Lewis Mumford

Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

by Paul Kingsnorth  · 23 Sep 2025  · 388pp  · 110,920 words

? Can we? Is it real—or is it only a metaphor carried too far? The man to ask is the American historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford. His massive study The Myth of the Machine, published in two volumes between 1967 and 1970, is an exhaustive attempt to chronicle the rise and

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, of course, ‘Luddism’. But while the Luddites lost their war, their case was always correct. That war was not fought against technology per se—what Lewis Mumford called ‘technics’. Most Luddites operated weaving looms themselves, and were quite comfortable with machinery. What mattered was who controlled it. They were fighting what they

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is an urban civilisation, and its worldview and direction is that of the urban dwellers who build, justify and benefit from it. Our old friend Lewis Mumford wrote another of his epics on precisely this topic. The City in History, published in 1961, explores the development and essence of cities and where

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’t much care after all. The Machine is virtually impossible to resist, not least because it is found both around us and within us. As Lewis Mumford explained, the ‘myth of the Machine’ comes from within the human heart: we carry its drive for planning, efficiency, profit, clarity, straight lines, organisation, domination

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to bite the nations which birthed them. Vast and unprecedented levels of migration—a result of the low-cost, globalised economy which sees people, in Lewis Mumford’s formulation, as ‘human parts’ to be shifted around to where their labour is cheapest—are transforming entire nations. Their elites, who tend to benefit

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REFERENCE 2 Eugene McCarraher, ‘Mammon’, Aeon, 22 October 2019, https://aeon.co/essays/capitalism-is-modernitys-most-beguiling-dangerous-enchantment. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3 Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966), 3. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4 Mumford, Myth of the Machine: Technics

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6 Mumford, Myth of the Machine: Technics, 11. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7 Mumford, Myth of the Machine: Technics, 12. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8 Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 435. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9 V: A Monster That Grows in

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UN’, 16 May 2018, https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/2018-revision-of-world-urbanization-prospects.html. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1 Lewis Mumford, The City in History (Peregrine Books, 1987), 72. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2 Mumford, City in History, 75. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3 ‘Empowering Urban

Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy

by Quinn Slobodian  · 4 Apr 2023  · 360pp  · 107,124 words

Cayman Islands and Bermuda and former colonies like Singapore, Ireland, and Dubai.8 And the City was at the center of it all. In 1938, Lewis Mumford compared capitalism to a cuckoo bird that laid its eggs in the walled city and crowded out the city’s own native offspring.9 After

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they often inherited British Common Law. Manuel B. Aalbers, “Financial Geography I: Geographies of Tax,” Progress in Human Geography 42, no. 6 (2018): 920.     9.  Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1938), 22.   10.  The story of the redevelopment of the Docklands is a set piece in

Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City

by Richard Sennett  · 9 Apr 2018

Jerusalem, or for Shanghai residents in Mao’s early reign. The additive grid has in the modern era served as a tool of capitalist power. Lewis Mumford asserted, in plans like that for New York in 1811, which envisioned endless, regular blocks above Greenwich Village, that it ‘treated the individual lot and

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the prevailing mood. Jane Jacobs, then a youngish writer for architectural magazines, attended the event, and found the assembled dignitaries depressing in their self-confidence. Lewis Mumford was the event’s humanist, a great historian of cities and a committed progressive. He ringingly declared the ‘absolute folly of creating a physical structure

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few years after the Harvard meeting, Mumford and Jacobs parted ways, bitterly, over how to achieve this goal. III. HOW THEN TO OPEN THE CITY? – LEWIS MUMFORD DEBATES JANE JACOBS Jane Jacobs became famous as an activist for the campaign she waged against Robert Moses, the dictatorial planner of much of twentieth

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’t get involved in politics, even though she never stopped urging them to do so. She became a hero to my generation. She also put Lewis Mumford’s back up. He attacked her in the name of socialism, asserting that to fight capitalist top-down power you need a sweeping, countervailing force

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of the community. In this she was the direct heir of the Chicago School: her aim was to open the city, from the bottom up. Lewis Mumford (whom I knew better at the time) was not a relaxed, curiosity-driven urbanite; in fact, thinking our city too politically corrupt and physically degraded

