Author: sudocity

The Villager’s ideal : “to delight in their food, to be proud of their clothes, to be content with their home, to rejoice in their customs.” In India, only the village is described as permanent. It survives. It endures. “Dynasty after dynasty tumbles down. Revolution succeeds to revolution. Hindoo, Pathan, Mogul, Maharatha, Sikh, English, are… Continue reading the contribution of the village (1.6)

Under woman’s dominance, the neolithic period is pre-eminently one of containers: it is an age of stone and pottery utensils, of vases, jars, vats, cisterns, bins, barns, granaries, houses, not least great collective containers like irrigation ditches and villages. I recall the jars of Cambodia. These large cisterns of water. In villages. At bus stops.… Continue reading ceramics, hydraulics, and geotechnics (1.5)

Physically permanent and socially continuous, the city betrays the experience of life as passing and uncertain. Lewis Mumford finds the source of the city’s permanence and continuity in the establishment of the village. Village life gave its inhabitants a sense of stability. From soil to seed to harvest, farming requires permanence and an interest in… Continue reading domestication and the village (1.4)

Maybe I took the bus there, maybe it was a train. I certainly walked a distance. The memory isn’t clear. It was outside the city. In the suburbs, maybe past that or right on the border. It could have been right in the center of town, I couldn’t tell. It took time to get there,… Continue reading cemeteries and shrines (1.3)

At every level of life one trades mobility for security …. immobility for adventure. We know the experience of this to the individual. Moving to a new place means losing the security of friends, family, a job, possibly a language. The threat of mobility on any size community is by a similar exercise neither hard… Continue reading animal promptings and foreshadowings (1.2)

What is the city? How did it come into existence? What processes does it further: what functions does it perform: what purposes does it fulfill? Lewis Mumford opens the first chapter of The City in History with these questions in 1961. I would like to repeat those questions today. The context for studying the city… Continue reading the city in history (1.1)