In his book titled The City in History, Lewis Mumford examines the structure of the modern urban environment and developments that took place in the 19th century. The chapter titled “Paleotechnic Paradise: Coketown” focuses on the ways in which people have produced conditions mistakenly assumed to be natural- conditions that, in actuality, deny and destroy nature. Further, to maintain these conditions we were forced to move underground, compounding our distance from nature and our “own human center… and the arts of life” (pp. 481). Mumford goes into great detail describing the disease and filth present in the early modern city. It was only when conditions became unbearable that some effort was made by people to fix things, but the solutions they came up with only created different problems.
The obvious question is: what parallels can be drawn between these early modern cities and contemporary circumstances? Mumford says that the delay in fixing many of these problems was due to the cost, which ended up being even greater. What are some contemporary parallels? What were some of the consequences (political, economic and social) of the delay? Mumford explains that the new underground systems simply extended the unnatural, aboveground city humans had to live and work in. As Williams points out, however, underground passages have been seen throughout human history as a way to transcendence or a passage to a better life. For example, the term “underground railroad” was first used in the 1830’s in reference to the slaves’ passage to freedom. On the one hand, the physical underground we constructed seems to be a trap, but the term “underground” is a metaphor for the passage to a better life. How might we understand this apparent contradiction?
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