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The limits of the city
"City air makes people free." With this adage Murray Bookchin begins a remarkable essay on the evolution of urbanism. With a wealth of learning and a depth of passion, Bookchin convincingly argues that there was once a human and progressive tradition of urban life, and that this heritage has reached its "ultimate negation in the modern metropolis".
147 pages, Unknown Binding
First published January 28, 1974
About the author
Murray Bookchin
123 books648 followersMurray Bookchin was an American libertarian socialist author, orator, and philosopher. A pioneer in the ecology movement, Bookchin was the founder of the social ecology movement within anarchist, libertarian socialist and ecological thought. He was the author of two dozen books on politics, philosophy, history, and urban affairs as well as ecology. In the late 1990s he became disenchanted with the strategy of political Anarchism and founded his own libertarian socialist ideology called Communalism.
Bookchin was an anti-capitalist and vocal advocate of the decentralisation of society along ecological and democratic lines. His writings on libertarian municipalism, a theory of face-to-face, assembly democracy, had an influence on the Green movement and anti-capitalist direct action groups such as Reclaim the Streets.
Bookchin was an anti-capitalist and vocal advocate of the decentralisation of society along ecological and democratic lines. His writings on libertarian municipalism, a theory of face-to-face, assembly democracy, had an influence on the Green movement and anti-capitalist direct action groups such as Reclaim the Streets.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
May 10, 2014
Let me start with the title: I like it. I like the whole idea of a limit to the city, because this is not so often expressed. With capitalism, in so many ways, the sky turns out to be the limit, and there is so much sky yet to be conquered, that the very idea that our modern cities would run up to an invisible boundary is intriguing.
Having said that, I am not sure Bookchin argues it so well. He is at his best when he traces the history of the city and city planning back to its beginnings, and when he analyzes the current state of affairs. When he proceeds to project into the future, his otherwise clear and concise prose suddenly turns vague and abstract - unsure of itself.
Now I will be the last person to argue against vague, in-between specifications, because sometimes this is all you have. Bookchin correctly defines city planning as an over-rationalization, stemming from a generalized modern ideal of rationality. Perhaps the future is indistinct and will not be willed into words so easily, but if it is, then Bookchin's convinced tone about the way we need to go is equally unwarranted.
The most clear limit of the city is still that where social cohesion falls apart, where Jane Jacobs' traditional neighborhoods dilute in a sea of supermarkets. However, this is also a consequence of the sheer number of people alive right now, a number which cannot be spread out over our landmasses in a precapitalist way, occupying vast stretches of land and barring high-rise buildings. As much as Bookchin wants us to believe otherwise, we do have to find a solution within the current status quo, or at least overlapping with it.
Having said that, I am not sure Bookchin argues it so well. He is at his best when he traces the history of the city and city planning back to its beginnings, and when he analyzes the current state of affairs. When he proceeds to project into the future, his otherwise clear and concise prose suddenly turns vague and abstract - unsure of itself.
Now I will be the last person to argue against vague, in-between specifications, because sometimes this is all you have. Bookchin correctly defines city planning as an over-rationalization, stemming from a generalized modern ideal of rationality. Perhaps the future is indistinct and will not be willed into words so easily, but if it is, then Bookchin's convinced tone about the way we need to go is equally unwarranted.
The most clear limit of the city is still that where social cohesion falls apart, where Jane Jacobs' traditional neighborhoods dilute in a sea of supermarkets. However, this is also a consequence of the sheer number of people alive right now, a number which cannot be spread out over our landmasses in a precapitalist way, occupying vast stretches of land and barring high-rise buildings. As much as Bookchin wants us to believe otherwise, we do have to find a solution within the current status quo, or at least overlapping with it.
October 12, 2012
Feudalism vs bourgeois culture: fascinating. The evolution of the city when it is not necessarily attached to empire, also fascinating. Necessary to think about in these times, it seems.