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it, as a kind of Media Lab transformed into urban space, the acme of an open environment. What could possibly be said against it? * * * Mumford Lewis Mumford countered each of the features of ‘Jacobism’, hoping instead that certain formal ways of building the ville could open up the city. Jacobs’ emphasis on

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for rich countries. Moreover, Madame Q thought Jane Jacobs naive about spontaneity, which to her meant roving bands of Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. Lewis Mumford made more sense to her. Like him, she believed that a city should be tied together by integrating its functions in a formal, orderly way

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sense of place owes something to Corbusier. The Plan Voisin was a manifesto for the mechanical age, in which form and function fitted tightly together. Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization, published in 1934, cautioned against soulless technology along Corbusier’s line; still, his version of the smart city was also of

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city council can suggest, but not require, changes. Something like this system is now installed in over 250 other Brazilian cities.32, 33 One of Lewis Mumford’s criticisms of Jane Jacobs was that you cannot built up scale in a city, in its ville, by local action in the city. The

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scaling up, even though he has started small; the appalling conditions of the poor in his country demand a large-scale solution. But again, unlike Lewis Mumford’s pre-made garden city, this solution should involve the poor themselves as makers of their own environment. This is the social logic behind this

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the poor, as in this bleak New York City project of the 1950s. 13. Ebenezer Howard’s vision for a ‘Group of Slumless Smokeless Cities.’ Lewis Mumford responded to the Plan Voisin with his own vision of a Garden City, restoring the ground as a plane which ties together all the aspects

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, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988). 16. Ildefonso Cerdà, Teoría general de la urbanización (General Theory of Urbanization) (1867) (Barcelona: Instituto de Estudios Fiscales, 1968–71). 17. Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York: Harcourt, Brace • World, 1961), p. 421. See also Peter Marcuse, ‘The Grid as City Plan: New York City and

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/6762/6762-h/6762-h.htm#link2HCH0090. 19. Richard Sennett, ‘An Urban Anarchist: Jane Jacobs’, The New York Review of Books, 1 January 1970. 20. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934), pp. 344–58. 21. These are the standards used by the American Association of State Highway

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, Klaus Jacobs, Allan Jacobs, Jane and ambiguity and Barcelona and Chicago School on courtesy departure from New York and Greenwich Village and Robert Moses and Lewis Mumford order and disorder and risk-taking and ruptures and scaling up and slow growth ‘So what would you do?’ on sound The Death and Life

The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways

by Earl Swift  · 8 Jun 2011  · 423pp  · 129,831 words

Roadside" by James Agee are from Fortune magazine, 9/1/1934 © 1934 Time Inc. Used under license. Excerpts from "The American Way of Death" by Lewis Mumford are used by permission of the Gina Maccoby Literary Agency. Copyright © 1966 by Elizabeth M. Morss and James G. Morss. Originally published in The New

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York Review of Books. Excerpts from "Townless Highways for the Motorist" by Lewis Mumford and Benton MacKaye are used by permission of the Gina Maccoby Literary Agency. Copyright © 1930 by Elizabeth M. Morss and James G. Morss. Originally published

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than any others, made it happen. Their supporting cast included auto executives, scientists, inventors, freelance designers and futurists, and no shortage of oddballs. Opponents, too: Lewis Mumford, a respected critic of art and architecture, helped whet the public appetite for superhighways, then morphed into their harshest critic. A quiet family man named

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month, MacKaye brought the discussion full circle with a refinement of his earlier article, this one in Harper's Monthly and produced with a coauthor—Lewis Mumford, a New York writer, author, social critic, and fellow member of the RPAA's inner circle. It was an infinitely more elegant work than the

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to specific targets, manipulated mood. And the highlight, the motorway, whizzed with motion. Not everyone was charmed by Bel Geddes' highways. Among their critics was Lewis Mumford, who in the years since cowriting the second townless highway piece had risen to fame as an author and social critic. Mumford's most recent

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pleasure lowered. They wanted interstates, and damn it, they wanted them pronto. Among the few voices raised against this almost universal enthusiasm was that of Lewis Mumford, who a quarter century before had teamed with Benton MacKaye to call for townless highways and who, in the intervening years, had grown into a

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along years before the 1956 act became law, were seeping farther and farther from every downtown, were fostering "a new kind of urban tissue," as Lewis Mumford put it in the spring of 1956, "a little looser than that of the central core but equally disadvantageous to a self-directed life, and

