Lewis Mumford

Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities
by Witold Rybczynski
Published 9 Nov 2010

Timothy Beatley, Green Urbanism: Learning from European Cities (Washington, D.C.: Island 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 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 in parentheses.

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Chapter 3: Home Remedies 1. For example, Jane Jacobs, “Washington,” Architectural Forum, January 1956, 93–115; “Typical Downtown 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 1, 1962. 4. Alice Sparberg Alexiou, Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 61–62. 5.

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Duffus, review of The Disappearing City, New York Times Book Review, December 11, 1932, 3. 14. Frank Lloyd Wright, The Living City (New York: New American Library, 1970; orig. pub. 1958), 230. 15. 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 Functions of Twentieth-Century Architecture, vol. 4, Building Types, ed. Talbot Hamlin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952). 17. David G. De Long, “Frank Lloyd Wright and the Evolution of the Living City,” in Frank Lloyd Wright and the Living City, ed.

The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways
by Earl Swift
Published 8 Jun 2011

Turner, "The Detroit Super-Highway Project," TAC, April 1925; "Experts Advocate Super Highways," NYT, August 21, 1926; "Wider Roads for Traffic Relief," NYT, August 22, 1926; "Super-Highways Are Criticized," NYT, October 10, 1926; "Super-Highways," NYT, October 17, 1926; Roger L. Morrison, "Practical Means of Building Safety into Streets and Highways," TAC, November 1928; and 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 Automobile Age; Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); Sam Bass Warner Jr., Streetcar 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 ...: Mumford, Sketches from Life; Miller, Lewis Mumford; Wojtowicz, Lewis Mumford and American Modernism. [>] As the American City observed ...: Henry M.

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Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); Sam Bass Warner Jr., Streetcar 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 ...: 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 1928. [>] MacKaye's New Republic piece ...: MacKaye, "The Townless Highway," The New Republic, March 12, 1930; "Townless Highways," TAC, May 1930. [>] When journalist Walter Prichard Eaton ...: Eaton, "Saving New England," Atlantic Monthly, May 1930.

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Dondero, chair of the House Committee 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, 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 years earlier—in a January 24, 1947, speech to the North Carolina Society of Engineers (THM). [>] The same year ...: 2007–2009 conversations with Robert Wojtowicz. [>] An architectural detail ...: Mumford, "Bauhaus—Two Restaurants and a Theatre," The New Yorker, December 31, 1938. [>] A proposed bridge ...: Mumford, "Growing Pains: The New Museum," The New Yorker, June 3, 1939. [>] A Manhattan milk bar ...: Mumford, "The Dead Past and the Dead Present," The New Yorker, March 23, 1940. [>] His "Sky Lines" ...: "Form of Forms," Time, April 18, 1938. [>] He'd been taken, too ...: Mumford, "Westward, Ho!"

Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City
by Richard Sennett
Published 9 Apr 2018

The cellular grid has often served powerless inhabitants as a secretive space, difficult for the authorities to penetrate – as it did for Christians in ancient 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 the block, the street and the avenue, as abstract units for buying and selling, without respect for historic uses, for topographic conditions or for social needs’.17 Two of these forms are hospitable to social life in the cité, courtyard fabric obviously so by conducting so many activities out in the open in a shared space.

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Blessed by Harvard, the mediation and combination of technical disciplines which became official urbanism focused on making the ville work as a self-contained problem.15, 16 Two voices were raised against 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 at the price of destroying the intimate social structure of a community’s life’, which was in fact just what the developers Gruen, Bacon and Lawrence were in the midst of doing, big-time.17 Mumford and Jacobs sought an alternative to official urbanism, one which incorporated a city’s lived complexities into its built form.

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He ringingly declared the ‘absolute folly of creating a physical structure at the price of destroying the intimate social structure of a community’s life’, which was in fact just what the developers Gruen, Bacon and Lawrence were in the midst of doing, big-time.17 Mumford and Jacobs sought an alternative to official urbanism, one which incorporated a city’s lived complexities into its built form. Yet only a 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-century New York who wanted to turn Fifth Avenue into a highway running through one of the city’s most loved parks, Washington Square. She persuaded the public to see this proposal as criminal, and eventually New York’s politicians relented.

The City: A Global History
by Joel Kotkin
Published 1 Jan 2005

Lack of competitive trade also slowed the development of a marketplace economy. Egypt would remain a civilization whose greatest achievement, the Pyramids, was constructed to house the dead, not provide an environment for the living. “Everything else in Egypt seemed to have found durable form,” observed the urban historian Lewis Mumford, “except the city.”24 INDIA AND CHINA What Egypt did share with urban Mesopotamia was the religious focus of its civilization. Similarly, Harappa and Mohenjodaro, constructed around 2500 B.C. in the present Pakistani provinces of Sind and Punjab, also placed monumental religious architecture at their core.

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In Petronius’s Rome, we transcend the bounds of antiquity and move closer to contemporary New York City, Tokyo, London, Los Angeles, Shanghai, or Mexico City. With a population of more than 1 million, Rome was two to three times larger than early giant cities such as Babylon.2 Like later urban leviathans, noted Lewis Mumford, Rome suffered from what he called “megalopolitan elephantiasis,” a total loss of human scale.3 Yet to their everlasting credit, the Romans created the legal, economic, and engineering structures that allowed this leviathan to function as the nerve center of the world for roughly half a millennium.

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One observer wrote about an old Connecticut mill that, once the center of the local economy, had been shut down and now sat mute, “intimidated by the headlights of commuters as they race up and down the valley, weary from the city and hungry for home.”8 The harshest critics tended to be dedicated urbanists and impassioned city dwellers. Lewis Mumford identified the suburbs as “the anti-city,” sucking the essence out of the old urban areas. As more residents and businesses headed for the periphery, he argued, the suburbs were turning cities from creative centers into discarded parcels of “a disordered and disintegrating urban mass.” Perhaps the most telling criticism of suburban migration focused on an expanding racial divide between the heavily white suburbs and the increasingly black inner cities.

City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age
by P. D. Smith
Published 19 Jun 2012

Remarkable though the Sumerian civilisation undoubtedly was, cities – with or without the help of the gods – did not rise out of the Mesopotamian landscape in a single generation. In Sumer, cities developed over two millennia, from c. 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 village. House, shrine, cistern, public way, agora – not yet a specialised market – all first took form in the village.’5 As Neolithic people increasingly gained control over food production, creating surpluses that could support specialist craftsmen, their villages gradually grew into a new kind of community.

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Such affordable housing coupled with low-interest loans, cheap cars and even cheaper fuel brought the American Dream within reach of even ordinary working-class people. 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 communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless pre-fabricated foods.’122 Similarly, Richard Sennett criticised the desire of people to leave ‘dense, disorderly, overwhelming cities’ for more homogeneous but less stimulating communities in the suburbs.

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A mere 10 per cent of the city’s surface was used for movement.34 Vehicles changed that – first carts, then carriages, coaches and sedans, followed by streetcars – all had an impact on the urban streetscape. People’s freedom to walk in the city has been increasingly restricted to pavements and sidewalks. But in the twentieth 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 dominated by monotonous linear structures. In the ideal cities of the Modernists, streets were replaced by multi-lane expressways and pedestrians were herded on to skywalks or down into underpasses.

The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving
by Leigh Gallagher
Published 26 Jun 2013

a massive region where two-thirds of residents: Scott Gold and Massie Ritsch, “Swallowed by Urban Sprawl,” Los Angeles Times, October 18, 2002. In 2002 a report: Reid Ewing, Rolf Pendall, and Don Chen, Measuring Sprawl and Its Impact, Smart Growth America, 2002. “There is no ‘there’ there”: Gold and Ritsch, “Swallowed by Urban Sprawl.” The historian Lewis Mumford: Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, pp. 237, 244; Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (Mariner Books, 1970). Her influential 1961 book: Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Random House, 1961). The definitive critique of twentieth-century urban planning. It’s hard to overstate Jacobs’s role in urban planning, and her own artful explanation of the “sidewalk ballet” is worth citing in full here.

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They will be located closer to where we work and closer to the things we need, which will give us more time with our families and friends and more time to pursue all of the things we like to do. These changes won’t happen overnight, but they will ultimately lead to more choice, more freedom, and richer lives. And that will be a happy ending for everyone. 1 THE GREAT URBAN EXODUS The building of houses constitutes the major architectural work of any civilization. —LEWIS MUMFORD People have always wanted to get out of the city. At least they have since the days of ancient Egypt, which is where scholars have traced one of the earliest known references to the suburbs. In the fourteenth century BC, wealthy suburban villas with spacious gardens south of the ancient Egyptian capital of Amarna housed estates of the city’s powerful nobles.

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The widespread adoption of the car by the middle class, providing individual mobility to everyone anywhere, anytime, forever transformed the arrangement of our landscape, as developers were finally untethered from the constraints of public transportation. As the influential urban historian and sociologist Lewis Mumford would later write in his 1961 book, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects, “As long as the railroad stop and walking distances controlled suburban growth, the suburb had form.” The automobile suddenly unhooked us from the need to keep communities compact, the freeways soon gave us unfettered access, and there was land as far as the eye could see.

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities
by Howard P. Segal
Published 20 May 2012

The exhibit included approximately 220 models, videos, photographs, and works on paper. See Allan Temko, “Which Guide to the Promised Land? Fuller or Mumford?” Horizon, 10 (Summer 1968), 25–30. Mumford’s life and work have received serious posthumous treatment—see, for example, Donald Miller, Lewis Mumford: A Life (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1989) and Agatha and Thomas Hughes, eds., Lewis Mumford: Public Intellectual (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), but Fuller’s have not. Partial reconsideration have now been remedied by Hsiao-Yun Chu and Roberto G. Trujillo, eds., New Views on R. Buckminster Fuller (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).

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There have been several classical accounts of utopias to which generations of students and scholars are indebted. But it is surely time to update The Story of Utopias (1922), to invoke the title of one of those pioneering studies, which was the first book by the great historian and social critic Lewis Mumford.1 We are by now past the hostility that greeted most utopian proposals throughout much of the twentieth century, when utopias were commonly equated with the nightmarish and pseudo-utopian totalitarian regimes that shaped most of that century, whether right-wing or left-wing, fascist or communist.