I find Bookchin's writing amazingly clear, and at a time when he was so far ahead of his fellow thinkers/writers. I suppose inherent in accepting his viewpoint is opposing needless hierarchy; Murray and I agree on that framework wholeheartedly.
Still for me, anarchy remains my political principle , but only with human frailty planned for and current population issues on the table. In other words, I believe in individualism but know we gotta work together when we need to. It seems to some extent Bookchin grew to believe that too. So, his social ecology work (although yet to be named but clearly emerging) must be added to your contextual reading here.
There is so much within this book that appeals to those who think about direct democracy and proper scale. However, I can hear bits of the anger that alienated many of the activists back in the day; one of these peers even saying to me recently, "if he could have reduced the obvious venom for any idea in opposition to his, he might be more widely understood."
But there is no question in my mind he was thinking in a systemic problem and solution syntax and bringing real workman language to what had been a dry academic issue: what to do about the cities? what were cities for?
I am about to start his "Towards an Ecological Society" and also dip into "The Politics of Social Ecology" to further understand his later reach and his libertarian municipalism ideas. I hope he continues to inspire.
And for those of you who work for holistic system change, read Bookchin.
I find Bookchin's writing amazingly clear, and at a time when he was so far ahead of his fellow thinkers/writers. I suppose inherent in accepting his viewpoint is opposing needless hierarchy; Murray and I agree on that framework wholeheartedly.
Still for me, anarchy remains my political principle , but only with human frailty planned for and current population issues on the table. In other words, I believe in individualism but know we gotta work together when we need to. It seems to some extent Bookchin grew to believe that too. So, his social ecology work (although yet to be named but clearly emerging) must be added to your contextual reading here.
There is so much within this book that appeals to those who think about direct democracy and proper scale. However, I can hear bits of the anger that alienated many of the activists back in the day; one of these peers even saying to me recently, "if he could have reduced the obvious venom for any idea in opposition to his, he might be more widely understood."
But there is no question in my mind he was thinking in a systemic problem and solution syntax and bringing real workman language to what had been a dry academic issue: what to do about the cities? what were cities for?
I am about to start his "Towards an Ecological Society" and also dip into "The Politics of Social Ecology" to further understand his later reach and his libertarian municipalism ideas. I hope he continues to inspire.
And for those of you who work for holistic system change, read Bookchin.
July 30, 2017
"The limits of the bourgeois city can be summed up in the fact that the more there is of urbanism, the less there is o urbanity." (p. 127)
Amongst Murray earliest work, it draws upon the histories of Lewis Mumford and E.A. Gutkind to paint a history of the rise of the city. It is very different from his Urbanization Without Cities: The Rise and Decline of Citizenship insofar as his theory is not yet fully developed. And the dialectics that are usually part of a social-ecological analysis are present only in a small minority. There are fragments that pit citizenship against electorate, as revealed by the opening quote of this review, but the analysis doesn't go further than that. It does not have an analysis of centralism vs. confederalism, and so on. But, we do see quite a clear picture on the influences of capitalism on the development of cities [1] via the increasing "proletariazation" of the artisans, and the encroachment of markets into civic life. Moreover, ecological sensibilities of early cities are also explored a bit [2].
Significantly, the major theme of the book is the step by step simplification of life—consequently of the individuals themselves—in the city throughout history [3].
Starting from the ancient cities—with an analysis of the fall of Rome [4]—going through the medieval communes [5], and the rise of the bourgeois city [1], all the way to the urban cancers (a phrase not used yet in this work) like Los Angeles, and New York [6]. The book culminates (in the first edition) with an analysis vision of urban planning [7] that is to restore citizenship, vital, but lacking in the minds of many modern urban planners. This newer edition also contains a chapter "Theses on Libertarian Municipalism"—which is Murray Bookchin's favored political revolutionary praxis. A whole topic on its own—and developed much later than when this book was originally written. Ultimately explored more deeply in other works like The Next Revolution, Urbanization Without Cities: The Rise and Decline of Citizenship, Remaking Society, and The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism (by Janey Biehl).