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older expressway proposals—and by now there were plenty to choose from—for alternatives that might spark less controversy. They received some unsolicited advice from Lewis Mumford, whose letter castigating the interstate's route through the parks west of Rosemont appeared in Landscape Architecture. "What is happening in your community is a

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conference's last speaker, who dispensed with any pretense of politeness and changed the whole tenor of the gathering: an eloquent, forceful, and very cranky Lewis Mumford. *** Just a month before, Mumford had been all but branded a has-been by the New Republic, a magazine for which he'd written extensively

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to restrain their minions in the Bureau." Innumerable newspaper stories called the urban program into question, along with the agencies behind it. Then there was Lewis Mumford, the Freeway Revolt's ideological Adam, who was in more of a rage than ever. In 1961 he'd published The City in History: Its

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and public face hailed from San Francisco: architect Nathaniel A. Owings, who in terms of his view of the automobile had much in common with Lewis Mumford. The interstate system, he wrote, had "raised more problems than it solved," had "cut through neighborhoods, parks and historic areas" in cities throughout the country

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reordered the American landscape. That we could thank the interstates for shrinking the distances between our cities, and the untidy growth of those cities beyond Lewis Mumford's worst nightmare; for the "Edge City" of shopping and office space springing up on beltways in any number of metropolitan areas, and the "big

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have been lucky, over the past twenty-plus years, to count Robert Wojtowicz of Old Dominion University as my friend; that he happens to be Lewis Mumford's literary executor is pure providence. Robert guided me in my exploration of Mumford's life, supplied me with Mumford's books, and oft en

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Wyatt B. Brummitt, "The Superhighway," TAC, January 1929. [>] He belonged to a circle ...: Lewis Mumford, Sketches from Life: The Autobiography of Lewis Mumford (New York: Beacon Books, 1983); Donald L. Miller, Lewis Mumford: A Life (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1989); and Robert Wojtowicz, Lewis Mumford and American Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). [>] The modern metropolis ...: Flink, The

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Suburbs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962) and The Urban Wilderness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972). [>] What was needed ...: Mumford, Sketches from Life; Miller, Lewis Mumford: A Life. [>] In 1924, MacKaye and company ...: Ibid. [>] A small, one-family ...: Display advertisement, NYT of May 2, 1926. [>] With the success of Sunnyside Gardens

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...: Mumford, Sketches from Life; Miller, Lewis Mumford; Wojtowicz, Lewis Mumford and American Modernism. [>] As the American City observed ...: Henry M. Propper, "Construction Work Now Under Way on the 'Town for the Motor Age,'" TAC, October

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of the New York World's Fair 1939 (New York: Exposition Publications, 1939). [>] Among their critics...: "Rebuilding Our Cities: Parasitic Modes of Life Must Go, Lewis Mumford Argues," Newsweek, April 18, 1938; Time, April 18, 1938. [>] "Mr. Geddes is a great magician...": Mumford, "The Sky Line," The New Yorker, July 29, 1939

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on Public Works, observed that buggies would be faster in a speech at AASHO's annual meeting, Seattle, November 1954 (FCT). [>] Born out of wedlock ...: Lewis Mumford's childhood, discovery of Patrick Geddes, widening explorations of New York, and early writings are detailed in his autobiography, Sketches from Life; Miller

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, Lewis Mumford: A Life; and Wojtowicz, Lewis Mumford and American Modernism. [>] The turning point ...: "Where the Great City Spread," The New Yorker, March 3, 1956. MacDonald noted Olmsted's grade-separation scheme

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Forms," Time, April 18, 1938. [>] He'd been taken, too ...: Mumford, "Westward, Ho!" The New Yorker, February 25, 1939. [>] By 1947, Mumford was writing ...: Wojtowicz, Lewis Mumford and American Modernism. [>] His magazine pieces ...: The New Yorker, October 25 and November 15, 1947. [>] Moses's Stuyvesant Town ...: Mumford, "Prefabricated Blight," The New Yorker

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," Sun, July 22, 1958; "Group Opposes Elevated East, West Road," Sun, October 22, 1958; and "Expressway Shift Urged," Sun, April 10, 1959. [>] "What is happening...": Lewis Mumford, letter, Landscape Architecture, December 1958. [>] The city's planners...: "City Buys 15 Acres for East-West Road," Sun, January 7, 1959. [>] When utility officials...: Francis

