The Thammasat University Libraries have newly acquired through the generosity of Ajarn Adul Wichiencharoen a classic text about urbanism. It was written by Lewis Mumford (1895 -1990) a celebrated American expert on cities and urban architecture whose other books are also available in the TU Libraries collection. The Culture of Cities, first published in 1938, is generally seen as Mumford’s most significant work. The purpose of the book was to find hope in the future of cities by offering possible solutions for designing them in a way that respected the people who live in them. While addressing many problems of modern society, Mumford’s approach was generally positive and optimistic. He admired such developments as garden cities, where people living in an urban environment also had easy access to trees and nature. He also enjoyed small towns in Western Europe, where urban environments were close to the countryside, so people living there could easily experience both.
Like Mumford, Professor Dr. Adul has also greatly valued nature as well as cities. Living and working in Bangkok as well as in the countryside, Ajarn Adul has spent a happy retirement surrounded by nature. As with his personal copy of The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, also donated to the library by Ajarn Adul, his copy of The Culture of Cities has many annotations in the form of underlinings in ink. Researchers value such marginalia, or notes written in the margins of a text, as they can give us some ideas of how a book affected a noted reader. Underlining a passage of a book from a private collection usually suggests that the words were especially important and useful for its owner. So by looking at this copy of Mumford’s text, we might be able to see how it influenced Ajarn Adul as well.
The very first words underlined in the book are in the preface by Mumford, written not long before World War II was declared, mentioning that the author’s goal was to explore
what the modern world may hold for mankind once men of good will have learned to subdue the barbarous mechanisms and the mechanized barbarisms that now threaten the very existence of civilization.
As always, to achieve civilization, peace and good will are necessary. Ajarn Adul also undelined Mumford’s basic definition of a city (page 3):
The city… is the point of maximum concentration for the power and culture of a community…Cities are a product of the earth. They reflect the peasant’s cunning in dominating the earth; technically they but carry further his skill in turning the soil to productive uses, in enfolding his cattle for safety, in regulating the waters that moisten his fields, in providing storage bins and barns for his crops. Cities are emblems of that settled life which began with permanent agriculture.
Immediately we can see how closely cities and rural life are connected in the imaginations of both Mumford and Ajarn Adul. What turns a village into a city? On page 6, Mumford writes, underlined by Ajarn Adul:
The mark of the city is its purposive social complexity . It represents the maximum possibility of humanizing the natural environment and of naturalizing the human heritage.
We see how nature and humanist ideals are essential elements for any city. Mumford sees failed city planning as
a general miscarriage and defeat of civilized effort…the task of city design involves the vaster task of rebuilding our civilization.
These words, underlined by Ajarn Adul, highlight that planning cities is not just a matter of designing individual buildings, but defining what we think society should be. Part of this ideal, expressed on page 252, is respecting nature. As Mumford observes, and Ajarn Adul underlined, this all too rarely occurs in modern cities:
Nature, except in a surviving landscape park, is scarcely to be found near the metropolis: if at all, one must look overhead, at the clouds, the sun, the moon, when they appear through the jutting towers and building blocks. The blare of light in the evening sky blots out half the stars overhead: the rush of sewage into the surrounding waters converts rivers into open sewers, drives away the more delicate feeders among the fish, and infects the bathers in the waters with typhoid.
City planners who may think that urbanism generally improves the lives of average people are victims of a hallucination, writes Mumford:
To believe that civilization has reached a culmination in the modern metropolis one must avert one’s eyes from the concrete facts of metropolitan routine.
Ajarn Adul, who has traveled widely around the world, is familiar with real cityscapes, and surely underlined these words as someone who has seen the reality of city streets. In trying to find solutions for these problems, Mumford traces the history of how villages became cities. He notes, and Ajarn Adul underlines:
The village remains the most enduring of collective forms. Its life underlies all subsequent transformations of civilization…The agricultural village, not the market, is the prototype of the city… [later an association of villages would provide] a common meeting place where the special products and skills of the larger community may be interchanged in periodical markets. (pages 285-286)
Since Ajarn Adul would ultimately choose rural and village life over big cities, like Mumford he voted for the importance of preserving these sources. The alternative is giant, heavily populated urban complexes where the achievement of riches and the display of wealth are all that matters. To avoid following the precedent of many once-great cities that declined, Mumford argues, and Ajarn Adul underlines:
We can no longer leave soils and landscapes and agricultural possibilities out of our calculations in considering the future of either industries or cities. (page 305)
As with passages that he seems to agree with especially, Ajarn Adul has also written a large # symbol, called a number sign or hash, here in the margins of the page. Finding other solutions of interest in The Culture of Cities, he also underlined:
Civilizations have risen and fallen without apparently perceiving the full import of their relations with the earth… Henry Thoreau suggested that every community in America should have, as part of its permanent domain, a portion of the wilderness, kept free for the citizens from all the encroachments of civilization… [Thoreau was] primarily concerned with the threatened extinction of the primeval wilderness and the impoverishments and dangers that might arise from the destruction of the forest cover. (pages 322-323)
As all Thais know, deforestation is a problem for cities as well as the countryside in the Kingdom. Active on the Thai National Committee on Land Use, the National Education Council and the National Environment Board, and the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, Ajarn Adul is familiar with the challenges of preserving natural wonders. He underlined these thoughts by Mumford:
The conservation movement has tended to have a negative influence: it has sought to isolate wilderness areas from encroachment and it has endeavored to diminish waste and prevent damage. The present task of regional planning is a more positive one : it seeks to bring the earth as a whole up to the highest pitch of perfection and appropriate use—not merely preserving the primeval, but extending the range of the garden, and introducing the deliberate culture of the landscape into every part of the open country… The reservation of coastal areas as wildernesses is equally important… As for the ocean itself, it is the least spoiled of all primeval wildernesses, except where it is tainted by the adjoining land and the offal of its population. The recapture of the coastal wilderness has become an important element in every sound scheme of regional planning… Each type of environment, then, has its special interest for man, its special economic capacities-above all, its special uses as a social habitat… The principle of democracy does not mean that every type of environment should be equally available to every type of person; and that every part of the natural scene should be as open to dense occupation as the concert hall of a great metropolis. This vulgarization of activities that are by their essential nature restricted and isolated would blot out the natural varieties of the habitat and make the whole world over into a single metropolitan image. In the end, it would mean that one must be content with only one type of life, and to accept only one type of environment: that of the metropolis… In sum, man cannot achieve a high level of economic life or culture in an environment whose resources he has plundered and defaced. And if even an economic system demands a balance between energy income and outgo, human culture demands a still greater degree of discrimination and care in the use of the environment. (pages 331 to 335)
These words of caution, underlined and marked with another # by Ajarn Adul, are further examples of a dialogue in thought between a writer and astutely informed reader. It is evidence of a thought-provoking dialogue that is at the heart of reading.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)