Overall, it is really fascinating to see the evolution of Bookchin's analyses. This is a book well worth reading for the scholar, but to the casual reader I would recommend Urbanization Without Cities: The Rise and Decline of Citizenship, it is much more richly articulated, and explores more facets of the city. All essential insights found in "The Limits of the City" can be found therein as well, but not vice-versa.
[1] p. 85-86
"By reducing every relationship to a cash nexus, capital removes all the moral and esthetic restraints that held the growth of earlier cities in check. The concept of social responsibility, once intuitive to precapitalist communities, is replaced by a single goal: plunder. Every entity and human capacity is conceived of as a resource for the acquisition of profit: the land, forests, seas, rivers, the labor of other, and ultimately all the verities of social life from those which inhere in the family to the community itself. The new industrial and commercial classes fall upon the social body like ravenous wolves on a helpless prey, and what remains of a once vital social organism is the torn fragments and indigestible sinews that linger more in the memory of humanity than in the realities of social intercourse. The American urban lot with its rusted cars, broken glass, and debris strewn chaotically among weeds and scrub reflects in the minuscule the ravaged remains of forests, waterways, shorelines, and communities.
Society is now ruled by competition; and qualitative changes in social relations consist in the fact that competition tends to transform the numerous small enterprises into fewer and fewer centralized industrial and commercial giants. All elements of society being to change. Civic, political, and cultural gigantism parallel industrial and commercial gigantism. Social life assumes dimensions so far removed from the human scale and human control that society ceases to appear as the shelter of humanity. Rather, it becomes a demonic force operating far above the heads of its human constituents, obeying a law of development completely alien to human goals. Cities and regions are delivered over to an autonomous national division of labor to a scale of economic and social life that is far beyond the comprehension of the community. The city becomes and agglomeration of dispirited people scattered among cold, featureless structures.
The new corporatism of late capitalism differs profoundly from traditional corporatism. Bourgeois corporatism aggregates the monads without transforming their relations to each other; they are reconstituted into an anonymous herd, not a personalized interdependent collectivity. The individual is denies sovereignty over those conditions of life that make for authentic individuality without gaining the mutual support afforded by traditional corporatism."
[2] p. 127
"[..] early cities were not only economically dependent upon the land, but they often included space for food cultivation within the urban perimeter. Tenochtitlan, for example, contained many of the famous "floating gardens" that the Aztecs created in Lake Texcoco by anchoring mud with osier reinforcements, adding trees whose roots [cxed, sic!] fixed the entire ensemble to the lake bottom. The Mesopotamian cities, Gutkind points out, "included large open spaces that were used as fields, gardens and orchards, contributing to the good supply of the population." Until the medieval towns became overcrowded toward the end of the Middle Ages, gardening and dairying were a normal part of family life. Plots were reserved for growing food and each family retained some pigs, chickens, and a cow or two which could be pastured on common land."
[3] p. 113
"Modern urban entities are no longer sources of individuation; they are arenas par excellence of psychic and physical massification—the aggregation of the individual into a herd. This massification isolates rather than relates; it produces no "common mind" in Gustav LeBon's sense, but mindlessness and apathy. The bourgeois city, if it can still be called, is a place where one finds not human contiguity and association, but anonymity and isolation. The limits of the bourgeois city can be summed up in the fact that the more there is of urbanism, the less there is o urbanity."
[4] p. 57
"The "Fall of Rome" can be explained by the rise of Rome. The Latin city was carried to imperial heights not by the resources of its rural environs, but by the spoils acquired from the systematic looting of the Near East, Egypt, and North Africa. The very process involved in maintaining the Roman cosmopolis destroyed the cosmopolis. Every attempt on Rome's part to exact further tribute from her colonies involved increasing coercion and expenditures, which in turn required more tribute."