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, Connecticut Sets Its Agenda for New Roads," NYT, August 30, 2004. [>] Just a month before...: Van R. Halsey Jr., "Lewis Mumford's Golden Day," New Republic, August 12, 1957. [>] A half century later...: Lewis Mumford, "The Highway and the City," Architectural Record, April 1958 [>] Still bruised...: "Coordination," Better Roads, November 1958; E. H. "Ted

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, September 1967. [>] Writers for the conservative...: J. B. Jackson, "Abolish the Highways!" National Review, November 29, 1966; Kirk, "From the Academy." [>] In "The American Way...": Lewis Mumford, "The American Way of Death," New York Review of Books, April 28, 1966. [>] Turner decried the "nonsense"...: Cullison Cady, "Highways Are for People," Highway User

The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics

by Christopher Lasch  · 16 Sep 1991  · 669pp  · 226,737 words

out a few years later; and that the hope of some final state of earthly perfection, in short, is the "deadest of dead ideas," as Lewis Mumford wrote in 1932—"the one notion that has been thoroughly blasted by the facts of twentieth-century experience." Utopian visions of the future were definitively

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to them, 'I offer you struggle, danger, and death,' and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet." In the same year, Lewis Mumford offered an analysis of the "sleek progressive mind" that could easily have been written by Orwell himself. Progressives, according to Mumford, believed that human nature

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of popular history began to focus on particular decades. Examples of this new genre included Meade Minnigerode's Fabulous Forties, Thomas Beer's Mauve Decade, Lewis Mumford's Brown Decades, and Frederick Lewis Allen's Only Yesterday, a history of the postwar decade that appeared in 1931 and contributed to the romance

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mass," life in the Middle Ages—so often invoked as a standard of comparison—consisted of "crushing, brutalizing toil." Ten years later, a critic of Lewis Mumford's book on American architecture, Sticks and Stones, made the same point when he accused Mumford of seeking to "escape from the consequences of modern

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that this would not require any appreciable alteration of its content. The second position, advanced by Thorstein Veblen, Frank Lloyd Wright, John Dewey, Randolph Bourne, Lewis Mumford, Van Wyck Brooks, and Waldo Frank, among others, rested on a very different idea of both culture and democracy. These writers distrusted the missionary impulse

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pleasant and convivial environment to live in, Americans ransacked Europe for its cultural treasures and enshrined them in museums carefully secluded from ordinary working life. Lewis Mumford too saw the museum as a symbol of the divorce between art and life. In 1918, he drew on Ruskin, Morris, and Patrick Geddes, the

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generation of Americans should take any but a nostalgic interest in the "Orpheus" of the nation's infancy. The same question was left unanswered by Lewis Mumford's more discriminating version of nineteenth-century literary history, The Golden Day (1926); by F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance (1941); and by the many

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Olaf Hansen, The Radical Will (1977), Lillian Schlissel, The World ofRandolph Bourne (1965), and Carl Resek, War and the Intellectuals (1964); on various works by Lewis Mumford, notably The Golden Day (1926), Findings and Keepings (1975), and Interpretations and Forecasts (1973); and on Waldo Frank's Our America (1919). Like the debate

City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age

by P. D. Smith  · 19 Jun 2012

. 5500–3500 bc.4 But the city’s roots go deeper still. Archaeology is now revealing tantalising glimpses of the Neolithic origins of modern urbanism. Lewis Mumford, whose monumental work The City in History remains a classic study of urbanism, notes that ‘the embryonic structure of the city already existed in the

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. However, many architects and cultural commentators condemned this flight from the cities, describing suburbia as a ‘subtopia’ and predicting landscapes consumed by ‘slurbs’ (slum-suburbs). Lewis Mumford attacked the suburbs as an ‘anti-city’: ‘a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly at uniform distances on uniform roads in a treeless

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century, cities began to be designed with the car, not pedestrians, in mind. ‘Instead of planning motor cars and motorways to fit our life,’ complained Lewis Mumford in 1957, ‘we are rapidly planning our life to fit the motor car.’35 Traffic flows became the urban planner’s priority, resulting in cities

