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Title: Megaflopolis
Author: Peter Sommer
Date: 1975
Language: en
Topics: alternative technology, book review, Lewis Mumford, Murray Bookchin, Undercurrents, utopianism
Source: Undercurrents no. 9, January-February 1975

Peter Sommer

Megaflopolis

The Limits Of The City by Murray Bookchin. Harper & Row, $2.75.

I EXPECTED Murray Bookchin’s new book to warrant a long review. It

doesn’t, not because it is bad, but because it is good, and there is

little to say except that it is essential reading.

On the surface there is little to distinguish it from a whole host of

recent books lamenting the breakdown of the city. Bookchin has the usual

amount of wailing invective describing how the functions of the City

have broken down, and he does this much better than Oscar Newman

(Defensible Space) or Thomas Blair (The International Urban Crisis).

But Bookchin’s talent has always been to set himself aside from the

current immediate problem and show its historic genesis in direct,

simple, but not oversimplified terms. The most valuable sections of his

book, the second two chapters, are in effect a rewriting of the story of

the growth of cities carried out in an almost schoolbook like aphoristic

style. Obviously one immediately thinks of Lewis Mumford’s gigantic

tomes and, from memory, Bookchin has borrowed rather more there than he

actually acknowledges.

But the triumph of the book is that it is not trapped in the notion of

the ideal of limitless ‘progress’ into which most analyses of the city

fall. The city, ever since the heavier aspects of the industrial

revolution, didn’t work, and never could, and those who claim that the

breakdown of cities is a recent event (say of the last decade) have it

all wrong. The city fails, not because of a series of small breakdowns,

but because everything. in the late bourgeois city is based on a cash

nexus. The price of heavy capitalism has been that all other measures of

value have disappeared—and the feeling of social community in more

‘primitive’ groupings of people, which was a real help and aid has been

replaced by the artificiality of a ‘social contract’—Bookchin’s phrase,

not mine, and not the Labour Government’s either.

Bookchin sees some future in the love generation revolt of the late ‘60s

and here returns to some of the themes in Post Scarcity Anarchism. At

the moment I’m not too sure that he isn’t a mite too utopian.

However, sensible utopian writing is what we need now. Orthodox

religions make no apologies for using devotional and inspirational

writings. Straight scientists are too reductionist and materialist to

allow for such things in their cosmology, but alternative technologists,

less hopeful that ‘pure science’ will get us out of our mess, need a

modest and realistic utopia-builder. Thank you Murray Bookchin.