8 - But is it art?

Summary

And in the spirit he carried me away to a great, high mountain and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God. It has the glory of God and a radiance like a very rare jewel, like jasper, clear as crystal.

(Revelation 21.10–11)

The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant heap, says Lewis Mumford. ‘But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art.’

Mind takes form in the city: and in turn, urban forms condition mind. For space, no less than time, is artfully reorganized in cities: in boundary lines and silhouettes, in the fixing of horizontal planes and vertical peaks, in utilizing or denying the natural site, the city records the attitude of a culture and an epoch to the fundamental facts of its existence. The dome and the spire, the open avenue and the closed court, tell the story, not merely of different physical accommodations, but of essentially different conceptions of man's destiny. The city is both a physical utility for collective living and a symbol of those collective purposes and unanimities that arise under such favouring circumstances. With language itself it remains man's greatest work of art.

Jane Jacobs' great manifesto, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, was written to confute most of Mumford's contentions.