“Highway and the City”
13 November 2007 | Share:
Lewis Mumford, 1962 (ninth printing)
Muschamp on Mumford
Perhaps because this is a collection of essays written over time (New Yorker “Skyline” columns and others) and not a single piece of art, this book feels utterly contemporary, as if it might have been a collection of website postings. For this we feel the immense power of Mumford; we see him range and hope and critique and express his most-well-conceived ideas. We also see him struggle and feel powerless.
And some of us see ourselves in his shadows.
The title of this book is immensely misleading. It isn’t a straightforward critique of suburbanization; by highway I believe Mumford means the instinct to blast through and destroy, for it is here he gives great shake to the instinct to preserve, to reflect on, and integrate and contrast a city’s history into its contemporary reality. As Philadelphia readers we are treated to four essays on the creation of Independence Mall in which his contemplates the destruction of the commercial heart of the city to form a monument. Here we get to see Mumford at his worst—
Generally, the first step in establishing a modern residential neighborhood is to eliminate half the streets and create a system of superblocks, turning the space so saved into gardens, green promenades, and playgrounds.
and best—
But the beauty must not be that of Williamsburg, a dead beauty preserved in embalming fluid. It must be a living beauty that strengthens its links with the past through successive acts of creation and that respects the needs and purposes of our own day without attempting to deform them in the mold of an earlier period.
Of course the thinking on display emerges from the same qualified Modernist instinct. To preserve and celebrate the old city he refuses to fetishize and mimic it; that’s a lesson we in Philadelphia are still learning. But Mumford is loud and clear and correct in his assessment of the highway, which he gets to at last in an essay on New York:
When the American people, through their Congress, voted a little while ago (1957) for a twenty-six-billion-dollar highway program, the most charitable thing to assume about this action is that they hadn’t the faintest notion of what they were doing. Within the next fifteen years they will doubtless find out; but by that time it will be too late to correct all the damage to our cities and countryside…
Looking back at 1957, as Mumford imagined the continuous development of Independence Mall, I leave the Philadelphia reader, especially, with this (oh, what 50 years will do):
Open minds, ready to face the future as boldly as William Penn did when he planned his city, are the main requisite. In the lively, confident atmosphere of present-day Philadelphia, such minds are not lacking, even in the business community, so perhaps history will yet be made there as well as remembered.