Lewis mumford, op. city.

To add DTO films to an institutional or educational streaming server, please contact a sales agent to discuss pricing. Institutional License The institutional price includes the rights to screen this film in institutional settings and in free public screenings. This short documentary is part of a series hosted by American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic Lewis Mumford, who was particularly noted for his study of cities and urban architecture.

This episode presents an outline of the opposed natures—creative and destructive—of the city throughout history. In this film, the focus is on the elements that created the first cities about years ago, and the forces that now threaten our "most precious collective invention.

Free streaming. Credits director. Watch your films later, offline, on your phone or tablet. With this feeling of alienation goes the typical psychological problem of our time, characterized in classic terms by Erik Erikson as the 'Identity Crisis. The individual suddenly awakens, as Tolstoi did in a famous crisis in his own life at Arzamas, to find himself in a strange, dark room, far from home, threatened by obscure hostile forces, unable to discover where he is or who he is, appalled by the prospect of a meaningless death at the end of a meaningless life.

Hence the fury evoked by the Hippies-quite apart from any objectionable behavior. On megatechnic terms complete withdrawal is heresy and treason, if not evidence of unsound mind. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created. The classic proof of their power and their success was their command of limitless amounts of food and drink, limitless quantities of clothes and jewels: the services of innumerable slaves, servants, and officials: limitless sensual stimulations, and not least, limitless opportunities for sexual intercourse, for even here erotic delight was measured in gross quantitative terms.

The affluence that once was monopolized by the king and his court is now being held up as the ultimate gift of the power system to mankind at large. This was so at the beginning and it still holds. His greatest problem has been how to selectively organize and consciously direct both the internal and external agents of the mind, so that they form more coherent and more intelligible wholes.

Technics played a constructive part in solving this problem; but instruments of stone and wood and fiber could not be put to work on a sufficient scale until man had succeeded in inventing other impalpable tools wrought out of the very stuff of his own body, and not visible in any other form. In short, to go back to the Stone Ages, before the institutions of Bronze Age civilization had crystallized. Though the Western hemisphere was indeed inhabited, and many parts of it were artfully cultivated, so much of it was so sparsely occupied that the European thought of it as a virgin continent against whose wildness he pitted his manly strength.

In one mood the European invaders preached the Christian gospel to the native idolaters, subverted them with strong liquors, forced them to cover their nakedness with clothes, and worked them to an early death in mines; in another, the pioneer himself took on the ways of the North American Indian, adopted his leather costume, and reverted to the ancient paleolithic economy: hunting, fishing, gathering shellfish and berries, revelling in the wilderness and its solitude, defying orthodox law and order, and yet, under pressure, improvising brutal substitutes.

The beauty of that free life still haunted Audubon in his old age. The idea that there should be no limits upon any human function is absurd: all life exists within very narrow limits of temperature, air, water, food; and the notion that money alone, or power to command the services of other men, should be free of such definite limits is an aberration of the mind.

For the same reason, the most revealing symbol of the city's failure, of its very non-existence as a social personality, is the absence of dialogue-not necessarily a silence, but equally the loud sound of a chorus uttering the same words in cowed if complacent conformity.

The silence of a dead city has more dignity than the vocalisms of a community that knows neither detachment nor dialectic opposition, neither ironic comment nor stimulating disparity, neither an intelligent conflict nor an active moral resolution.

Such a drama is bound to have a fatal last act. Any valid concept of organic development must use the primary terms of ecology-cooperation and symbiosis-as well as struggle and conflict, for even predators are part of a food chain, and do not 'conquer' their prey except to eat them. The idea of total conquest is an extrapolation from the existing power system: it indicates, not a desirable end, accomodation, but a pathological aberration, re-enforced by such rewards as this system bestows.

As for the climactic notion that "the universe will be man's at last"-what is this but a paranoid fantasy, comparable to the claims of an asylum inmate who imagines that he is Emperor of the World? Je reageert onder je Facebook account. Houd me via e-mail op de hoogte van nieuwe reacties. Houd me via e-mail op de hoogte van nieuwe berichten. Naar de inhoud springen. Home About this blog. Share this: Twitter Facebook.

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