LewisMumfordtakesahighlypersonalviewofthecityinhistory精选.docxVIP

PAGE  PAGE 5 Manjun Zang Assignment 2: Mumford Essay UP 443_The History of Urban Form Professor Robert Fishman 16/11/2015 Cities, People and Human Civilization: Reading Response to The City in History by Lewis Mumford Lewis Mumford shows strong humanism thoughts in the book, The city in History. The most compelling and valuable part of the book for me is Mumford’s idea about the relationships between city and human civilization. According to Mumford, city is the product of human civilization, and it influences the development of human civilization at the same time. Mumford takes readers into the long river of history, analyzes the nature and law of the origin and development of cities in different historic periods, and finally figures out that the task of the coming city in the future is to “put the highest concerns of man at the center of all his activities” and “create a visible regional and civic structure, designed to make man at home with his deeper self and his larger world, attached to images of human nurture and love” Lewis Mumford, The City in History (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1961), page 573. . According to Mumford’s description, a big village can not simply turn into a city. “The change needed an outer challenge to pull the community sharply away from the central concerns of nutrition and reproduction: a purpose beyond mere survival” Mumford, The City in History, page 29. . Just as Aristotle once said, it is for the sake of living that people gather in city, and they do their best to live better and better. Actually, in the early cities, it was the religion that attract people coming to the cities, for “religion constituted the better part of life”. Although with the development of cities, people’s desires become more and more complicated. Mumford never deny the existence of human’s desire. Cities should never be considered as a product that only satisfies the basic demand of people. It is just because of the higher aspirations that cities bec