The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects was published by Harcourt, Brace & World in 1961, winning the National Book Award. At over 600 pages, it represents the culmination of Mumford’s lifetime engagement with urbanism — a work that combines archaeology, history, sociology, architecture, and moral philosophy into a single sweeping argument about the relationship between urban form and human possibility.
Mumford traces the city from its Neolithic origins (the village as the first permanent settlement, the shrine as the first urban nucleus) through the Greek polis, the Roman imperium, the medieval commune, the baroque capital, the industrial metropolis, and the twentieth-century megapolis. At each stage, he asks: what does the city make possible? What does it destroy? How does its physical form (streets, buildings, public spaces, boundaries) shape the consciousness of its inhabitants?
His central argument is dialectical: the city concentrates human energy, enabling achievements impossible in dispersed settlement (art, science, philosophy, complex social organization). But this concentration also enables unprecedented destruction (war, exploitation, ecological devastation, the loss of individual identity in mass anonymity). The city is simultaneously humanity’s highest achievement and its greatest danger.
The book’s final chapters — on the contemporary megapolis, suburban sprawl, and the nuclear threat — are among Mumford’s most powerful: he argues that the modern city has ceased to serve human purposes and has become a machine for producing consumers, a structure that no longer nurtures life but merely processes it.
Collecting The City in History
First edition (Harcourt, Brace & World, New York, 1961): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $40–$120
- Signed first edition: $100–$300
- Without jacket: $10–$25