[5] p. 71
"Nearly all communes were policed by their own citizens, who rotated to form the night watch and filled the ranks of the city militia. Commonly, mayors and town councils were elected by the guilds or by public assemblies of the populace reminiscent of the Athenian Ecclesia. Indeed, like the polis, these towns formed a complete and rounded totality. As Mumford notes:
Prayer, mass, pageant, life-ceremony, baptism, marriage or funeral—the city itself was stage for the separate scenes of the drama, and the citizen himself was the actor."
[6] p. 94
"In a metropolis of such enormous dimensions as Los Angeles, it would be preposterous to speak of a meaningful municipal government. More appropriately, one might describe the administrative apparatus of the city as an impersonal state power, as removed in many respects from civic immediacy as the national government thousands of miles away. Little exists to bridge the chasm between the average citizen, pursuing his private interests, and a massive governing bureaucracy following its own law of life."
[7] p. 139
"The future of design, as an integral part of social analysis, depended heavily upon how deeply reconstructive ideals could become integrally wedded to the revolutionary movement of the period."
Amongst Murray earliest work, it draws upon the histories of Lewis Mumford and E.A. Gutkind to paint a history of the rise of the city. It is very different from his Urbanization Without Cities: The Rise and Decline of Citizenship insofar as his theory is not yet fully developed. And the dialectics that are usually part of a social-ecological analysis are present only in a small minority. There are fragments that pit citizenship against electorate, as revealed by the opening quote of this review, but the analysis doesn't go further than that. It does not have an analysis of centralism vs. confederalism, and so on. But, we do see quite a clear picture on the influences of capitalism on the development of cities [1] via the increasing "proletariazation" of the artisans, and the encroachment of markets into civic life. Moreover, ecological sensibilities of early cities are also explored a bit [2].
Significantly, the major theme of the book is the step by step simplification of life—consequently of the individuals themselves—in the city throughout history [3].
Starting from the ancient cities—with an analysis of the fall of Rome [4]—going through the medieval communes [5], and the rise of the bourgeois city [1], all the way to the urban cancers (a phrase not used yet in this work) like Los Angeles, and New York [6]. The book culminates (in the first edition) with an analysis vision of urban planning [7] that is to restore citizenship, vital, but lacking in the minds of many modern urban planners. This newer edition also contains a chapter "Theses on Libertarian Municipalism"—which is Murray Bookchin's favored political revolutionary praxis. A whole topic on its own—and developed much later than when this book was originally written. Ultimately explored more deeply in other works like The Next Revolution, Urbanization Without Cities: The Rise and Decline of Citizenship, Remaking Society, and The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism (by Janey Biehl).
Overall, it is really fascinating to see the evolution of Bookchin's analyses. This is a book well worth reading for the scholar, but to the casual reader I would recommend Urbanization Without Cities: The Rise and Decline of Citizenship, it is much more richly articulated, and explores more facets of the city. All essential insights found in "The Limits of the City" can be found therein as well, but not vice-versa.
[1] p. 85-86
"By reducing every relationship to a cash nexus, capital removes all the moral and esthetic restraints that held the growth of earlier cities in check. The concept of social responsibility, once intuitive to precapitalist communities, is replaced by a single goal: plunder. Every entity and human capacity is conceived of as a resource for the acquisition of profit: the land, forests, seas, rivers, the labor of other, and ultimately all the verities of social life from those which inhere in the family to the community itself. The new industrial and commercial classes fall upon the social body like ravenous wolves on a helpless prey, and what remains of a once vital social organism is the torn fragments and indigestible sinews that linger more in the memory of humanity than in the realities of social intercourse. The American urban lot with its rusted cars, broken glass, and debris strewn chaotically among weeds and scrub reflects in the minuscule the ravaged remains of forests, waterways, shorelines, and communities.