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Rostow was alone in wanting to bomb them ahead to the Age of High Mass-Consumption.”22 Alas, the line of false prophets of technocracy, of arrogant “number-crunchers” from Howard Scott through McNamara, Bundy, and Rostow has obscured the largely forgotten intellectual tradition that viewed technocracy not as an opponent of progress and democracy but as a friend. This tradition includes any number of Progressive and New Deal intellectuals and reformers as well as science fiction writers. As Lewis Mumford, perhaps the leading figure in that tradition, put it so well in a 1921 review of economist and social critic Veblen’s The Engineers and the Price System, “What matters it if industrial society is run efficiently, if it is run only further into the same blind alley in which humanity finds itself today.”23 Ironically, the first chapter of Life in a Technocracy is entitled “Blind Alley.”

One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility
by Zack Furness and Zachary Mooradian Furness
Published 28 Mar 2010

For more on the 1939 World’s Fair, see David E. nye, 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. Bureau of 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’s highway requirements was chaired by lucius D.

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pucher and Buehler note that bicycling accounted for 15 percent 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, 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 own.

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Sheldon Brown also sees the interest in single-speed mountain bikes as a “rebellion against the excessive complication, fragility and weight of current mountain bikes,” in “Single Speed Conversions,” Sheldon Brown’s Bicycle Technical Information, July 3, 1999, available at http://www.sheldonbrown.com/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’ Bicycling,” Affinities: A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture, and Action 1, no. 1 (2007): 90. ross Evans, interview with the author, august 7, 2007; aaron Weiler, Namibian Bicycle Ambulance Project, available at http://bikecart.pedalpeople.com/namibia.

The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape
by James Howard Kunstler
Published 31 May 1993

Yet the movie's central T H E G E O G R A P H Y O F N O W H E R E metaphor-that our civilization has been undone by an evil cartoon ethos--could not 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 within cllecabht of darkness before a television set. " The whole wicked, sprawling, megalopolitan mess, he gloomily predicted, would completely demoralize mankind and lead to nuclear holocaust.

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For instance, L'Enfant sited the Capitol building on a hill, affording it visual grandeur appro­ priate to the idealism of a young democracy. But as Robert A. M. Stern points out, the 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 with the later efforts of freeway engineers. Finally, for all its shortcomings, much of L'Enfant's plan actually got built. Washington grew into a major city very slowly and painfully.

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Church steeples and the masts of ships along the waterfront made up th-e��-nenizens of the cities moved about mainly on foot. I; the second half of the nineteenth century, city life changed more dramatically than any time since the Renaissance. 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 areas they covered. Huge new factories employing thousands of workers congregated in clusters along rivers and the rail lines that followed rivers.

The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us
by Joel Kotkin
Published 11 Apr 2016

In this respect, the urban experience is simply not only confined to the inner city or old neighborhoods but also to the “sprawl” that now surrounds them in virtually every vibrant urban area in the world. As Gregg Easterbrook, contributing editor of the Atlantic and the Washington Monthly, asks, “Sprawl is caused by affluence and population growth, and which of these, exactly, do we propose to inhibit?”3 Many voices influenced this book. These include the writings of Fernand Braudel, Lewis Mumford, Frank Lloyd Wright, Peter Hall, H. G. Wells, Herbert Gans, and, although I differed from her on many ideas, Jane Jacobs. These figures from the past informed my reporting on the present; their focus on how people actually live, and what they desire, gave me necessary inspiration. No field of study—technical or in the humanities—thrives when only one side or perspective is allowed free reign and granted a dispensation from criticism.

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THE CITY OF GOD Early cities rested largely on urban studies scholar Robert Park’s notion of cities as “a state of mind [and] a body of customs and traditions.”5 The earliest urban residents built their cities with the idea that they were part of something larger than themselves, connected not only to their own traditions but to divinity itself. Great ancient cities were almost always spiritual centers, and as the great urban historian Lewis Mumford noted, religion provided a critical unifying principle for the city and its civic identity: Behind the wall of the city life rested on a common foundation, set as deep as the universe itself: the city was nothing less than the home of a powerful god. The architectural and sculptural symbols that made this fact visible lifted the city far above the village or country town. . . .

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One of the earliest and most innovative examples emerged in 1929 with the development of Radburn, New Jersey. Visualized as “a town for the motor age,” the community offered a wide range of residential units, with interior parklands and access to walkways. Car and pedestrian traffic was to be strictly separated, with houses grouped around cul-de-sacs with a small access road. To Lewis Mumford, Radburn represented “the first departure in city planning since Venice.”53 Radburn focused on creating a secure and healthful environment for the residents. There were extensive recreation opportunities for the community, and the town emphasized providing an ideal environment for raising children.

The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900
by David Edgerton
Published 7 Dec 2006

The implication was that Asiatic and despotic traditions, quite different from those which led to feudalism and capitalism, were crucial in shaping both the Soviet Union and Communist China.3 Yet similar analogies were also applied to the capitalist West. A famous American student of technology, Lewis Mumford, writing in the early 1960s, regarded the ancient ‘pyramid age’ as one characterised by ‘authoritarian technics’, which he saw as a historical alternative to ‘democratic technics’. Yet, in the post-Second World War years, particularly in the United States, Mumford saw a new authoritarian technics appearing, a kind of ‘occidental despotism’.

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Each successive war of modern times has revealed the lag due to the slow pace of mental adaptation’.10 Another soldier, in a pioneering book called Armament and History, published in 1946, warned that ‘civil progress is so intense that there is not only a danger but a certainty that no army in peacetime can in the full sense be kept up to date.’11 Lewis Mumford put the point graphically: ‘Fortunately for mankind, the army has usually been the refuge of third-rate minds … Hence the paradox in modern technics: war stimulates invention, but the army resists it!’12 The histories amplify these stories. Before the First World War, it is claimed, admirals thought submarines ungentlemanly, and generals irrationally defended cold steel and horses against machine guns.

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Maintenance 1. Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977), p. 183. 2. Ibid., p. 173. 3. Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957). 4. Lewis Mumford, ‘Authoritarian and Democratic Technics’, Technology and Culture, Vol. 5 (1964), pp. 1–8. 5. Ivor H. Seeley, Building Maintenance, second edition (London: Macmillan, 1987). 6. United Nations, Maintenance and Repair in Developing Countries: Report of a Symposium … (New York: United Nations, 1971). 7.

Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines
by Richard Heinberg and James Howard (frw) Kunstler
Published 1 Sep 2007

Values of the Wise Press, 2006. 17 Richard Heinberg. Fifty Million Farmers. schumachersociety.org/publications/heinberg_06.html Chapter 1 1 Lewis Mumford. “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics.” Originally published in Technology and Culture, Vol. 5 No. 1, reprinted in John Zerzan and Carnes, eds. Questioning Technology: Tool, Toy or Tyrant? New Society, Publishers, 1991, p. 17. 2 John Zerzan. Elements of Refusal. Left Bank Books, 1988. 3 Lewis Mumford. Technics and Human Development. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1966; The Pentagon of Power. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1970, p. 146. 4 Richard Heinberg.

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— against the dehumanizing side effects of mechanization. As industrialization proceeded decade-by-decade — from powered looms to steam shovels, jet planes, and electric toothbrushes — objections to the accelerating, mindless adoption of new technologies waxed erudite. During the past century, books by Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich, Kirkpatrick Sale, Stephanie Mills, Chellis Glendinning, Jerry Mander, John Zerzan, and Derrick Jensen, among others, have helped generations of readers understand how and why our tools have come to enslave us, colonizing our minds as well as our daily routines. These authors reminded us that tools, far from being morally neutral, are amplifiers of human purposes; therefore each tool carries its inventor’s original intent inherent within it.

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Thus, as clashes over human purposes form the core of ethical and political disputes, technology itself, as it proliferates, must inevitably become the subject of an increasing array of social controversies. Battles over technology concern nothing less than the shape and future of society. In principle, those battles, if not the scholarly discussions about them, reach all the way back to the Neolithic era, and perhaps to our harnessing of fire tens of thousands of years ago. Lewis Mumford drew a through-line emphasizing how modern megatechnologies are externalizations of a social machine that originated in the pristine states of the Bronze Age:The inventors of nuclear bombs, space rockets, and computers are the pyramid builders of our own age: psychologically inflated by a similar myth of unqualified power, boasting through their science of their increasing omnipotence, if not omniscience, moved by obsessions and compulsions no less irrational than those of earlier absolute systems: particularly the notion that the system itself must be expanded, at whatever the eventual cost.1 John Zerzan goes further, asserting that it is the human tendencies to abstract and manipulate, which are at the heart of our tool-making ability, that cut us off from our innate connections with the natural world, and therefore obscure our own inherent nature.2 This effort to show how our current technological crisis is rooted in ancient patterns is certainly helpful.

The death and life of great American cities
by Jane Jacobs
Published 1 Nov 1961

Under regional planning, garden cities would be rationally distributed throughout large territories, dovetailing into natural resources, balanced against agriculture and woodland, forming one far-flung logical whole. Howard’s and Geddes’ ideas were enthusiastically adopted in America during the 1920’s, and developed further by a group of extraordinarily effective and dedicated people—among them Lewis Mumford, Clarence Stein, the late Henry Wright, and Catherine Bauer. While they thought of themselves as regional planners, Catherine Bauer has more recently called this group the “Decentrists,” and this name is more apt, for the primary result of regional planning, as they saw it, would be to decentralize great cities, thin them out, and disperse their enterprises and populations into smaller, separated cities or, better yet, towns.

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* * * *1 Please remember the North End. I shall refer to it frequently in this book. *2 Readers who would like a fuller account, and a sympathetic account which mine is not, should go to the sources, which are very interesting, especially: Garden Cities of Tomorrow, by Ebenezer Howard; The Culture of Cities, by Lewis Mumford; Cities in Evolution, by Sir Patrick Geddes; Modern Housing, by Catherine Bauer; Toward New Towns for America, by Clarence Stein; Nothing Gained by Overcrowding, by Sir Raymond Unwin; and The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning, by Le Corbusier. The best short survey I know of is the group of excerpts under the title “Assumptions and Goals of City Planning,” contained in Land-Use Planning, A Casebook on the Use, Misuse and Re-use of Urban Land, by Charles M.

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It is typical of this confusion between high densities and overcrowding that one of the great Garden City planners, Sir Raymond Unwin, titled a tract which had nothing to do with overcrowding, but instead with super-block arrangements of low-density dwellings, Nothing Gained by Overcrowding. By the 1930’s, overcrowding of dwellings with people and supposed “overcrowding” of land with buildings (i.e., city dwelling densities and land coverage) were taken to be practically identical in meaning and results, insofar as the distinction was thought about at all. When observers like Lewis Mumford and Catherine Bauer could not avoid noticing that some very successful areas of cities had high densities of dwellings and high ground coverages, but not too many persons in a dwelling or a room, they took the tack (Mumford still takes it) that the fortunate people living in comfort in these popular places are living in slums, but are too insensitive to know it or resent it.

