Cities and Civilization: the book as doorstop

Cities in Civilization, by Peter Hall

Cities have a magic. Approaching a big city – London, Paris, or Berlin – by train slowly reveals the vast extent of a big city, the division into older and newer zones, and the sheer excitement of such a vast number of people co-existing.

But just as cities are vast, so to write about them threatens to get lost in the sheer scale of the exercise. The study of cities is such a vast topic that it threatens to become overwhelming. Why some cities are more successful than others, why cities have a golden age, why some cities appear to decline and die, will have many reasons, and few writers would dare venture to comment on such great themes.

Peter Hall (1932-2014) is not someone to shirk such a challenge. Cities in Civilization, over a thousand pages long, includes all the usual candidates for the most famous city in world history (Athens, Florence, Paris) but then adds a lot more besides. Hall’s theme is actually “how creativity comes about” – and Hall claims that creativity, and golden ages, take place in cities.

I admit here I haven’t read the book – only a few specific sections. But to be honest, I would look suspiciously at anyone who claims to have read it from cover to cover. I’m not against wide-ranging books, but this one seems to take the whole of human civilization as its theme – as, I suppose, the title Cities in Civilization would suggest. That makes it rather unwieldy. Perhaps Hall is just running out of book titles including the name “city”. He is already the author of The World Cities, Cities of Tomorrow, Good Cities, Better Lives. Hall’s obituary in The Guardian states he authored more than 50 books. I trust they are not all as wide-ranging as this one. I think the intention is that we, the readers, are so impressed by the scale and the range of the references that the argument is accepted without question.

Any book that includes Halliwell’s Film Guide in its bibliography, and has index references to Bill Gates, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Ella Fitzgerald, and Bill Haley, is casting its net wide. Just how do you compile such a vast work of over 1,000 pages, with an index containing over 4,000 references? Well, you credit a lot of research assistants (including your wife as a research assisant for six years [p.viii]. And you inevitably base a lot of your ideas on secondary writing, or on commonly held assumptions (also known as hearsay). To be honest, it is difficult to marshall so many co-writers and such a vast topic. Hall’s book (it’s not the only book with this fault) suffers from what I would describe as over-inflation. It’s a bit like a concert by a virtuoso violinist, who is desperate to show how capable they are. Not only does Hall write over a thousand pages of text, but he references everything, as if citations make any argument sufficiently rigorous. I like citations, but I do object to gratuitious references. Out of curiosity, I looked up references to Joseph Schumpeter in the text; I wasn’t sure of his link to cities, but he did write about “creative destruction”. On page 295 Hall discusses Schumpeter’s concept of innovation, and his idea of business cycles. Hall states: “this is not the place to re-enter into detail into that controversy, which I have discussed at length elsewhere” (although Hall spends the next two pages explaining it). Quite correctly, Hall includes a citation to where he has discussed this point; but when you consult the citation, Hall lists twelve separate referenced titles, only two of which are by Hall himself. And none of those referenced titles include a page number! Where in the other ten books (many of them published before Hall was writing) has Hall discussed this point? Is this one rogue reference, or are they all equally vague?

I start to lose confidence in this book’s ability to track such wide references.  Is this a work of scholarship or is it, to use Hall’s disparaging comparison, merely “journalism”? To be fair, many of the notes include specific page references, but this is a kind of war of attrition on the reader – with over 50 pages of notes, along the lines of 3,000 citations in all. Few readers would dare question such an edifice; even Hall calls the notes “interminable” [p8].

In light of the above, I became rather more relaxed at commenting on Hall's mighty tome. 

The thesis

What is Hall arguing?  The argument seems quite clear from the organisation into five books. Book One looks at “cultural or artistic creativity”, and presents the usual suspects of the famous cities in world history: Athens, Florence, Paris 1870-1910, Weimar Berlin. Interestingly, Hall associates golden ages not just with the arts and culture but with technological innovation as well. “These two great modes of innovation, long since seen as separate and contraposed, ave become one” [p5]. Hall argues that the innovation he describes includes identifying ways in which humans can live in cities more efficiently. Of course, what “efficient” means has varied with civilizations.

Fundamentally, Hall takes issue with Lewis Mumford’s The Culture of Cities. According to Hall, Mumford thought great cities were doomed: Megalopolis was destined to become Necropolis, strangled by its urban entrails. Instead, for Hall, cities can reinvent themselves.