Society is now ruled by competition; and qualitative changes in social relations consist in the fact that competition tends to transform the numerous small enterprises into fewer and fewer centralized industrial and commercial giants. All elements of society being to change. Civic, political, and cultural gigantism parallel industrial and commercial gigantism. Social life assumes dimensions so far removed from the human scale and human control that society ceases to appear as the shelter of humanity. Rather, it becomes a demonic force operating far above the heads of its human constituents, obeying a law of development completely alien to human goals. Cities and regions are delivered over to an autonomous national division of labor to a scale of economic and social life that is far beyond the comprehension of the community. The city becomes and agglomeration of dispirited people scattered among cold, featureless structures.
The new corporatism of late capitalism differs profoundly from traditional corporatism. Bourgeois corporatism aggregates the monads without transforming their relations to each other; they are reconstituted into an anonymous herd, not a personalized interdependent collectivity. The individual is denies sovereignty over those conditions of life that make for authentic individuality without gaining the mutual support afforded by traditional corporatism."
[2] p. 127
"[..] early cities were not only economically dependent upon the land, but they often included space for food cultivation within the urban perimeter. Tenochtitlan, for example, contained many of the famous "floating gardens" that the Aztecs created in Lake Texcoco by anchoring mud with osier reinforcements, adding trees whose roots [cxed, sic!] fixed the entire ensemble to the lake bottom. The Mesopotamian cities, Gutkind points out, "included large open spaces that were used as fields, gardens and orchards, contributing to the good supply of the population." Until the medieval towns became overcrowded toward the end of the Middle Ages, gardening and dairying were a normal part of family life. Plots were reserved for growing food and each family retained some pigs, chickens, and a cow or two which could be pastured on common land."
[3] p. 113
"Modern urban entities are no longer sources of individuation; they are arenas par excellence of psychic and physical massification—the aggregation of the individual into a herd. This massification isolates rather than relates; it produces no "common mind" in Gustav LeBon's sense, but mindlessness and apathy. The bourgeois city, if it can still be called, is a place where one finds not human contiguity and association, but anonymity and isolation. The limits of the bourgeois city can be summed up in the fact that the more there is of urbanism, the less there is o urbanity."
[4] p. 57
"The "Fall of Rome" can be explained by the rise of Rome. The Latin city was carried to imperial heights not by the resources of its rural environs, but by the spoils acquired from the systematic looting of the Near East, Egypt, and North Africa. The very process involved in maintaining the Roman cosmopolis destroyed the cosmopolis. Every attempt on Rome's part to exact further tribute from her colonies involved increasing coercion and expenditures, which in turn required more tribute."
[5] p. 71
"Nearly all communes were policed by their own citizens, who rotated to form the night watch and filled the ranks of the city militia. Commonly, mayors and town councils were elected by the guilds or by public assemblies of the populace reminiscent of the Athenian Ecclesia. Indeed, like the polis, these towns formed a complete and rounded totality. As Mumford notes:
Prayer, mass, pageant, life-ceremony, baptism, marriage or funeral—the city itself was stage for the separate scenes of the drama, and the citizen himself was the actor."
[6] p. 94
"In a metropolis of such enormous dimensions as Los Angeles, it would be preposterous to speak of a meaningful municipal government. More appropriately, one might describe the administrative apparatus of the city as an impersonal state power, as removed in many respects from civic immediacy as the national government thousands of miles away. Little exists to bridge the chasm between the average citizen, pursuing his private interests, and a massive governing bureaucracy following its own law of life."
[7] p. 139
"The future of design, as an integral part of social analysis, depended heavily upon how deeply reconstructive ideals could become integrally wedded to the revolutionary movement of the period."
July 14, 2015
This book is so important, but this book is -so- unknown.
Glossing over Bookchin's guessing at the future, which is necessarily a little vague and uncertain, Bookchin's real strength is in his Social-Philosophical-Historical analysis of the development of the modern city from agrarian societies, and his critique of modern cities.
The writing is very clear and accessible, without any of the verbosity of abstraction that philosophers are prone to, so is appropriate for architects, urban planners, designers and other non-philosophers.