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities
by Benjamin R. Barber
Published 5 Nov 2013

Much of what I do here is merely to hold up a megaphone before them so that their measured and persistent voices on behalf of the redemptive potential of the urban can be widely heard. Tom Bender, Manuel Castells, Eric Corijn, Mike Davis, Richard Florida, Edward Glaeser, David Harvey, Peter Marcuse, Saskia Sassen, Richard Sennett, and Ronald van Kempen—and before them Lewis Mumford, Max Weber, Jane Jacobs, and the many others who are cited below—have built a scholarly edifice I feel lucky to have been able to inhabit and explore. My task has been to apply the results of their work to the challenge of establishing a form of constructive interdependence—global democratic governance—in which cities are prime actors.

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That was the ideal lurking in the background of “Middletown,” that average town in 1929 (based on Muncie, Indiana) that the sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd sought to portray as a transitional American archetype that aspired to conserve the virtue of country with the attractions of city as the nation morphed in the automobile age from a rural republic of towns into an urban republic of cities.19 Howard’s followers like Lewis Mumford, less dialectical than their muse, fought a losing battle on behalf of human-scale cities, even as they libeled the gargantuan dimensions of the new metropolis with epithets like “Tyrannopolis” and “Nekropolis.”20 Fritz Lang took this nightmarish caricature of the city to the limit in his 1927 silent film classic Metropolis, where the city becomes a surrogate for capitalism’s netherworld, epitomizing a fierce class struggle between owners living in towers and workers living underground.21 This radical moral geometry of the city has been a reciprocal affair.

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These realities give the urban its seemingly ineluctable character and allow us to treat cities as potential global democratic building blocks. There is no need to retrace here the remarkable history of towns and cities that has been narrated by eminent sociologists and historians from Max Weber, Lewis Mumford, and Jane Jacobs to Peter Marcuse, Ronald van Kempen, Saskia Sassen, and Eric Corijn.7 Yet we do need to recall that this history, for all its variety, has been marked by a relentlessly progressive development, not just change but seemingly purposeful and “progressive” change: a growth in population density, in diversity, and in specialization of function; and hence in complexity.

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together
by Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin
Published 21 Jun 2023

We are far from the first to recognize the fundamental importance of cities to the modern world. Ed Glaeser’s Triumph of the City, Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class, Enrico Moretti’s The New Geography of Jobs and many other excellent books over recent years have laid a trail before us, as have canonical works such as Lewis Mumford’s The City in History, Peter Hall’s Cities in Civilization, Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities and Paul Bairoch’s Cities and Economic Development. We have also been inspired by recent works that explore the importance of place more broadly, such as Tim Marshall’s Prisoners of Geography, and provide a fresh historical perspective on why our world is the way it is today, including Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads.

…

The rapidly growing Pearl River Delta area in China, for example, encompasses nine increasingly interconnected cities with a total population of 65 million, equivalent to that of the UK or France, and a total output of $1.2 trillion, nearly equivalent to that of Spain.17 In his 1961 magnum opus The City in History, renowned historian Lewis Mumford described the city as both a container and a magnet.18 As cities have continued to bleed outwards, it is the magnet that has become the most apt metaphor for understanding our urban world. It may be difficult to draw a neat boundary around the city today, but its gravitational pull is more powerful than ever.

…

What may feel unfamiliar and threatening when encountered the first time gradually begins to feel normal with each new exposure, and with time can even come to be seen as a valuable contribution to the rich tapestry of a varied life. Not all urban environments are equally effective at achieving this ideal. Suburban sprawl in particular poses a challenge to the connecting power of the city. Lewis Mumford once described suburbanization as ‘a collective attempt to live a private life’.34 In trading proximity for space, the suburbanite also trades serendipitous connection for privacy. And time spent commuting limits our ability to engage with our community – ten minutes extra daily commuting time reduces involvement in community affairs by an average of 10 per cent.35 That is why expanding mixed-use development throughout the city, as argued in Chapter 5, will be essential in restoring community bonds.

Ellul, Jacques-The Technological Society-Vintage Books (1964)
by Unknown
Published 7 Jun 2012

I do not wish at this point to enter the realm of prognosis, but predictions of the more or less rapid extinction of technical progress seem to me to be contradicted by the facts. Whether it be Lewis Mumford, say, declaring that the era of mechanical progress is almost at an end, or Colin Clark announc­ ing the transition of secondary mechanical activities to tertiary ac­ tivities, they are exhibiting what can only be termed a dangerous confidence. Lewis Mumford shows that certain of our inventions cannot be improved, that the possible domain of mechanical activity cannot be extended, and that mechanical progress is limited by the nature o f the physical world.

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Less penetrating than Thorstein Veblen’s The Engineers and the Price System, it nevertheless widens the scope of inquiry into the consequences of having a society pervaded by technicians. Ellul’s book is more colorful and incisive than Oswald Spengler’s Man and Technics— which by contrast seems faded and unperceptive— and it is more analytical than Lewis Mumford’s trilogy— although Ellul handles the historical evidence much more sparingly and with less assurance than Mumford. And it is more far-ranging and system­ atic than Siegfried Giedion’s Mechanization Takes Command, which, of all the books overlapping Ellul’s subject, comes close to giving the reader a sense of what the dominance of technique might mean for the present and the future of man.

…

It is useless to rail against capitalism. Capitalism did not create our world; the machine did. Painstaking studies designed to prove the contrary have buried the obvious beneath tons of print. And, if we do not wish to play the demagogue, we must point out the guilty party. “The machine is antisocial,” says Lewis Mumford. "It tends, by reason of its progressive character, to the most acute forms of human exploitation.” The machine took its place in a social milieu that was not made for it, and for that reason created the in­ human society in which we live. Capitalism was therefore only one aspect of the deep disorder of the nineteenth century.

The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
by Christopher Lasch
Published 16 Sep 1991

Almost everyone now agrees that progress—in its utopian form at least—is a "superstition" that is "nearly worn out," as Dean William Ralph Inge put it in 1920; that we can now appreciate its religious roots largely because "the idea has begun to lose its hold on the mind of society," as Christopher Dawson pointed 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 discredited by their association with the totalitarian movements that came to power in the thirties. Belief in a secular millennium, rooted in the Christian tradition, seemed to have furnished modern barbarism with much of its spiritual energy.

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Hitler knew that men and women wanted more than "comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth control." "Whereas socialism, and even capitalism ... have said to people, 'I offer you a good time,' Hitler has said 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 is deflected from its natural goodness only by external conditions beyond the individual's control. Having no sense of sin, they discounted inherent obstacles to moral development and therefore could not grasp the need for a "form-giving discipline of the personality."

…

This instantaneous idealization of the jazz age suggests a shortening of historical attention, an inability to recall events beyond a single lifetime, which may help to explain another curious feature of the twentieth-century historical imagination: the growing inclination, among journalists, commentators on cultural trends, and even professional historians, to think of ten-year periods as the standard unit of historical time. In the twenties and thirties, works 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 of the twenties. Mumford's study of the post-Civil War era, the best of these books, sheds light on the close connection between the new preoccupation with decades and the concept of generations.

Emergence
by Steven Johnson

It is indeed too huge and too complex a state of organized affairs ever to have been thought up in advance, to have preexisted as an idea.” Those broad, glittering avenues, in 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 from above. But that understanding has entered the intellectual mainstream only in recent years—when Engels paced those Manchester streets in the 1840s, he was left groping blindly, trying to find a culprit for the city’s fiendish organization, even as he acknowledged that the city was notoriously unplanned.

…

The jewelry merchants on West Forty-seventh don’t have quite the pedigree of their colleagues on the Ponte Vecchio, but then New York is a young city by Italian standards. Look at those Manhattan streets from the thousand-year view, the scale of the 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 of civilization.” Preeminent among the “goods” stored and transmitted by the city is the invaluable material of information: current prices in the marketplace; laborsaving devices dreamed up by craftsmen; new remedies for disease.

…

Still, the top-heavy structure of mass media may keep those loops relatively muted for the foreseeable future, at least where the tube is concerned. Feedback, after all, is usually not a television thing. You need 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 urban renewal, “Mother Jacobs”—as Mumford derisively called her—offered a “homemade poultice for the cure of cancer.” The New Yorker critic had been an early advocate of Jacobs’s work, encouraging her to translate her thoughts into a book while she was a junior editor at Architecture Forum in the midfifties.

Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It
by Daniel Knowles
Published 27 Mar 2023

And inevitably, for this car-centric city, the automobile would be at the forefront of it. Coventry would become a symbol for how cities would be transformed by the car. The architect behind this was a man called Donald Gibson. Appointed to be the city’s architect at the age of just twenty-nine, in 1939, Gibson was inspired by Lewis Mumford, an American sociologist who wrote a book arguing for radical changes to cities. Gibson handed out copies of Mumford’s book, The Culture of Cities, to councilors to impress upon them the importance of its ideas. Mumford believed that the industrial revolution had wrecked cities by making them too dense.

…

“High land values, the delays involved by town planning legislation, together with a lack of plan for the central area made it seem impossible. Now, in a night, all this is changed.” Under Gibson’s tutelage, the industrial slums could be cleared and replaced with new, more spacious council homes. New roads would facilitate traffic. Despite his love of Lewis Mumford, who was always critical of the takeover of public space by automobiles, Gibson embraced it. Much more traffic had to be accommodated, he argued. And “it would be fitting for the center of the motor car industry to give a lead” to the rest of the country. Under the postwar governments, bombed Coventry thus became a place to experiment with new ideas.

…

Where Jacobs had Eleanor Roosevelt, Moses had David Rockefeller, the tycoon in charge of Chase Manhattan Bank, who argued that the neighborhood was clearly in decline. This, rebutted Jacobs, was entirely predictable. Why would anyone invest in a neighborhood where an expressway was planned to knock through? Not everyone loved Jacobs’s views. Despite agreeing with her about the need to keep cars out of Washington Square Park, Lewis Mumford—who inspired Donald Gibson in Coventry—called her a “confident but sloppy youngster.” Jacobs, he thought, was a naive woman who could not understand cities in the scientific way that he did. Others noted acidly that it was easy for rich women like Jacobs to sing the praises of “slums,” because they were not the ones actually crowded into aging houses—they had the money to occupy whole buildings that poorer people had to share with other families.