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mansion’s towering size / Where the floors on floors to the tenth storey rise.’100 The least desirable apartments were on the top floors. As Lewis Mumford has said, ‘the main population of the city that boasted its world conquests lived in cramped, noisy, airless, foul-smelling, infected quarters, paying extortionate rents

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and restaurants but multiplex cinemas, post offices, ice-skating rinks, even theme parks. Malls were pioneered by Victor Gruen, a Los Angeles architect inspired by Lewis Mumford’s criticism of the car’s impact on urban communities. He believed malls could become the new agoras or medieval market places. His design for

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, 1999), 23; cf. Guillermo Algaze, Ancient Mesopotamia at the Dawn of Civilization: The Evolution of an Urban Landscape (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 5. Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (London: Secker & Warburg, 1961), 19. 6. Gates (2003), 18; J. G. D. Clark, World

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of the materials needed to construct a ship, including 178 mature date palms and 17,644 bundles of reeds (pp. 40–41). 7. Cited in Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (London: Secker & Warburg, 1961), 78; see also the passages cited in Reader (2004), 38

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_survey_acs/001695.html> Accessed December 2009. 121. Donald N. Rothblatt and Daniel J. Garr, Suburbia: An International Assessment (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 2. 122. Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (London: Secker & Warburg, 1961), 486. 123. Richard Sennett, The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity

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Estate Magazine, 2 (May 1913), 50, cited from Fenske (2008), 220. 98. Spark, cited from Fenske (2008), 220. 99. Cited from Fenske (2008), 216. 100. Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (London: Secker & Warburg, 1961), 220. 101. Mumford (1961), 221. 102. J. G. Ballard, High

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), of security (the defensive wall) and as a locus for a commercial market. (Joel Kotkin, The City: A Global History (London: Phoenix, 2005), xvi.) 6. Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (London: Secker & Warburg, 1961), 72. 7. Mumford (1961), 72. 8. Kotkin (2005), 21. 9

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America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 177. 7 Time Out 1. Cited from Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (London: Secker & Warburg, 1961), 111. 2. John T. Appleby, ed. and tr., The Chronicle

The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape

by James Howard Kunstler  · 31 May 1993

be more pertinent, for more and more we appear to be a nation of overfed clowns living in a hostile cartoon environment. Thirty years ago, Lewis Mumford said of post-World II develop­ ment, "the end product is an encapsulat�d.JiJe, spent more and more either in a motor car or

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arrangement as a whole resulted in too many oddly shaped and awkward building sites that hindered property development, and tended to disorient the pedestrian. 5 Lewis Mumford said that the huge proportion of area given over to boulevards compared to the area reserved for public buildings was "absurd," and on a par

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. The American city had embarked on a pattern of growth that would ultimately consume it. "Industrialism, the main creative force of the 19th century," wrote Lewis Mumford, "produced the most degraded human environment the world had yet seen. , , 9 Extraordinary changes of scale took place in the masses of buildings and the

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better-off before them. Yet through the nineteenth century, the standard of city housing declined steadily for all classes. In a curious process described by Lewis Mumford, the homes of the middle classes and then even the well-off in New York began to emulate the architectural pattern of the tenement. As

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or towers. Train stations we!:.� Jsklw:dso!!� �.r�ad and but­ ter. In fact, sometimes the buiidings-��disdainfully referrel t'O as- Rail­ road Romanesque. Lewis Mumford called this period the "brown decades" because the buildings were so darkly ponderous. 6 2 _ _ Y E S T E R DA Y ' S T

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nature, of creating a city out of buildings in a park. That it might end up, in practice, as "buildings in a parking lot," as Lewis Mumford put it, was a possibility that planners and architects did not admit. From the late forties through the eighties, thousands of urban rede­ velopments in

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revenues. Unfair, they cried. Metro was actually telling people over a three-county region exactly how their land was going to be used. It was Lewis Mumford's dream come true: authentic regional planning. It was un-American. You can't tell me what to do with my land! Realtors complained that

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. Lynes, Russell. The Tastemakers. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949. Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964. Miller, Donald L. Lewis Mumford-A Life. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicol­ son, 1989. Morison, Samuel Eliot. The Story of the Old Colony of New Plymouth. New York: Alfred A. Knopf

Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities

by Witold Rybczynski  · 9 Nov 2010  · 232pp  · 60,093 words

heap. But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. —Lewis Mumford But what we have to express in expressing our cities is not to be scorned. Their intricate order—a manifestation of the freedom of countless

