In the canon
The City in History
- Form
- Form Non-fiction
- Year
- Year 1961
- Pages
- Pages 660
Before the living had a permanent address, the dead did. Mumford opens on the cave and the cairn, the burial mound that drew wandering hunters back to one place, and from that single act of return he builds everything after it: the shrine, the granary, the wall, the citadel, the Greek city whose finest invention was not a building but the citizen, the baroque avenue cut straight for a prince's carriage and his cannon, the black industrial town that burned people like fuel.
The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art.
The blurb, the gist, the why of the day and the work itself are in the app. The first button needs it on this device; the second gets it there.