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
by Neil Postman and Jeff Riggenbach Ph.
Published 1 Apr 2013

A person who reads a book or who watches television or who glances at his watch is not usually interested in how his mind is organized and controlled by these events, still less in what idea of the world is suggested by a book, television, or a watch. But there are men and women who have noticed these things, especially in our own times. Lewis Mumford, for example, has been one of our great noticers. He is not the sort of a man who looks at a clock merely to see what time it is. Not that he lacks interest in the content of clocks, which is of concern to everyone from moment to moment, but he is far more interested in how a clock creates the idea of “moment to moment.”

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But there were other reasons why education was required, as suggested by the following ditty, popular in the seventeenth century:From public schools shall general knowledge flow, For ‘tis the people’s sacred right to know. 8 These people, in other words, had more than the subjection of Satan on their minds. Beginning in the sixteenth century, a great epistemological shift had taken place in which knowledge of every kind was transferred to, and made manifest through, the printed page. “More than any other device,” Lewis Mumford wrote of this shift, “the printed book released people from the domination of the immediate and the local; ... print made a greater impression than actual events.... To exist was to exist in print: the rest of the world tended gradually to become more shadowy. Learning became book-leaming.” 9 In light of this, we may assume that the schooling of the young was understood by the colonists not only as a moral duty but as an intellectual imperative.

…

For the first time, we were sent information which answered no question we had asked, and which, in any case, did not permit the right of reply. We may say then that the contribution of the telegraph to public discourse was to dignify irrelevance and amplify impotence. But this was not all: Telegraphy also made public discourse essentially incoherent. It brought into being a world of broken time and broken attention, to use Lewis Mumford’s phrase. The principal strength of the telegraph was its capacity to move information, not collect it, explain it or analyze it. In this respect, telegraphy was the exact opposite of typography. Books, for example, are an excellent container for the accumulation, quiet scrutiny and organized analysis of information and ideas.

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
by Matthew Desmond
Published 1 Mar 2016

Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Camille Zubrinsky Charles, “The Dynamics of Racial Residential Segregation,” Annual Review of Sociology 29 (2003): 167–207. 12. Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: MJF Books, 1961), 417. See also Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1938). 13. Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 1785–1850 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 199. 14. Mumford, City in History, 462–63; Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent; Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (New York: Penguin Books, 1997 [1890]). 15.

…

Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, vol. 1, The Growth of Ties of Dependence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 147; Beryl Satter, Family Properties: How the Struggle over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009), 135–45. 2. One’s sovereignty over the land is expressed most powerfully in the act of banishment. Perhaps the first eviction recorded in human history was Adam and Eve’s. See Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: MJF Books, 1961), 107–10. On the link between sovereignty and expulsion, see Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Orlando: Harcourt, 1968). 3. The distinctly American desire to own a home is just as pronounced among the poor as it is among the middle class.

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This may be why Bob Helfgott, a landlord of twenty years who owned dozens of properties in poor neighborhoods, believed lesbians to be difficult tenants. “The gay women,” he said with a sigh. “That angry dyke thing, it drives me crazy. They’re just terrible. Always complaining.” See Cecilia Ridgeway, “Interaction and the Conservation of Gender Inequality: Considering Employment,” American Sociological Review 62 (1997): 218–35. 12. Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: MJF Books, 1961), 107, 110. 13. Tobin and Lenny had had enough. But it is important to recognize that Larraine had nearly avoided eviction, as she had in the past, by borrowing money from a family member. Petitioning acquaintances, friends, or family members for help sometimes worked.

To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction
by Phillip Lopate
Published 12 Feb 2013

Luria: The Mind of a Mnemonist, The Man with a Shattered World Richard Selzer: Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery Gretel Ehrlich: The Solace of Open Spaces John McPhee: Coming into the Country Peter Matthiessen: The Snow Leopard Wendell Berry: The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture Edward Hoagland: Hoagland on Nature Barry Lopez: Arctic Dreams Michael Pollan: Second Nature, The Botany of Desire Psychology Sigmund Freud: The Wolf Man, Dora, Civilization and Its Discontents D. W. Winnicott: Winnicott on the Child, Playing and Reality Karen Horney: Feminine Psychology Leslie H. Farber: The Ways of the Will Adam Phillips: On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored Jules Henry: Pathways to Madness Architecture and Landscape Lewis Mumford: Sidewalk Critic, The Lewis Mumford Reader Ada Louise Huxtable: On Architecture Jane Jacobs: The Death and Life of Great American Cities J. B. Jackson: Landscape in Sight William H. Whyte: The Essential William H. Whyte Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour: Learning from Las Vegas Dance Edwin Denby: Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets Arlene Croce: Croce on Dance, The Fred and Ginger Book Elizabeth Kendall: Where She Danced Art Denis Diderot: Diderot on Art John Ruskin: The Stones of Venice Harold Rosenberg: Discovering the Present Clement Greenberg: Collected Essays and Criticism Meyer Schapiro: Impressionism, Modern Art Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings John Berger: Ways of Seeing, Selected Essays Robert Hughes: Nothing If Not Critical Sports Red Smith: The Red Smith Reader, To Absent Friends A.

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Ackerley: My Father and Myself and My Dog Tulip Jean-Paul Sartre: The Words Nadezhda Mandelstam: Hope against Hope Primo Levi: Survival in Auschwitz, The Reawakening Carlos Levi: Christ Stopped at Eboli Ernst Junger: The Storm of Steel Natalia Ginzburg: Family Sayings Storm Jameson: Journey from the North Malcolm X: The Autobiography Frederick Exley: A Fan’s Notes Christopher Isherwood: Christopher and His Kind, My Guru and His Disciple Czeslaw Milosz: Native Realm Victor Shklovsky: A Sentimental Journey, Third Factory Thomas Bernhard: The Cause, The Cellar, The Breath (3 vol. autobiography) V. S. Pritchett: A Cab at the Door Elias Canetti: The Tongue Set Free, The Torch in My Ear, The Play of the Eyes Konstantin Paustovsky: The Story of a Life Boris Pasternak: Safe Conduct, I Remember C. G. Jung: Memories, Dreams and Reflections Kate Simon: Bronx Primitive Lewis Mumford: Sketches from Life Loren Eiseley: All the Strange Hours Thomas Merton: The Seven-Storey Mountain Colette: My Mother’s House Michel Leiris: Manhood, Rules of the Game Geoffrey Wolff: The Duke of Deception Hilary Masters: Last Stands Frank Conroy: Stop-Time Peter Handke: A Sorrow beyond Dreams John Updike: Self-Consciousness Anatole Broyard: Kafka Was the Rage, Intoxicated by My Illness V.

The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection
by Michael Harris
Published 6 Aug 2014

Brenda Milner,” CBC News, accessed January 16, 2014, http://www.cbc.ca/player/News/Health/ID/2323340807/. “The Internet allows us to know”: John Brockman, ed., Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net’s Impact on Our Minds and Future (New York: Harper Perennial, 2011), 239. Perhaps we should side with philosopher Lewis Mumford: Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 182. Author Clive Thompson wondered: Clive Thompson, “Your Outboard Brain Knows All,” Wired, September 25, 2007, http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/15-10/st_thompson. A team of psychologists has reported in Science: Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu, and Daniel M.

…

Others argue that future generations will learn to make new connections with facts that aren’t held in their heads, that dematerialized knowledge can still lead to innovation. As we inevitably off-load media content to the cloud—storing our books, our television programs, our videos of the trip to Taiwan, and photos of Grandma’s ninetieth birthday, all on a nameless server—can we happily dematerialize our mind’s stores, too? Perhaps we should side with philosopher Lewis Mumford, who insisted in The Myth of the Machine that “information retrieving,” however expedient, is simply no substitute for the possession of knowledge accrued through personal and direct labor. Author Clive Thompson wondered about this when he came across recent research suggesting that we remember fewer and fewer facts these days—of three thousand people polled by neuroscientist Ian Robertson, the young were less able to recall basic personal information (a full one-third, for example, didn’t know their own phone numbers).

Hacking Capitalism
by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

By extension, regulation over a plant’s inputs and outputs translates into control over the farmer tending the plant. Men themselves are grouped into allopoietic ‘social machines’. The first example coming to mind is the factory. Subsumed under capital, living labour has outputs (surplus value) and inputs (commodified needs). Historian of technology Lewis Mumford dated this wretchedness back to Pharaohs’ Egypt. The orchestration of slaves and free men on a grand scale, crowned by the erection of the pyramids, exemplified to him a gigantic, allopoietic system. He labelled it the mega machine. Here the concept of the machine is extended beyond a narrow focus on any single device, giving due credit to the social machine which organises and confines the operation and scope of the technical machine.

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Language can only exist in a commons. This is true whether the language in question consists of words, software code, or brands. Signs acquire their use value when they are diffused to the point of becoming a standard, in which case the product is pushed to the edge where the commodity form dissolves. Historian of technology, Lewis Mumford, grasped this as a potentiality many years ago: “[…] the production of words introduced the first real economy of abundance […]”19 For as long as words were little more than the building blocks of prose, Mumford’s observation was of limited relevance. When signs become components in software machines, and start to intervene directly in economic reality, his remark carries a lot more weight.

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New attempts are made in contemporary society when a community faces the depletion of resources on which it depends. For a collection of such examples, see David Fenny, Fikret Berkes, Bonnie McCay, and James Acheson “The Tragedy of the Commons: Twenty-two Years Later.” in ed. John Baden and Douglas Noonan, Managing the Commons (London: Indiana University Press, 1998). 19. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Human Development, (New York: HBJ Book, 1967), 96. 20. Jean-Joseph Goux argues that with the post-modern turn of capitalism, Georges Bataille’s thinking has become attractive to capital’s apologetics. Jean-Joseph Goux, “General Economics and Postmodern Capitalism” Yale French Studies 78 (1990).

Supertall: How the World's Tallest Buildings Are Reshaping Our Cities and Our Lives
by Stefan Al
Published 11 Apr 2022

With building codes regulating the elevators and egress stairs on the inside of towers, architects spent most of their creative energy designing the curtain wall exterior. In 1973, these regulations spawned the imposing Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, briefly the tallest buildings in the world. For their plain extrusions, urban critic Lewis Mumford called them “just glass-and-metal filing cabinets.”19 In addition to the modernist towers, the city’s planners had been captivated with a few new private plazas. The minimalist plaza lined with reflecting pools adjacent to the Seagram Building, a burnished copper building designed by Mies van der Rohe, buzzed with life.

