Conference to Study 'City and History'

About 50 eminent international scholars will gather in Cambridge late next month to discuss the role of the city in history, and to consider whether history offers any lessons in the present muddle of urban affairs.

The Conference on the City and History, scheduled for the week of July 24-23, is being sponsored by the Summer School and the Harvard-MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies. Its purpose is to inspire historical research on the development of the city, a subject long neglected by scholars.

Conference papers will consider cities dating back as far as the 15th century and from all areas of the world. Among the scholars are a Japanese-Shigeto Tsuru, professor of Economics at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo--and two eminent Englishmen--Dennis brogan, professor of Political Science at Cambridge, and Sir John Summerson, an Architeotural historian and curator of Sir John Soane's Museum in London.

Oscar Handlin, professor of History at Harvard, will deliver the only public address of the conference, on "The Modern City as a Field of Historical Scholarship.

According to John E. Burchard, Dean of Humanities at MIT and General Chairman of the conference, the primary focus of the meeting will be academic rather than practical. That is, the conference will seek first to encourage a more active study of urban history, rather than explicitly offer concrete solutions to current problems. But it is hoped, too, that the papers and discussions will provide some fruitful generalizations about cities of the past that may be applied to the study of cities in the present. Then these new concepts and leading ideas might provide an intellectual foundation for contemporary city planning. In the past, planners and others engaged in -the practical aspects of urban management have worked in a vacuum of reliable information about the major causes of urban change.

But if the rather scholarly conference papers can suggest some answers to great questions about cities of the past, will these solutions prove relevant to contemporary urban problems? This will be one of the questions that the members of the conference will have to consider. Is there any continuity in the history of the city? Do contemporary cities obey the laws of change of past cities? Are the problems of urban industrial civilization completely unique?

The conference participants will offer answers to these and other questions in terms of their specialized disciplines. The seven closed sessions will consider the role of the city in technological innovation and economic development; in the history of ideas; in the development of architecture and related physical features; and finally, the meaning of these findings for the contemporary urban world. Senator Joseph S. Clark '23 of Pennsylvania, will moderate the final session.

Some of the Harvard Faculty members who will participate in the conference are Oscar Handlin; Carl J. Friedrich, professor of Government; Morton G. White, professor of Philosophy; Alexander Gerschenkron, professor of Economics: and Frank B. Freidel, professor of History.

Many of the questions of the conference will deal with urbanization. What is that impact of the city on its population? what are the specific characteristics--physical, social, cultural, etc.-- that explain this impact? How explain urban growth, and why do some cities stagnate or die? What is the broader significance of suburbanization, and what happens to the central city?

The papers also will consider, in the histories of specific cities, some perennial problems of urban life: How did the Romans, for example, handle their traffic problems? taxes? slums? rebuilding? division of work and residence areas? farming and cultivation within the city? the relationship of the intellectual to the city?