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Need Acknowledgments Notes List of Illustrations Index Preface Like those of many architecture students of my generation, my ideas about cities were formed by reading Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs. While I pored over their books, in class and out, I was too green to see that in many important ways they

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. What makes the latter so compelling is a combination of close observation and common sense; sixty years later, even the demanding urban historian and critic Lewis Mumford considered Robinson’s book “an excellent book in its time and still worth consulting.”9 Robinson was interested in aesthetics, but his view of the

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for a British edition and personally distributed a hundred copies to friends. But while Bellamy advocated wholesale political change on a national scale, Howard, whom Lewis Mumford once described as a “practical idealist,” started thinking about how a community organized along the lines that Bellamy described might actually be implemented—not in

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for more than a million dollars, frequently several million.35 Three thousand dollars was a lot of money in 1911, and housing reformers such as Lewis Mumford criticized the project because it did not provide housing for blue-collar workers, but—the precast concrete houses apart—that was never the intention.36

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that laundry.”2 Jacobs, lacking academic credentials, based her arguments on simple observation, but her conclusions were an unvarnished condemnation of architecture and city planning. Lewis Mumford, who was at the conference, later described the scene: “Into the foggy atmosphere of professional jargon that usually envelops such meetings, she blew like a

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. Death and Life was a finalist for the 1962 nonfiction National Book Award, which went to another book on urbanism, The City in History, by Lewis Mumford. Mumford, sixty-seven, had long been active as a literary critic, essayist, historian of technology, urban reformer, and architecture critic. Since 1931, his “Sky Line

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that good physical structures and handsome design are not everything in city planning to the callow notion that they do not matter at all.”23 Lewis Mumford, whose views on urbanism clashed with those of Jane Jacobs. Although Mumford conceded that Jacobs was a perceptive observer of urban life—“no one has

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’s Art Crusade,” Harper’s Magazine 104 (February 1902): 443–52; “Art Effort in British Cities,” Harper’s Magazine 105 (October 1902): 787–96. 9. Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961), 620. 10. Charles Mulford Robinson, Modern Civic Art

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. W. Norton & Company, 2009), 81–82. 33. Ibid., 176. 34. De Forest to Olmsted, December 20, 1908. 35. Pennoyer and Walker, Grosvenor Atterbury, 158. 36. Lewis Mumford, “Mass-Production and the Modern House,” Architectural Record, January 1930, 110–16. 37. De Forest to Olmsted, December 20, 1908. 38. Stern, Pride of Place

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Transformed,” Architectural Forum, May 1956, 145–55. 2. Jane Jacobs, “The Missing Link in City Redevelopment,” Architectural Forum, June 1956, 133. 3. Lewis Mumford, “Home Remedies for Urban Cancer,” in The Lewis Mumford Reader, ed. Donald L. Miller (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 186. Orig. pub. as “Mother Jacobs’ Home Remedies,” New Yorker, December

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. George Fred Keck, review of The Disappearing City, Journal of Land & Public Utility Economics 9, no. 2 (May 1933): 16. 16. Lewis Mumford, “The Ideal Form of the Modern City” in The Lewis Mumford Reader, ed. Donald L. Miller (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 163. Orig. pub. as “The Modern City,” in Forms and

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. 3. Alexander Garvin, The American City: What Works, What Doesn’t (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996), 1. 4. Ibid., 2. 5. Lewis Mumford, “Yesterday’s City of Tomorrow,” in The Lewis Mumford Reader, ed. Donald L. Miller (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 181. Orig. pub. as “The Future of the City: Part 2—Yesterday

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Press, 2000), 4–5. 8. Ibid., 3–4. 9. Moshe Safdie, For Everyone a Garden (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1974), 4. 10. Lewis Mumford, “The Disappearing City,” in The Lewis Mumford Reader, ed. Donald L. Miller (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 112. Orig. pub. as “The Future of the City: Part I—the Disappearing

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City,” Architectural Record 132, no. 4 (October 1962). 11. Lewis Mumford, “The Choices Ahead,” in Miller, Lewis Mumford Reader, 239. Orig. pub. in The Urban Prospect: Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1968). List of Illustrations Photographic acknowledgments are given