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Even drive-in movie theaters had a comeback. Could this mean the end of the New York City skyscraper? “NYC must develop an immediate plan to reduce density,”45 tweeted New York governor Andrew Cuomo, on the cusp of the crisis. This is tragic, since cities like New York are also our greatest achievements, the root of civilization. Lewis Mumford, the noted writer on cities, described cities as “containers” that help speed up civilization. “As with a gas, the very pressure of the molecules within that limited space produced more social collisions and interactions within a generation than would have occurred in many centuries if still isolated in their native habitats, without boundaries,” he wrote.46 From their very beginnings, cities accelerated innovation and social experiments.

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Building,” Associated Press, November 12, 2013. 42.Stefanos Chen, “The Downside to Life in a Supertall Tower: Leaks, Creaks, Breaks,” New York Times, February 3, 2021. 43.Henry Petroski, “Super-Tall and Super-Slender Structures: Skyscrapers with Smaller Footprints Require Countermeasures to Wind and Sway,” American Scientist 107 (2019): 342–45. 44.Andrew Lawrence, “The Skyscraper Index: Faulty Towers,” Property Report, Dresdner Kleinwort Benson Research (January 15, 1999). 45.Emily Badger, “Density Is Normally Good for Us. That Will Be True after Coronavirus, Too,” New York Times, March 24, 2020. 46.Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1961), 34. 47.Alan Berube, MetroNation: How US Metropolitan Areas Fuel American Prosperity, Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings, 2007. 48.Enrico Berkes and Ruben Gaetani, “The Geography of Unconventional Innovation,” Rotman School of Management Working Paper 3423143 (2019). 49.Luís Bettencourt, José Lobo, Dirk Helbing, Christian Kühnert, and Geoffrey West, “Growth, Innovation, Scaling, and the Pace of Life in Cities,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104, no. 17 (2007): 7301–6.

Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America
by Giles Slade
Published 14 Apr 2006

George, as he was known, is now generally recognized as the man who invented progressive obsolescence.1 This puts him at the head of a group of writers who by the early 1930s were devoting considerable attention to products that were made to break—a group that would include the distinguished company of Archibald MacLeish, Aldous Huxley, and Lewis Mumford. Justus George firs introduced the concept of progressive obsolescence in a lead article for Advertising and Selling in the fall of 1928. With characteristic energy, he wrote: “We must induce people . . . to buy a greater variety of goods on the same principle that they now buy automobiles, radios and clothes, namely: buying goods not to wear out, but to trade in or discard after a short time . . . the progressive obsolescence principle . . . means buying for up-to-dateness, effici ncy, and style, buying for . . . the sense of modernness rather than simply for the last ounce of use.”2 Progressive obsolescence was J.

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But monopolies and cartels were illegal by the 1930s, owing to a series of antitrust laws that were increasingly enforced. Moreover, the meaning of “planned obsolescence”had not yet crossed over from its external technocratic use to become an internal industrial substitute for adulteration; and the alternative phrase, “death dating,” would not be invented until 1953 (see Chapter 6). In 1934 Lewis Mumford described practices that would later be called “death dating,” but he did not use that term nor the phrase “planned obsolescence.” So, despite Bernard London’s pamphlets, planned obsolescence probably did not achieve currency among industrial designers until after the 1936 publication of an article on “product durability” in Printers’ Ink.48 Still, Mumford recognized death dating and psychological obsolescence for what they were, and wrote books criticizing both practices.

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A.Hobson,Work and Wealth: A Human Valuation (New York:Kelley, 1968), p. 90. 47. Stuart Chase, The Tragedy of Waste (New York: Macmillan, 1925), pp. 70, 74. 48. Leon Kelley, “Outmoded Durability: If Merchandise Does Not Wear Out Faster, Factories Will Be Idle, People Unemployed,” Printers’ Ink, January 9, 1936. 49. Lewis Mumford,Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1934), p. 394. 50. George Wise, Willis R. Whitney, General Electric and the Origins of U.S. Industrial Research (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 117. 51. Ibid., p. 41. 52. Letter from L. C. Porter to M. I. Sloan, November 1, 1932.

The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community
by Marc J. Dunkelman
Published 3 Aug 2014

As anyone who has been to an ocean beach knows, waves, the central metaphor of the Tofflers’ grand theory, rarely emerge in any sort of neat progression.73 And true to form, even after the Second Wave crested in the 1950s, First Wave society remained in much of rural America. The same sorts of overlap occurred decades later as the Third Wave began to crest over the Second—a process that continues today. Lewis Mumford, an early twentieth-century scholar who used waves to describe changing patterns of American life decades before the Tofflers, wrote in the 1920s that “the movement of population is not from farm-village to industrial town, to financial metropolis; the migrations rather come as successive waves, and while one wave recedes as the next comes foaming in, the first nevertheless persists and mingles with the second as an undertow.”74 The enduring truth of Mumford’s statement is plain again today.

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And in 1807, an Englishman trying to explain the differences between the old and new worlds noted that while Englishmen thought in terms of “church and nation,” Americans tended to sort the world by “village and congregation.”9 That distinction isn’t simply a difference in perspective; “townships,” properly understood as the rudimentary building blocks of American society, were a crucial force in driving the birth of a new nation. Writing in 1925—a year shy of the nation’s 150th birthday—the philosopher, historian, and sociologist Lewis Mumford published an essay arguing that American history had been defined by four major migrations.10 The first was westward expansion of the frontier, and the second our economic transition from farm to factory. The third migration saw the arrival of millions of European immigrants in the nation’s metropolises.

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Through the early twentieth century, community organizations played a more central role in caring for those unable to take care of themselves. As Theda Skocpol has documented, the turn of the twentieth century marked the peak of voluntary associations, a phenomenon fueled by the fact that no public institutions were available to handle the challenges facing a nation streaming from farm to factory.11 Lewis Mumford, in an effort to explain how community was structured in the teeming cities of the Gilded Age, noted that private nonprofits were at the center of each neighborhood’s capacity to care: “In every industrial center remedial agencies from soup kitchens to building and loan associations, from social settlements to employment bureaus, have been endeavoring to supply, partly from private means, the necessary facilities for living and enjoyment that were left out in the growth and expansion of the industrial town.”12 Absent the sort of care provided by family members, neighbors, and charities, there was, for most Americans, no safety net.

Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace
by Ronald J. Deibert
Published 13 May 2013

Anonymous: Expect Us But at this terminal point, where the automatic process is on the verge of creating a whole race of acquiescent and obedient human automatons, the forces of life have begun, sometimes stealthily, sometimes ostentatiously, to re-assert themselves in the only form that is left them: an explosive affirmation of the primal energies of the organism. —Lewis Mumford, The Pentagon of Power June 3, 2011. A video is posted on YouTube from those outlaws of the Net: Anonymous. It is a still image of a now-classic Anonymous poster: blue and black shading, a frightening looking lineup of men in suits topped with question marks where their heads should be. Hovering above is the overlord Guy Fawkes, brim down, covering his gaze in menacing fashion.

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Oriented around a specific set of values that would inform our research, as I saw it (and still do) hacktivism has a lot in common with a philosophical tradition stretching back to the ecological holism of Harold Innis, the pragmatism and experimentalism of William James and John Dewey, and the yearning for a return to a polytechnic culture of the early Renaissance articulated by Lewis Mumford. These thinkers all shared a particular view of technology as something that should be seen not as a thing or product, but as a technic, a craft, that was inherently political and essential to a healthy, democratic, and public life. Just as Mumford saw Leonardo da Vinci as the paradigmatic proto-citizen of a polytechnic society, I saw him as a prototypical hacktivist: interdisciplinary and experimentalist.

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In November 2012, the United States Department of State issued a guidance document that attempted to clarify under what conditions companies might violate restrictions on the export of “sensitive technologies” to countries like Iran and Syria, which can be found at: http​s://ww​w.feder​alregis​ter.go​v/arti​cles/2​012/1​1/13​/20​12–27​642​/depar​tment-of-st​ate-sta​te-dep​artme​nt-sanct​ions-inform​ation-an​d-guida​nce#h-10. See also Ben Wagner, Exporting Censorship and Surveillance Technology (The Hague: Hivos, 2012). 14: ANONYMOUS : EXPECT US 1 Epigraph: Lewis Mumford, The Pentagon of Power: The Myth of the Machine, Vol. II (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974). Mumford’s Pentagon of Power is a major influence on my thinking about political resistance and technology. I assigned it as the standard text to my graduate seminar on the Politics of Planetary Surveillance, taught at the University of Toronto from 1997 to 2004. 2 Ryan Cleary, a nineteen-year-old member: Details of Cleary’s arrest appear in Graham Cluley, “Ryan Cleary has Asperger’s Syndrome, Court Hears,” Sophos Naked Security, June 26, 2011, http:​//nake​dsecuri​ty.soph​os.com/​2011​/06​/26/​ryan-cl​eary-aspe​rgers-synd​rome. 3 Anonymous’s breaches are typically followed by the exfiltration of data: For details on the Stratfor breach, see Richard Norton-Taylor and Ed Pilkington, “Hackers Expose Defence and Intelligence Officials in US and UK,” Guardian, January 8, 2010, http​://ww​w.guard​ian.co.u​k/techn​ology/2​012/j​an/0​8/hacke​rs-expose-def​ence-int​ellige​nce-offic​ials. 4 Neustar … surveyed IT professionals: Neustar reports on the impacts of DDOS attacks in Neustar Insights, “DDOS Survey: Q1 2012 When Businesses Go Dark,” http​://hel​lo.neust​ar.bi​z/rs/​neustar​inc/im​ages/neu​star-ins​ights-dd​os-att​ack-sur​vey-q1​–20​12.pdf 5 The New York-based hacker and artist collective: Details of Electronic Disturbance Theatre’s use of DDOS attacks in support of the Zapatista movement are available in Coco Fusoco, “Performance Art in a Digital Age: A Conversation with Ricardo Dominguez,” The Hacktivist Magazine (2001), http​://www.iw​ar.or​g.uk/hac​kers/resou​rces/the-hack​tivist/iss​ue-1/vo​l1.html. 6 has likened them to picket lines: Evgeny Morozov argues that “under certain conditions … DDOS attacks can be seen as a legitimate expression of dissent, very much similar to civil disobedience” in “In Defense of DDOS,” Slate, December 13, 2010, htt​p://www.s​late.co​m/art​icles/t​echnolo​gy/te​chnology​/2010​/12/​in_de​fens​e​_​of_​ddo​s.html.

