Cities in civilisation, a survey of urban cultural centres across 2,500 years of history, includes a long chapter on the glory that was Memphis-Tennessee, not Egypt. As a native of the Bluff City, I was taken aback by the author's understanding of how a particular community segregated by race and class, could give rise to a unique amalgam of black and white musical traditions-the blues and country. Led by BB King, Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis, by Sam Phillips's Sun Records and by Beale Street (which, Peter Hall writes, had "more whorehouses per square mile than anywhere in America outside of New Orleans"), my home-town transformed the listening habits of the western world.
Since Lewis Mumford's death almost a decade ago, Hall has emerged as our preeminent urban planner, critic and historian. A Londoner who has taught for decades on both sides of the Atlantic, Hall has written or edited a dozen seminal books in his field. Now, as if to cap his distinguished career, he has produced a book so huge, so sweeping, and so majestic that it bears comparison with Mumford's The City in History, one of the great works of the 20th century. Like Mumford, Hall's historical grasp spans millennia. Like Mumford, he seems to have been everywhere and to know everything. Like Mumford, he can see patterns where the rest of us see only confusion. And like Mumford, he can write.
Over 1,000 pages long, Cities in Civilization has 30 chapters, of which 21 are about individual cities, with Berlin, Los Angeles and Paris considered twice, London three times. Along the way, Hall analyses Athens in the 4th century BC, when that tiny polis became such an astonishing fountainhead of philosophy, drama, sculpture, architecture and political thought. On similar grounds, he offers long chapters on the 15th century Florence of Brunelleschi, Donatello and Ghiberti; the London of Shakespeare; and Vienna at the height of the Habsburg empire, first when Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven were in their prime, and a century later, when Freud, Mahler and Wittgenstein were among the creative geniuses who lived along the Danube. How could a few square miles nurture such talent in such a short time? This is a mystery to which Hall constantly returns.
Hall does not focus only on high culture and grand monuments. He also dissects Manchester as the first industrial city; Glasgow when its shipyards dominated the globe; Detroit in the age of Henry Ford and the Model T; and Tokyo after 1890, when its industrial powerhouse transformed Japan. Especially concerned with innovation in all its forms, Hall includes perceptive chapters on Los Angeles and the movies, Palo Alto and telecommunications and the chapter on Memphis and music.
Cities in Civilization is about cultural achievement in enormous, smelly, obnoxious, crowded and expensive concentrations of humanity. Such places are not just small towns multiplied. Hall shows how the creative urban spirit built aqueducts and fountains for Rome; boulevards in Paris; bridges, subways and skyscrapers in New York; and freeways in Los Angeles. He shows how some cities managed to embody in themselves and in their buildings the values of an entire society. So, for example, the satellite towns of modern Stockholm were the embodiment of Swedish social democracy between 1945 and 1980.
Of course the book has mistakes. Hall seems unaware, for example, of the spectacular drop in crime and the rise in public transit ridership in New York in recent years. And another writer might have chosen different cities: Istanbul when it was the engine of the Ottoman Empire; Chicago when it organised the railroads and the economy of half a continent; or Hong Kong, when it pointed the way for mainland China to emerge from centuries of backwardness and poverty. But no one can come away from Cities in Civilization without respect for Hall's achievement. The beauty of the volume is that it can be read on many levels. Because it is organised topically-"The City as Innovative Milieu," for example-rather than chronologically, it is a volume to browse. Should you want an introduction to imperial Rome, or turn-of-the century New York, or Paris in the generation before the first world war, or Berlin between the wars, you could hardly do better than to open this book. And if you seek the essence of cities, the benefits of congestion, the nature of creativity and innovation, or the direction of the future, Hall's book will give you many hours of stimulation.
l This article first appeared in "Civilization" (December 1998/January 1999). All rights reserved.
Cities in civilization
Peter Hall
Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1998, ?30
