Cities in Civilization

Buy the book

Cities in Civilization: Culture, Innovation and Urban OrderPeter Hall, Weidenfeld and Nicholson 1998

This latest addition to the Peter Hall oeuvre is one of the most substantial items in that extraordinary output, now stretching to around thirty volumes. The title at once invites comparison with Lewis Mumford's The Culture of Cities (1938) and Hall confronts this in his opening chapter. Mumford argued that the vast urban areas that he christened 'Megalopolis' would inevitably destroy themselves, would "finally strangle in its own entrails". Hall declares boldly "I do not at all share the Mumfordian view". Instead he states his counter argument clearly - that the biggest and most cosmopolitan cities, for all their evident disadvantages and obvious problems, have throughout history been the places that ignited the sacred flame of the human intelligence and the human imagination".

To demonstrate his thesis Hall presents a vast historical survey organised in a highly original way. To convey the scope and interest of the work one cannot do better in a brief review than to itemise the contents, which are arranged in four 'Books'. Book One presents 'The City of Cultural Crucible', with Athens (500-400 BC), Florence (1400-1500), London (1570-1620), Vienna (1780-1910), Paris (1870-1910), Berlin (1918-1933). Each of these cities, Hall suggests, had a brief period of intellectual and artistic glory, a belle Žpoque, which was seldom repeated.

Book Two considers 'The City as Innovative Milieu' and parades a new cast of cities largely different from the first - Manchester (1760-1830), Detroit (1890-1925), San Francisco/Palo Alto/Berkeley (1950-1990), Tokyo-Kanagowa (1850-1950). Book Three on 'The Marriage of Art and Technology' shows how cities came to combine the artistic and technological cultures in a new kind of creativity - Los Angeles (1910-1945), Memphis (1948-1956). This is perhaps the weakest link in the argument, as those two places hardly showed the cultural diversity of the city despite their brief periods of fame. But it completes the historical panorama. Book Four adopts a different perspective and focuses on the physical development of the city and its governance. Thus we have Rome (50BC-AD100), London (1825-1900), Paris (1850-1870), New York (1880-1940), Los Angeles (1900-1980), Stockholm (1945-1980), London - now 'The City of Capitalism Rampant', (1979-1993). Book Four concludes with a chapter on 'The Achievement of the Urban Order' but this is not attributed to any one city.

Finally the last Book - 'The Union of Art, Technology and Organisation' - concludes with "The City of the Coming Golden Age'. The title suggests a somewhat Panglossian view or Romantic concept of the city, which tends to flavour the historical narrative. Those evocations of the golden ages of cities tend to obscure the sordid realities: Rome was built on slavery and imperial aggression, Manchester on child labour, London on a dunghill of slumdom and poverty. Hall does not totally ignore these aspects but they are not allowed to darken the glowing picture of abounding creativity and success. In this we see some parallels with the Rogers report Towards and Urban Renaissance (1999).

But this is unfair. The concluding sections of the book present a compendium of statistics that reveal the alarming concentrations of crime, poverty, deprivation, unemployment and worse, unemployability, that characterises the inner urban areas - the dark shadow around the glittering centre: in Hall's words "islands of affluence surrounded by seas of poverty and resentment". Hall quotes similar prognostications: Jeremy Rifkin foresees "rising levels of worldwide unemployment and the increasing polarisation between rich and poor (that) are creating conditions for social upheaval and open class warfare on a scale never before experienced in the modern age"; and William Mitchell foresees "well connected, well serviced, fortified enclaves of privilege surrounded by miserable hyperghettos".

Despite this, Hall tries to end his book on a positive note. He concludes that cities are "places for people who can stand the heat of the kitchen: places where the adrenaline pumps through the bodies of the people and through the street on which they walk; messy places, sordid places sometimes but places nevertheless superbly worth living in, long to be remembered and long to be celebrated". As he says, most of us have the choice - to live there or to get out. It is perhaps a bleaker message than he intended.

This is a huge book and it would have been kinder to the reader (and certainly to the reviewer) if the publisher had issued it as a series of separate volumes over four or five years. How eagerly we would have awaited the Peter Hall Cities Annual. Credit is due to the picture editor, Elaine Willis, whose original and entertaining selection of illustrations relieves the text and refreshes the exhausted reader.

(This review was first published in Urban Design Quarterly 73, January 2000 and is reproduced with the Editor's kind permission).