Clock of the Long Now
by Stewart Brand
Published 1 Jan 1999

Park it in academic disciplines. (“Writing history is a way of getting rid of the past”—Goethe again.) Park it in august buildings. (“Layer upon layer, past times preserve themselves in the city until life itself is finally threatened with suffocation; then, in sheer defense, modern man invents the museum”—Lewis Mumford.) Park the past in literature and in theater. Park it in religion. (Yet why are Europe’s beautiful cathedrals empty while America’s storefront churches are full?) A new version of the problem is coming. As Hawthorne predicted, the amount of accumulated past is accelerating. Each new U.S. president leaves behind more papers to be preserved than all the previous presidents combined.

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Nathaniel Hawthorne, quoted in Jeannette Greenfield, The Return of Cultural Treasures (Cambridge Univ., 1989), p. 310. :79 “America, you have it better than our old continent . . .” Johann Wolfgang Goethe, quoted in Irresistible Decay (Los Angeles: Getty, 1997), p. 55. :79 “Layer upon layer, past times preserve themselves in the city . . .” Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938) :79 Each new U.S. president leaves behind more papers to be preserved than all the previous presidents combined. Personal communication from David Lowenthal, author of Possessed by the Past and The Past Is a Foreign Country. CHAPTER 14, ENDING THE DIGITAL DARK AGE :82 “Digital information is forever.”

City: Urbanism and Its End
by Douglas W. Rae
Published 15 Jan 2003

The heavy lines indicate highways completed during the Lee years: I-95 was planned as the Connecticut Turnpike before Lee’s time, and opened in 1958, while the Oak Street Connector (1959) and I-91 (1966) were plotted and built on Lee’s watch. Highway building was in this period wildly popular with people living away from the cities they traversed. Intellectuals were harshly critical, as, for instance, Lewis Mumford’s jeremiad: “This is pyramid building with a vengeance: a tomb of concrete roads and ramps covering the dead corpse of a city.”26 Mumford was thinking of New York; his rhetoric would have fit New Haven with equal force. Highways removed everything in their paths, while urban renewal was in most cases somewhat more selective.

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Atwater (New York: Munsell, 1887), 500. 23. The Quinnipiac is by far the largest of the three with a drainage basin of 169 square miles. See Marianne McElroy, “Natural Drainage Basins of Connecticut” (Hartford: Connecticut Geological and Natural History Survey, 1981). 24. This tidy bit of shorthand comes from Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1934). I understand it to indicate a complex of interdependent technologies working together in a particular period. Mumford’s further elaboration of such things as “otechnic” and “paleotechnic” seems unnecessary for present purposes. 25. As counterpoint, very inefficient steam engines were used much earlier to drive mining pumps at sites where fuel was abundant and cheap (e.g., at a coal mine). 26.

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Arnold, “Playgrounds of New Haven,” Saturday Chronicle, January 2, 1915. 30. Seymour, New Haven, 593–94. 31. New Haven Evening Register, August 23, 1916, p. 1. 32. Ibid., January 18, 1917. 33. Ibid., August 25, 1916. 34. Ibid., September 3, 1916. 35. Stilgoe, Borderland, 1820–1939, 9. CHAPTER 7. BUSINESS AND CIVIC EROSION 1. Lewis Mumford, The City in History (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1961), 413. 2. When I say that urbanizing technologies built cities and dimmed their hinterlands in this passage, I of course mean that they played a dominant enabling role in the trains of human decisions, embedded in capitalist institutions, to bring about these changes. 3.

City Squares: Eighteen Writers on the Spirit and Significance of Squares Around the World
by Catie Marron
Published 11 Apr 2016

The city’s urban planning czar Robert Moses had wanted to drive a highway straight through the middle of Washington Square. That the Village has become one of the most desirable and expensive places in the world is in no small measure due to Moses’s failure and the park’s survival. The good life, wrote the other great New York urban writer of Jacobs’s era, Lewis Mumford, involves more than shared prosperity; it entails what Mumford described as an almost religious refashioning of values based on an ecological view of the city. Seen whole, in all its variety and interconnectedness, urban health is expressed physically in a natural configuration of built forms across the city.

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[Fitzgerald trans., Book XVIII] The Ancient Greek word for “assembly” in the first line is “agora”—perhaps the first mention of a city square in recorded history. In this scene from Achilles’ shield, the agora is simply a public place where a dispute can be hashed out: the rudimentary origin of self-government. As Lewis Mumford observed in his 1961 classic The City in History, “Such a place for gathering, possibly under a sacred tree or by a spring, must have long existed in the village: an area large enough so that village dances or games might be held there, too. All these functions of the agora would pass into the city, to assume more differentiated forms in the complex urban pattern.”

Higher: A Historic Race to the Sky and the Making of a City
by Neal Bascomb
Published 2 Jan 2003

They celebrated function over form and were devoted to designing a “machine for living.” Ornamentation and extravagance had no place in the clean, precise world they imagined. The lean Depression years helped foster this “International Style,” and for many, the Chrysler Building was a lightning rod for what had gone wrong in American architecture. Lewis Mumford wrote in a 1931 article entitled “Notes on Modern Architecture”: “The ornamental treatment of the [Chrysler Building] facade is a series of restless mistakes [which] could easily have been corrected by a plain, factual statement of the materials . . . Such buildings show one the real dangers of a plutocracy; it gives the masters of our civilization an unusual opportunity to exhibit their barbarous egos, with no sense of restraint or shame.

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Stolen height titles, ruined careers, vicious reviews, miserly neglect, lost fortunes, and terrible accidents—these may seem to be the legacy of the skyscraper race, but they aren’t. Fitzgerald was too soaked in regret to understand that the Empire State was far from the “crowning error” of the city. Lewis Mumford was too enthralled by functionalism to see that the Chrysler Building reflected not plutocracy, but democracy. George Ohrstrom was too sullen after investing so much in the Manhattan Company Building to understand its value far outweighed that of its forty-three high-speed elevators. If they had taken a step back, had looked at who designed and drove these buildings to such great height, perhaps they would have come to a different conclusion.

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“Dear Faith”: Letter from Bill Gowen to Faith Griswold Hackl, September 4, 1941, courtesy of George Hackl. “unloved and unmourned”: Letter from Chesley Bonestell to Bill Estler, no date, courtesy of Ron Miller. Desperate for someone to accept: William Edwin Squire Jr., personal interview. “The ornamental treatment”: Lewis Mumford, “Notes on Modern Architecture,” New Republic (March 18, 1931). On May 20, 1946, an army transport: Jay Shockley, Manhattan Company Building (Landmarks Preservation Commission, 1995). Decades after the raising of the Chrysler: David Michaelis, “77 Stories—The Secret Life of a Skyscraper,” Manhattan, Inc.

A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams
by Michael Pollan
Published 15 Jan 1997

Yet I felt that by choosing its site—a single place out of all possible places in which to build—I was setting this great big contingency in motion, rolling it down the steep, one-way hill of personal and local history. Faced with any such large decision, my first instinct (if you can call it that) is to look for a book to tell me what to do. But I was surprised to find that the literature of architecture and building contains remarkably little on the subject. Lewis Mumford had complained back in the fifties that the proper siting of houses was a lost art, and I turned up little to suggest it has since been found. Mumford pointed me all the way back to Vitruvius, whose famous treatise on architecture, written in the first century B.C., offers some sensible advice on the siting of cities, dwelling houses, and tombs, all of which, he maintained, should be located according to the same principles.

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And told we were, over and over again—in the captions, in the quotations from the architects’ statements of purpose, and in the jurors’ comments, which were informative and often highly entertaining. A good thing, too, because without the words, these buildings were incomprehensible indeed—sort of like Charlie’s booklet, but without any of the sensual rewards. Lewis Mumford once wrote that sometime in the nineteenth century it became necessary to know how to read before one could truly see a building. Architecture had become referential, so a person needed a key in order to fully understand it. A Greek Revival house, for example, embodied a message about republican virtue that it helped to have at least some small knowledge of the classics to appreciate.

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Thoreau, Henry David. Walden (New York: Penguin Classics, 1986). Walker, Lester. Tiny Houses (Woodstock, N.Y.: The Overlook Press, 1987). Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harvest, 1989). Wright, Frank Lloyd. The Natural House (New York: Meridian Books, 1954). Chapter 2: The Site For Lewis Mumford’s discussion of the siting of houses in America, see Roots of Contemporary American Architecture (New York: Dover, 1972). There’s an excellent summary of picturesque landscape theory in The Villa: Form and Ideology of Country Houses, by James Ackerman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All
by Adrian Hon
Published 14 Sep 2022

Managers decided to ignore the previous conditions and pay the bonus anyway.77 CD Projekt Red’s attempt to bribe their workers was well and truly dead. We can only hope its lesson is learned by the only kind of organisation bigger than massive entertainment conglomerates: the government. CHAPTER SIX THE MAGNIFICENT BRIBE IN 1963, AMERICAN HISTORIAN AND PHILOSOPHER OF TECHNOLOGY LEWIS Mumford spoke at the Fund for the Republic in New York as part of a convocation on “Challenges to Democracy in the Next Decade.”1 Mumford warned of the threat that “authoritarian technics” could pose to democracy: From late neolithic times in the Near East, right down to our own day, two technologies have recurrently existed side by side: one authoritarian, the other democratic, the first system-centered, immensely powerful, but inherently unstable, the other man-centered, relatively weak, but resourceful and durable.

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Don’t collect it if it’s not necessary. And try to collect as little as possible if we have to.” Our fascination around reprehensible Chinese surveillance practices all too often only distracts from our own governments’ doings. Summing up his speech on the dangers of authoritarian technics, Lewis Mumford asked, “Is it really humanly profitable to give up the possibility of living a few years at Walden Pond, so to say, for the privilege of spending a lifetime in Walden Two?” Walden Pond is familiar to many as the site of Henry David Thoreau’s reflection on spiritual discovery and self-reliance in his book Walden.

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Charlie Hall, “Cyberpunk 2077 Has Involved Months of Crunch, Despite Past Promises,” Polygon, December 4, 2020, www.polygon.com/2020/12/4/21575914/cyberpunk-2077-release-crunch-labor-delays-cd-projekt-red; Patricia Hernandez, “Cyberpunk 2077’s Digital Store Removal: Your Questions, Answered,” Polygon, December 18, 2020, www.polygon.com/2020/12/18/22189082/cyberpunk-2077-delist-where-how-to-get-refund-update-patch-will-my-game-still-work-cd-projekt-red. 77. Jay Peters, “Cyberpunk 2077’s Long-Struggling Developers Will See Their Bonuses After All,” The Verge, Vox Media, December 11, 2020, www.theverge.com/2020/12/11/22170655/cyberpunk-2077-cd-projekt-red-developers-staff-bonuses-review-score. CHAPTER SIX: THE MAGNIFICENT BRIBE 1. Lewis Mumford, “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics,” Technology and Culture 5, no. 1 (Winter 1964): 1–8, https://doi.org/10.2307/3101118. 2. Richard Wike and Shannon Schumacher, “3. Satisfaction with Democracy,” Pew Research Center, February 27, 2020, www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/02/27/satisfaction-with-democracy. 3.