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, c. 1930. (Associated Press) 59 Jane Jacobs in 1962, the year after she published The Death and Life of Great American Cities. (Associated Press) 62 Lewis Mumford, whose views on urbanism clashed with those of Jane Jacobs. (© Bettmann/CORBIS) 73 Broadacre City was a vision of a highly decentralized urban future, with

One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility

by Zack Furness and Zachary Mooradian Furness  · 28 Mar 2010  · 532pp  · 155,470 words

in England, where the cycling industry thrived and bicycles were widely used for both transportation and recreation prior to, and following, World War ii.29 lewis Mumford was among those who spoke to the problem of U.S. automobility as early as the 1950s, seeing cars not as the end result of

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, continual hope for a technological savior, and an unwavering belief in “the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit”—a sentiment lewis Mumford rightly describes as “the most parochial notion of a very parochial [twentieth] century.”24 Consequently, the appropriate question when contemplating the not-so-distant future

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. Brian Griffin provides a nice overview of “muscular Christianity” in “Cycling and Gender in victorian ireland,” Eire Ireland 41, nos. 1–2 (2006): 220. as lewis Mumford argues in Technics and Civilization (new york: Harcourt Brace and World, 1963), 35–36, the church historically cultivated a hatred for the body that sought

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, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, Ma: MiT press, 1994), 199–224. ibid. The close timing of these events was brought to my attention in Cliff Ellis, “lewis Mumford and norman Bel Geddes: The Highway, the City and the Future,” Planning Perspectives 20 (2005): 60. also see “Toll roads and Free roads” (U.S

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public roads, 1939); “interregional Highways” (U.S. interregional Highway Committee, 1944). norman Bel Geddes, Magic Motorways (new york: random House, 1940), 237. also see Ellis, “lewis Mumford and norman Bel Geddes,” 58. as Kenneth T. Jackson points out in Crabgrass Frontier, the panel that Eisenhower assembled to take stock of the country

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of all trips made in the United Kingdom in 1950. See “Making Cycling irresistible,” 496. also see McGurn, On Your Bicycle and rosen, Framing Production. lewis Mumford’s sentiments on urban planning and transportation are best put in the following texts: The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

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, 1st ed. (new york: Harcourt, 1961); The Urban Prospect (london: Secker and Warburg, 1968); The Highway and the City (Westport, CT: Greenwood press, 1981). lewis Mumford, quoted in the segment “The City: Cars or people?” from The City—Heaven and Hell (national Film Board of Canada, 1963), Film. Emphasis is my

…

/singlespeed.html. rosen, “Up the vélorution,” 374. ibid., 368–370. rosen specifically refers to the work of lewis Mumford, langdon Winner, and richard Sclove in his discussion of “democratic technics.” For the seminal piece by lewis Mumford, see “authoritarian and Democratic Technics,” Technology and Culture 5, no. 1 (1964): 1–8. Chris Carlsson, “‘Outlaw

…

Social Power. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota press, 2004. Eisenhower, Dwight D. At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends. Garden City, ny: Doubleday, 1967. Ellis, Cliff. “lewis Mumford and norman Bel Geddes: The Highway, the City and the Future.” Planning Perspectives 20 (2005): 51–68. Epperson, Bruce. “Bicycle planning: Growing Up or Growing

Emergence

by Steven Johnson  · 329pp  · 88,954 words

other words, suggest a Potemkin village without a Potemkin. That mix of order and anarchy is what we now call emergent behavior. Urban critics since Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs have known that cities have lives of their own, with neighborhoods clustering into place without any Robert Moses figure dictating the plan

…

superorganism, and what comes to mind is an embryo self-organizing into recognizable shapes, forming patterns that will last a lifetime. * * * “From its origins onward,” Lewis Mumford writes in his classic work The City in History, “the city may be described as a structure specially equipped to store and transmit the goods

…

the Web to hear it wail. * * * In June of 1962, a full year after the appearance of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Lewis Mumford published a scathing critique of Jane Jacobs’s manifesto in his legendary New Yorker column, “The Sky Line.” In her prescriptions for a sidewalk-centric

…

–61. “This order is”: Ibid., 50. “We may wish”: Ibid., 434. Jacobs’s book would: Although he disagreed with Jacobs on a number of fronts, Lewis Mumford was also using the language of emergence to describe city development around the same period: “The city came as a definite emergent in the paleo

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