Jag fick förmånen att skriva om städer i det senaste numret av Axess. En del av resonemanget bygger några tankar kring ett intressant citat av Lewis Mumford om urbaniseringen och staden, och varför det förra inte automatiskt leder till det senare:
The city is an historic entity, an entity that arose originally, on my interpretation, through the coalescence and fusion of certain archetypal political and religious institutions (the palace and the temple) which at an early date found expression in a characteristic nuclear form that is still dimly visible.
Urbanization, on the other hand, is merely the process of creating close human settlements, buildings and roads – any kind of building, any kind of road – in an environment that thereby becomes increasingly unsuited to the pursuit of rural occupations like hunting, fishing, farming, gardening. […] Urbanization could go on coagulating indefinitely, as the sociologist, Jean Gottman, expects it to go on, without once creating a city […] To apply the term city to such an unstructured mass is to increase the deplorable mental confusion we are now in.