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller
by Alec Nevala-Lee
Published 1 Aug 2022

In an unpublished essay of the same title, he framed his sales pitch around a sweeping argument: “The living abodes of humans will become more and more decentralized, and industry more and more centralized and mechanicalized.” At a time when shifts in transportation, communications, and power transmission encouraged urban theorists such as Lewis Mumford to explore the notion of decentralization, Fuller wisely positioned his original objective—houses distributed from a factory—as part of the inevitable expansion of the geographical freedom of all mankind. A truly decentralized dwelling had to be light and autonomous. Using a term that he claimed inaccurately to have coined himself, Fuller spoke of “debunking” excess weight using materials and methods that were economical only in mass production.

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Afterward, he felt badly, and he began to emulate Le Corbusier in wearing a plain black suit, or “bank clerk’s clothing,” in order to highlight his ideas, not his eccentricities. He rarely achieved this goal, but his efforts were paying off. Henry Saylor, the editor of Architecture magazine, was interested in a book on his work, potentially to be written by Lewis Mumford for Scribner, for which Fuller recorded a lecture at the Architectural League of New York. After an introduction by Corbett, who confirmed that he wanted the house for the World’s Fair, Fuller explained its features, including photoelectric sensors to eliminate germs from doorknobs. It was a far-fetched notion at the time, and Wolcott worried that it made his brother “a liar.”

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Fuller’s proposed city was a tetrahedron two miles high, providing the maximum surface area on the outside for apartments, which could be added or removed as necessary. It could be built on land or anchored in water, and Sadao worked dutifully on versions for both the mainland and Tokyo Bay. Fuller received an annual fee of $25,000 to develop Tetrahedron City, which replaced the tower altogether. Renderings were later published in Playboy of what the critic Lewis Mumford called a monstrosity “big enough to entomb the population of a whole town.” While the most famous structure with which he would ever be associated was under way in Montreal, Fuller spent most of his time on ideas that were unlikely to be realized. Another was the Minnesota Experimental City, which the geophysicist Athelstan Spilhaus conceived as a futuristic community with zones for jet packs.

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech
by Jamie Susskind
Published 3 Sep 2018

Jamie Susskind London May 2018 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS COPY RIGHT NOTIFIC ATIONS Chapter 2 epigraph: From Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford (1934). Copyright © 1934 by Elizabeth M. Morss and James G. Morss. Used by permission. Courtesy of the estate of Lewis and Sophia Mumford. Chapter 4 epigraph: From Wind, Sand, & Stars, Antoine de SaintExupery (1939). Reproduced with permission by the Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Estate. Chapter 7 epigraph: From Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell (1949). Copyright © George Orwell, 1949. Reprinted by permission of Bill Hamilton as the Literary Executor of the Estate of the Late Sonia Brownell Orwell. Chapter 9 epigraph: From Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford (1934). Copyright © 1934 by Elizabeth M.

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Whatever the next computing paradigm turns out to be, it’s certainly not unreasonable to assume that computing power will continue to grow at the same rate as it has since Pascal’s invention of the calculator 400 years ago. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS T WO Increasingly Integrated Technology ‘a new world has come into existence; but it exists only in fragments.’ Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (1934) In the digital lifeworld, technology will permeate our world, inseparable from our daily experience and embedded in physical structures and objects that we never regarded previously as ‘technology’. Our lives will play out in a teeming network of connected people and ‘smart’ things, with little meaningful distinction between human and machine, online and offline, virtual and physical, or, as the author William Gibson puts it, between ‘cyberspace’ and ‘meatspace’.1 This is what I call increasingly integrated technology.

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Filters cloud the very perspective needed to keep an eye on the powerful. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS NINE Public and Private Power ‘One does not make a child powerful by placing a stick of dynamite in his hands: one only adds to the dangers of his irresponsibility.’ Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (1934) Who? Whom? Lenin is said to have distilled politics into two words: ‘Who? Whom?’1 If the previous four chapters are close to the mark, then we’ll need to think hard about the who and whom of power in the future.That’s the purpose of this short chapter. Turning first to whom, it seems clear that most of us will become subject to technology’s power in two main ways.

What’s Your Type?
by Merve Emre
Published 16 Aug 2018

“As I shall spend three weeks”: Carl Jung to Katharine Briggs, August 2, 1936, Hs 1056:4319, ETH. She would note in her diary: “Pleasure vs. Enterprise.” A handsome: Forrest G. Robinson, Love’s Story Told: A Life of Henry A. Murray (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 27. “Because Fascism”: Lewis Mumford and Henry Alexander Murray, “In Old Friendship”: The Correspondence of Lewis Mumford and Henry Murray, ed. Frank G. Novak Jr. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007), 190. Psychological Types seemed to him: Robinson, Love’s Story Told, 94. Murray had to learn: Ibid., 125. “One could characterize”: Claire Douglas, Translate This Darkness: Christiana Morgan, the Veiled Woman in Jung’s Circles (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 134.

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But he was plagued by certain doubts about Jung and the future practice of analytic psychology now that the ruling parties of Europe were girding themselves for yet another great war. This war, Murray suspected, would require a different appraisal of the human psyche than what Jung and his disciples had practiced since World War I. “Because Fascism has reared its Brutal head we can attack it, & in attacking it gain strength,” he wrote to his friend Lewis Mumford. But he worried about the “forward march of advertisitis,” a term he coined to describe the narcissism that bedeviled psychoanalysts, encouraging them and their patients to retreat from the social and political world into the solipsism of the self. It was a quietly evil force that Murray believed was corrupting, or had corrupted, “the Emotional Integration of the whole Nation.”

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis
by Leo Hollis
Published 31 Mar 2013

It is said by some that if the government had listened more to Geddes, and his understanding of ‘the harmonisation of social customs and religious ideas with the work of modern reconstruction’,4 the subsequent history of Palestine would have been very different. His notions were inspired by the science of life, moulded by empirical observation and deductive intuition. Nevertheless, Geddes was a poor communicator of his own ideas, and was no architect who could give shape and form to his philosophy. Instead he found the perfect disciple in Lewis Mumford, an American writer who later became the most influential architecture critic of his generation. Mumford would turn Geddes’s looping, mental peregrinations into coherent and urgent theory, ensuring that regional planning was one of the dominant ideas of how a city should be. As a leading member of the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA), Mumford transformed and popularised Geddes’s theories: allowing cities to grow unchecked was intolerable; people, industry and land were an integrated network that needed to be planned.

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Moving away from this were rings of housing, based around a 420-foot grand avenue, which also enclosed schools; and after that, centrifugal zones of factories, dairies and services. There was to be no smoke and every machine was to be driven by electricity. Needless to say, however, there was little discussion of life on the streets within the new Garden City; as Lewis Mumford would later write in his 1946 introduction to Garden Cities of Tomorrow, Howard was more interested in physical shapes than social processes. Howard’s dream was turned into reality at Letchworth, Hertfordshire, 34 miles to the north of London, and has been recreated around the world ever since.

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They will have all the attributes of a well-kept dignified cemetery.’14 From then on, the clash between Jacobs and Moses seemed inevitable. There was an early skirmish in the 1950s when Moses proposed driving a highway through Washington Square Park in order to ease congestion. Jacobs joined in with the campaign of energetic letter-writing, using her contacts to get high-profile support, including Whyte, the urban historian Lewis Mumford, who then wrote an influential column for the New Yorker, and even Eleanor Roosevelt. She brought her own children to the weekend protests on the square, providing perfect photo opportunities. On 25 June 1958 the New York Daily Mirror published a picture of Jacobs holding one end of a tied ribbon, symbol of a ‘reverse ribbon cutting’, signifying that Moses’s scheme had been delayed into oblivion in the face of determined opposition.

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma
by Mustafa Suleyman
Published 4 Sep 2023

For the futurist Alvin Toffler, the information technology revolution was a “third wave” in human society following the Agricultural and Industrial revolutions. Joseph Schumpeter saw waves as explosions of innovation igniting new businesses in bursts of “creative destruction.” The great philosopher of technology Lewis Mumford believed the “machine age” was actually more like a thousand-year unfolding of three major successive waves. More recently the economist Carlota Perez has talked about “techno-economic paradigms” rapidly shifting amid technological revolutions. Moments of booming disruption and wild speculation regear economies.

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If zombielike states will sleepwalk into catastrophe, their openness and growing chaos a petri dish for uncontained technology, authoritarian states are already gladly charging into just this techno-dystopia, setting the stage, technologically if not morally, for massive invasions of privacy and curtailments of liberty. And on the continuum between the two there is also a chance of the worst of all worlds: scattered but repressive surveillance and control apparatuses that still don’t add up to a watertight system. Catastrophe and dystopia. The philosopher of technology Lewis Mumford talked about the “megamachine,” where social systems combine with technologies to form “a uniform, all-enveloping structure” that is “controlled for the benefit of depersonalized collective organizations.” In the name of security, humanity could unleash the megamachine to, literally, stop other megamachines from coming into being.

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT And in the last hundred The remainder coming between 1000 BCE and 1700 CE. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT For the futurist Alvin Toffler Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: Bantam, 1984). See also the work of Nikolai Kondratiev on long-cycle waves. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The great philosopher of technology Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934). GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT More recently the economist Carlota Perez, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages (Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 2002).

The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream
by Christopher B. Leinberger
Published 15 Nov 2008

I liked 1960 in purple lights, going a hundred miles an hour around impossible turns ever onwards toward the certified cities of the flawless future.”11 There was little debate about whether the future should be car-driven. The excitement for this vision drowned out the few critics such as great urbanist Lewis Mumford, who wrote in the July 1939 New Yorker that these roads would “cancel out the motorist’s freedom of speed and movement . . . [reducing] driving to a chore.”12 The company responsible for Futurama had good reason to promote a car-based future riding on a superhighway system, presumably paid for F U T U R A M A A N D T H E 2 0 T H - C E N T U R Y A M E R I CA N D R E A M | 1 9 FIGURE 1.5.

