Docencia e Investigación PMZ: Génesis de la ciudad

Lewis Mumford

Los pueblos nómadas lo eran por necesidad. Las semillas de la vida urbana, nos recuerda Mumford, requiere de espacios que permitan la estabilidad, el control de los recursos mínimos para sustento de la vida.

Durante el mesolítico lo que tenemos son las primeras condiciones para contar con una oferta de comida constante, principalmente a partir de asentamientos a las orillas de los ríos.

Con la creación de los primeros utencilios presenciamos también la consolidación de formas de producción y ejercicio del poder por parte de los poblados.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avjdKTqiVvQ

"Into this life with its erotic exuberance a new order, a new regularity, a new security had entered; for the food supply was more abundant than it had ever been beofe: almost certainly more children were born and more survived in these neolithic communities than any earlier culture could sustain, except under unusually happy circumstances. The ground and polished tools that were once treated as the main criteria of neolithic culture bear witness to patience and systematic effort, far different from that needed for flink-knapping or hunting. All these habits and funcitons made their contribution to the city, when it finally emerged; and without this village component, the larger urban community would have lacked an essential base for physical permanence and social continuity. Even without any conscious push in that direction, this new symbiotic association of man and animals and plants was favorable to the later development of the city"

"The order and stability of the village, along with its maternal enclosure and intimacy and its oneness with the foreces of nature, were carried over into the city: if lost in the city at large, through its overexpansion, it nevertheless remains in the quarter or the neighborhood"

Sobre la dinámica del paleolítico al neolítico:

"The interplay between the two cultures took place over a long period; but in the end the masculine processes over-rode by sheer dynamism the more passive life-nurturing activities that bore woman's imprint. The very elements of procreation were taken out of woman's sphere, at leas in the imaginarion: of of the early Egyptian texts pictures Atum creating the universe out of his own body, by masturbation. The proud male could scarcely have used plainer words to indicate that, in the new scheme of life, woman no longer counted. In the early neolithic society, before the domestication of grain, woman had been supreme: sex itself was power."

Las primeras transformaciones urbanas están vinculadas con las transformaciones del trabajo y la producción. La diversificación de las actividades.

"To interpret what happened in the city, one must deal equally with technics, politics, and religion, above all with the religious side of the transformation"

En esta primacía de la religión, el arte -- la producción de imágenes -- jugó un papel fundamental.

"As soon as war had become one of the reasons for the city's existence, the city's own wealth and power made it a naturale target."

"From the beginning, then, the city exhibited an ambivalent character it has never wholly lost: it combined th maximum amount of protection with the greatest incentives to aggression: it offered the widest possible freedom and diversity, yet imposed a drastic system of compulsion and regimentation which, along with its military aggression and destruction, has become 'second nature' to civilized man and is often erroneously identified with its original biological proclivities. Thus the city had both a despotic and a divine aspect."

"Thus the transformation of village into city was no mere change of size and scale, though both these factores entered into it: rather, it was a change of direction and purpose, manifested in a new type of organization."

Ceremonials and memorials (Ghiza)