Hall, incidentally, has no doubt of his own place compared with other writers – considerably beyond Lewis Mumford, who “lacked long-term direct everyday knowledge of the quality of life” in London, Paris and other European cities” [p6] (does Hall have less superficial knowledge of cities, despite having travelled thousands of miles every year?). But that is not enough to dismiss Mumford: “despite the evident breadth of his reading, Mumford was fundamentally a brilliant polemical journalist, not a scholar.” I’m sorry, but for me scholarship is using citations and references properly. And even then, for every ten scholars who can cite properly, there is only one who can argue convincingly. For me, “journalist” is not a term of condemnation, and Cities in Civilization veers close to journalism in many ways. 

Is there a magic formula for a great city? No. “I want to argue that no one kind of city, nor any one size of city, has a monopoly on creativity or the good life; but the biggest and most cosmopolitan cities … have throughout history been the places that ignited the sacred flame of the human intelligence and the human imagination.” So, bigger is certainly better. That’s odd, because the comparative population of cities in the golden ages described by Hall are:

London, 1600: 200,000

Florence, 1500: 50,000

Athens, 450 BC: 250,000

Manchester, 1800: 95,000

[all figures taken from Wikipedia]

Clearly, size did not then correlate with cultural prestige, although that may be more true today. Nonetheless, there are today over 100 cities in China with a population of over one million, and I would be very hesitant to make any judgement about  how many of them represented cultural centres.

Arguing over details

We can all agree on classical Athens and Renaissance Florence, but Paris 1870-1910? In the visual arts, yes, but you could argue that the best French writers (Flaubert, Baudelaire) predated 1870. Madame Bovary was published in 1856. I am not a slave to periodization, but I do object when dates are suggested that seem to have spurious precision. Hall’s case studies (seven in total) “treat the major high arts … as well as the broader intellectual life”. Nothing if not ambitious!

But to separate cities in this way is questionable. You could argue that Florence’s artistic success was as much economic as artistic – for artists to flourish required a steady stream of commissions from wealthy merchants. And in political terms, Florence was a disaster. Its system of rule by committee had disastrous results, with a constant risk of invasion. The switch to the Medici rule, you could argue, guaranteed Florence’s long-term decline into a cultural (and economic) backwater that it remains as today.

Book Two then looks at centres of technological and economic innovation: Manchester, Glasgow, Berlin (again), Detroit, Silicon Valley. These are “cities where people had to earn their living the hard way” [p9] (was that not true of the cities in Book One? You feel that Hall has over-reached himself, and for all his vast knowledge of urban planning, is stating broad generalisations that can easily be challenged.

Book Three considers Los Angeles and Memphis, and describes the popular art forms created by outsiders, in Hollywood, many of them first-generation immigrants. Here is a fascinating theme.

Book Four is about “urban innovation”, “the capacity of cities to solve their own problems”. For me, this book would address what I noticed after living in Turin and Milan, and then visiting Rome for the first time. Rome was (and is) an official capital, but did not appear to me to be a fully vibrant capital of living culture as were Turin and Milan. Rome appears to me to be a city that fails to solve its own problems, and has failed to solve them for some hundreds of years.

Finally, Book Five, ostensibly about twentieth-century city planning, dreams about “the union of art, technology and organization”.  Hall discusses how cities “achieve urban order in order to survive, to compete, to thrive”.

History is the history of great men

Hall’s book suffers from the “great man thesis” [it’s always a man]. Can we learn about the world by studying what the great men did? You would think such an approach discredited, at least since the sinister implications of Carlyle’s idea of heroes, yet business books continue to be published in their thousands suggesting that if we only study one great man (Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Henry Ford, Richard Arkwright) we can learn great things. As early as page 11 sees Hall drifting into the world of great people:

"There is one study that is centrally relevant: Howard Gardner, a psychologist, has analysed the lives of seven highly creative twentieth-century individuals: Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi. He asks, “Where is creativity?”  

Is this relevant to cities or to civilization? A further problem with the “great men” approach is that the writing becomes superficial, based not just on secondary sources but on one or two writers only for each field. So we aren’t to trust Hall on all the details, only on “how their separate analyses and conclusions could fit into a general scheme”. That requires quite a bit of trust on the reader’s part.

I suspect I am being unkind to Peter Hall. He has authored some of the most famous books on urban planning in the last fifty years (see an interview in the The Guardian for some examples). But Cities in Civilization is not, I think the culmination of a career. Perhaps it is the kind of book a famous scholar dreams about writing at the end of their career; when they can relax and muse about such impossible-to-answer topics as your favourite city. But for most of us, a book a quarter of the size might have been better.