Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
congregate in large numbers; instead they reflect
a way of organizing society once the basics of
human survival are routinely satisfied. The key
to understanding the origins of cities is thus
recognizing that they enabled people who had
been freed from the all-encompassing responsi-
bilities of food production, home building and
reproduction to be engaged in more specialist
activities. It is in this context that Mumford (1961:
32) states that with the rise of cities historians
can see 'The expansion of human energies, the
enlargements of the human ego, perhaps for the
first time detached from its immediate communal
envelope the differentiation of common human
activities into specialized vocations'.
While urban centres have historically had
different functions (from centres of trade, to sites
of defence), Mumford argues that their defin-
ing function has been to enable the increasing
specialization of human work and activity. By
concentrating people and resources in one place,
urban centres enable people to develop expertise
(perhaps in carpentry or food processing, edu-
cation or banking). People could specialize in
such activities in cities for two reasons: 1) they did
not have to concern themselves on a daily basis
with food production; and 2) the dense and diverse
population of urban areas contained varied skills,
meaning it was possible for people to trade the
skills they had for the goods and services others
were able to offer.
The work of Mumford on the history of the
urban form has two key points of general note
for the themes running through this topic.
First, by connecting cities with human voca-
tional specialization, Mumford makes a clear
connection between the rise of cities and rise of the
type of technologically driven, scientifically
advanced civilization that is associated with the
Anthropocene. Without the early city of Ur there
could be no nuclear science; without Babylon no
digital technology. Second, Mumford's work
reveals the impacts that urbanization has had on
human-environment relations. At one level, cities
disconnect people from the intimate relations that
people had with nature in early agricultural and
pre-agricultural societies. At another level, the
types of specialist skills people developed in cities
enabled them to acquire further command over the
environmental resources that surrounded them.
Ironically, perhaps, one of the first major impacts
of urbanization on human-environment relations
was the development of more advanced and ambi-
tious agricultural techniques. Mumford (1961:
30) observes:
This new urban mixture resulted in an
enormous expansion of human capabil-
ities in every direction. The city effected
a mobilization of man-power, a command
over long distance transportation, an in-
tensification of communication over long
distances in space and time, an outburst of
invention along with a large scale develop-
ment of civil engineering, and, not least,
it promoted a tremendous further rise in
agricultural productivity.
Despite the profound implications of early
patterns of urbanization for human-environment
relations, it was not until the nineteenth cen-
tury that urbanization started to become a
dominant force within human social, economic
and environmental relations. With the indus-
trial revolution taking hold in places such as
Great Britain, France, Germany and the US, the
nineteenth century witnessed a significant shift
in population as many rural workers sought em-
ployment in the factories and workshops of
the city (see Harvey, 1989a). With newly devel-
oped techniques for iron and steel production,
significant advances in industrial chemistry and
the impact of steam power on production tech-
niques, cities were transformed from centres of
specialist handicrafts to large-scale production
systems (Mumford, 1961: 446). The impacts of
this first round of industrialization on the nature
and form of cities can be seen in the specific case