Glossing over Bookchin's guessing at the future, which is necessarily a little vague and uncertain, Bookchin's real strength is in his Social-Philosophical-Historical analysis of the development of the modern city from agrarian societies, and his critique of modern cities.
The writing is very clear and accessible, without any of the verbosity of abstraction that philosophers are prone to, so is appropriate for architects, urban planners, designers and other non-philosophers.
November 19, 2013
Bookchin provides thought-provoking insights into the historic development of cities and how the emergence and now-dominance of capitalist markets and "production for the sake of production" have changed urban development patterns and impacted quality of life in arguably quite negative ways.
May 5, 2020
Just reread this book from the 70s. Bookchin is somewhat nostalgic for the cities of Ancient Greece and enamored with the counter culture visions from the 60s in Berkeley. His contention that we can't redesign cities to be more human until we change our social system which dehumanizes them. His ecological vision is prescient. He was a visionary and ahead of his time. His words are still relevant today almost 50 years later.
Want to Read
October 6, 2023Pre-read notes:
Heard about this book from an interview with Andrewism, who promotes PanAfrican liberation, enlightened anarchy, and the SolarPunk revolution. Extremely intriguing!!! SolarPunk is the urban version of Permaculture.
How To Build A Solarpunk City
By Andrewism
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4UmU1dS...
Heard about this book from an interview with Andrewism, who promotes PanAfrican liberation, enlightened anarchy, and the SolarPunk revolution. Extremely intriguing!!! SolarPunk is the urban version of Permaculture.
How To Build A Solarpunk City
By Andrewism
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4UmU1dS...
June 29, 2020
Much of the content felt obsolete, but this was certainly an interesting read!
December 15, 2025
I became interested in Murray Bookchin after reading an essay on his in which he distinguished 'freedom' and 'liberty', where in the one notion the collective is seen as supporting of and even necessary for one's personal expansion while in the other it is rather seen as obstructing one's ability to 'do whatever he wishes'. The one was an essential concept in early communism and anarchism but evolved into the other, which Bookchin associates to the punk of the 80s and what he calls 'lifestyle anarchism.'
Interested, I started reading his book Ecology of Freedom. However, I started it just after I finished reading The Dawn of Humanity, and didn't get very far because it seemed to me that Bookchin falls exactly into one of the main idealizations of the past that The Dawn of Humanity tries to debunk, using lots of references to archaeological evidence which also lacks in Bookchin's work. So I had trouble believing his analysis. Similarly I had trouble believing the points he makes in the first parts of his essay Limits of the City. I did find his descriptions of modern cities such as downtown Los Angeles captivating and recognizable, though.
Interested, I started reading his book Ecology of Freedom. However, I started it just after I finished reading The Dawn of Humanity, and didn't get very far because it seemed to me that Bookchin falls exactly into one of the main idealizations of the past that The Dawn of Humanity tries to debunk, using lots of references to archaeological evidence which also lacks in Bookchin's work. So I had trouble believing his analysis. Similarly I had trouble believing the points he makes in the first parts of his essay Limits of the City. I did find his descriptions of modern cities such as downtown Los Angeles captivating and recognizable, though.
November 25, 2016
An insightful look at the development of the city, from the Greek, polis, through other "world" forms, up to the megalopolis of the late 20th century. Anarchist/libertarian theorist Bookchin looks at city planning models (by the social scientific movement) in the late 19th century to prevailing (1974) designs, and the "counterculture" models, inspired by People's Park in Berkeley and communal environments suggested at the time. "Hierarchical social relations produced hierarchical space; egalitarian relations, egalitarian space." Interesting to see his suggestions, based on the declining "counterculture" movement and how the changes in social relationships might impact the future of city planning.
March 27, 2011
Borrowed from UCLA.
March 29, 2008
Must read for any planner. It is about cities being intend as places of social interaction.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews