
Outside the walls of the temenos is profane space. Outside the walls of the city is chaos. At Ur, when the great Ziggurat was built under the king Urnammu in 1700, the great walls of the city were 26 feet high and 77 thick, and served both as defense against the marauding hill people, and as a sacred reminder of community.
Two sections of Ur have been excavated showing the streets and plans of its dwellings. The streets were quite narrow, ca. 7 feet wide, and not dissimilar from the two camel widths that serves as the standard in many traditional arabic cities built in our millenium. Although the street patterns of Ur seem fluid and natural like the course of a stream, we must acknowledge that some degree of planning existed. On cuneform tablets, evidence of zoning codes have been found, with uncompromizing clauses such as "he who blocks the street with his house will die; he who builds overhangs his heart will hang heavy." There is also evidence, at the place marked Baker's Square, that buildings were demolished to provide open space--a primitive form of eminent domain. The corners of the houses at the intersections have been rounded to facilitate movement, perhaps a further public gesture, although it may have happened as a wearing down of adobe by corner cutters. The houses of this allegedly middle class district had shops at the front and 13-14 rooms arranged around an open court. It is in Ur that we have the first evidence of the courtyard house, a typology that will be assimilated throughout the Mediterrean as well as in the other direction. Some of the houses were two stories; they had no windows and opened up only to the court. They were not markedly different from traditional houses in the middle East today, which for the climate tries to keep things narrow and shaded.
Already in a place like Ur we can deduce an urban language of the sort that Kevin Lynch theorized in the 1960s, that is to have a cognitive sense of the city one recogonizes paths lined with familiar elements, such as the shop lined streets. The paths cross at nodes and the intersections become points of reference. The areas of the city are distinguished by their edges, such as the walls of the temenos, or the boundaries of the open space of Bakers square. The edges held set off districts of the city, discrete areas that have their own identity. And finally a full sense of identity is gained through the presence of architectural landmarks, such as the Ziggurat or the city walls, which because of their scale or character set up a visual hierarchy that helps one get oriented in the city.
I want to conclude this very sketchy presentation of first cities, and the possibility that they followed a language of urban form that was developing in tangent with a literary and administrative language with that strange Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, which seems to moralize about the fact that the city's form and the city's language were bound in an act of hubris to threaten the godhead. The story occurs somewhat out of sequence in the bible and could be a reference to Abraham leaving Ur or to the hated neo-Babylonians of a thousand years later who also built a ziggurat. :"..let us build a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the earth. The lord said "behold the people is one and they have all one language, and this they begin to do, and now nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do. Let us go down then, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech...and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel"
This is surely one of the greatest puns in literature. It demonstrates the power of the city to organize itself through language and to create built statements. The city depends on language and the city is a language, and its power of constant transformation poses a theological threat, since god never changes but men do. The tower of Babel is the quintessential parable of hubris, and truly an architect's problem. We have continued to build the tower of Babel, especially since the cybernetic revolution has unified our language, and the consequences are probably equally frightening to a god that does not want to change. Hubris is the constant temptation of city builders, and language remains the only means of controlling it. That is why history is important to the problem of the city, this place to be negotiated, that we will attempt to redefine each week.
Sources
Spiro Kostof, The City Shaped, London, 1991.
Kevin Lynch, Good City Form, Cambridge, 1981.
Kevin Lynch, Image of the City, Cambridge, 1960.
Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities, New York, 1938.
Gideon Sjoberg, "The Origin and Evolution of Cities," 1965.
Max Weber, The City, New York, 1958 (published in German, 1921).
William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, Mythology, Sexuality, and the Origins of Culture, New York, 1981.
J. J. Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right, Princeton, 1967.
Robert Graves, The White Goddess, London, 1948.
Jane van Lawick-Goodall, In the Shadow of Man, New York, 1971.
Paul Lampl, Cities and Planning in the Ancient Near East, New York,
1968.
Henri Frankfurt, "Town Planning in Ancient Mesopotamia, " Town Planning Review,
Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return or, Cosmos and History,
Princeton, 1954.
Richard Ingersoll