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Norman Bel Geddes, Magic Motorways (New York: Random House, 1940). My copy of Magic Motorways is inscribed “To Jack in recollection of a tough job we did together, Norman, 14 March 1940.” Jack is John Dineen, the General Motors manager of the Futurama exhibit. E. B. White, “One Man’s Meat,” Harper’s Magazine, July 1939. Lewis Mumford, “The Skyline in Flushing,” The New Yorker, July 29, 1939. Bel Geddes, Magic Motorways. American Studies at the University of Virginia, “America in the 1930s: 1939 NY World’s Fair,” University of Virginia, http://xroads.virginia.edu/ ~1930s/DISPLAY/39wf/taketour.htm. Brendan Nee, “Fair and Square: The Planning Legacy of World’s Fairs,” http://www.bnee.com/research/fair-and-square-the-planning-legacy-ofworlds-fairs/. 

Grand Central: How a Train Station Transformed America
by Sam Roberts
Published 22 Jan 2013

“Without much pretension to architectural elegance,” a professional critic wrote of the new depot, “it is commodious and well adapted to the purposes for which it was designed, and perhaps we ought not to ask much more from a railroad depot.” The Times carped, though, that the depot “can only by a stretch of courtesy be called either central or grand”—particularly because 42nd Street was by no means the center of New York City yet. The remote depot was derided by another journal as “End of the World Station.” The critic Lewis Mumford would later denigrate its “imperial façade.” More than a century later, Christopher Gray would write in the Times that the station was “awkwardly up-to-the-minute, more cowtown than continental.” For reasons that were never made clear, Vanderbilt gave his tenant the New Haven the prime location, fronting East 42nd Street.

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Men came and went, they passed and vanished, and all were moving through the moments of their lives to death, and all made small tickings in the sounds of time—but the voice of time remained aloof and unperturbed, a drowsy and eternal murmur below the immense and distant roof. Wolfe’s evocation of Penn Station reverberates in the imaginary “silent bubble of space” that propelled Tony Hiss through Grand Central and in David Marshall’s “accidental music” of the Main Concourse. Referring to Penn Station and Grand Central, Lewis Mumford wrote that “the major quality of each station, one that too few buildings in the city today possess, is space—space generously even nobly handled.” As for the Penn Station that Mumford rhapsodized, though, you can’t go there again. And, for all its glory, for all the nostalgia that Penn Station still generates and richly deserves, of the two mega-stations, arguably Grand Central transformed the nation’s norms and Manhattan’s cultural geography to a much greater extent.

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
by Oliver Burkeman
Published 9 Aug 2021

If that sounds confusing, it’s because our modern way of thinking about time is so deeply entrenched that we forget it even is a way of thinking; we’re like the proverbial fish who have no idea what water is, because it surrounds them completely. Get a little mental distance on it, though, and our perspective starts to look rather peculiar. We imagine time to be something separate from us and from the world around us, “an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences,” in the words of the American cultural critic Lewis Mumford. To see what he means, consider some time-related question—how you plan to spend tomorrow afternoon, say, or what you’ve accomplished over the last year—and without being fully conscious of it at first, you’ll probably find yourself visualizing a calendar, a yardstick, a tape measure, the numbers on a clock face, or some hazier kind of abstract timeline.

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Anthony’s fire: See Ángel Sánchez-Crespo, “Killer in the Rye: St. Anthony’s Fire,” National Geographic, November 27, 2018, available at www.nationalgeographic.com/history/magazine/2018/11–12/ergotism-infections-medieval-europe/ [inactive]. “an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences”: Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 15. Medieval people might speak of a task lasting a “Miserere whyle”: E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present 38 (1967): 81. Richard Rohr, a contemporary Franciscan priest and author: Richard Rohr, “Living in Deep Time,” On Being podcast, available at https://www.wnyc.org/story/richard-rohr–living-in-deep-time/ [inactive].

Assassination Vacation
by Sarah Vowell
Published 28 Mar 2005

Who lives in that shrine, I wonder — Lincoln, or the men who conceived it: the leader who beheld the mournful victory of the Civil War, or the generation that took pleasure in the mean triumph of the Spanish-American exploit, and placed the imperial standard in the Philippines and the Caribbean? LEWIS MUMFORD Sticks and Stones: A Study of American Architecture and Civilization, 1924 In 1904, Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of war, William Howard Taft, sent his fellow Republican, architect Daniel Burnham, to the Philippines (where Taft had recently served as the new U.S. territory’s governor). Burnham’s assignment was to draw a new plan for the city of Manila.

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I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had linked arms with a woman in a burka and a Masai warrior, to belt out “It’s a Small World After All” flanked by a chorus line of nuns and field-tripping, rainbow-skinned schoolchildren. Yes, the memorial is lousy with coldhearted columns, a white Greek temple for a man associated with browns and blacks — the log cabin, the prairie, the top hat, the skin of slaves. Yes, Lewis Mumford called it a memorial to the Spanish-American War and he’s not all wrong. But loving this memorial is a lot like loving this country: I might not have built the place this way; it’s a little too pompous, and if you look underneath the marble, the structure’s a fake and ye olde Parthenon is actually supported by skyscraper steel.

The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge
by David McCullough
Published 1 Jun 2001

It is the “Tall Vision-of-the Voyage,” spare, “silver-paced,” and all-redeeming. The finest thing written at the time the bridge was opened appeared in Harper’s Weekly. The author was a newspaperman named Montgomery Schuyler and his article, “The Bridge as a Monument,” was not only the first critical review of the great work, but a bugle call, as Lewis Mumford would say, for serious architectural criticism in America. Schuyler did not think much of the bridge as a work of art. Still, everything considered, he judged it “one of the greatest and most characteristic” structures of his century. “It so happens,” he wrote, “that the work which is likely to be our most durable monument, and to convey some knowledge of us to the most remote posterity, is a work of bare utility; not a shrine, not a fortress, not a palace, but a bridge.”

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New York for him had become a “steel-souled machine room,” the end product of which was “merciless multiplications” and the bridge was a “monstrous organism,” marking the beginning of a new age. For James the prospect was chilling. By the 1920’s, however, the bridge was a unique source of “joy and inspiration” for the critic Lewis Mumford. The stone plays against the steel; the heavy granite in compression, the spidery steel in tension. In this structure, the architecture of the past, massive and protective, meets the architecture of the future, light, aerial, open to sunlight, an architecture of voids rather than solids. The bridge proved, he said, that industrialism need not be synonymous with ugliness.

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It is the “Tall Vision-of-the Voyage,” spare, “silver-paced,” and all-redeeming. The finest thing written at the time the bridge was opened appeared in Harper’s Weekly. The author was a newspaperman named Montgomery Schuyler and his article, “The Bridge as a Monument,” was not only the first critical review of the great work, but a bugle call, as Lewis Mumford would say, for serious architectural criticism in America. Schuyler did not think much of the bridge as a work of art. Still, everything considered, he judged it “one of the greatest and most characteristic” structures of his century. “It so happens,” he wrote, “that the work which is likely to be our most durable monument, and to convey some knowledge of us to the most remote posterity, is a work of bare utility; not a shrine, not a fortress, not a palace, but a bridge.”

The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 31 Dec 2009

It wasn’t long before the lessons of how to transform animals into capital and a source of health and power were applied to human beings. In the Middle East, around the fourth millennium BC, we see the beginnings of societies based on the herding of thousands of human beings into giant work groups to build canals, erect dikes, and create the first large-scale hydraulic agricultural civilizations. The creation of what Lewis Mumford called the human “mega-machine” ushered in a radical restructuring of human society. Matriarchal forms of familial relations gave way to new patriarchal forms of power. Governance, which traditionally had been structured around cohort groups, marking the passage of life from infancy to old age, made way for abstract rule in the hands of a single ruler who exercised absolute power.

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From what we know from studying the few Paleolithic tribes still left on Earth, early human beings had to be adept at exploring their surroundings and maintaining an intimate memory of edible and inedible plants, insects and small animals, and the seasonal changes that conditioned their own hand-to-mouth survival. Darwin was taken aback by primitive people’s keen senses of mimicking. They were constantly observing the behavior of other animals and mimicking their behavior as if to incorporate it into the making of their own. Lewis Mumford points out that mimicking was perhaps the most important invention of early man, allowing him to better expropriate his surroundings and secure his survival. Being imitative as well as curious, he may have learned trapping from the spider, basketry from the birds’ nests, dam-building from beavers, burrowing from rabbits, and the art of using poisons from snakes.

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With stored surplus, human beings created the possibility, for the first time, of planning ahead, establishing a bulwark against the vagaries of nature and gaining control over their environment. With surplus came economics, and the gnawing question that has plagued the human family ever since—who produces the surplus, who stores it, to whom is it distributed, and in what proportions. Stored grain, as Lewis Mumford points out, is potential energy and, along with cattle, the oldest form of capital. He reminds us that pre-monetary commercial transactions were almost always in measures of grain.12 The analogy of containers with the human womb—both store potential energy—could not have been lost on our Neolithic ancestors.

The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work
by Richard Florida
Published 22 Apr 2010

If your job was in a factory or in some retail concern in the city, “work” was now a place to go to, a separate world outside the home. Cities became more differentiated into areas for working, living, and shopping. Driving this evolution was the rise of the factory as the center of economic life. “The main elements in this new urban complex,” wrote the fabled urbanist Lewis Mumford, “were the factory, the railroad and the slum…. The factory became the nucleus of this new organism. Everything else was subordinate to it.”10 Early factories were concentrated in and around the core of the city. But as the scale of production grew larger, some moved to the outskirts of towns where larger plots of land could be assembled.

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See the broader discussion of the role of foreign-born entrepreneurs in U.S. industrialization in my The Flight of the Creative Class: The Global Competition for Talent (New York: Harper Business, 2005). 8. Immigrants made up 42 percent of the population in New York, 41 percent in Chicago, and 40 percent in Detroit. 9. Data on average travel speeds are from Randal O’Toole as cited in Neil Reynolds, “America’s Fast Track to Wealth,” Globe and Mail, October 9, 2009. 10. Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964), 458, as cited in Patrick Ashton, “Urbanization and the Dynamics of Suburban Development under Capitalism,” in Marxism and the Metropolis: New Perspectives in Urban Political Economy, William K. Tabb and Larry Sawers, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 55. 11.

Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution
by David Harvey
Published 3 Apr 2012

B ut, for obvious reasons, it is a complicated right partly by virtue of the contemporary con ditions of capitalist urbanization, as well as because of the nature of the populations that might actively pursue such a right. Murray B ookchin, for example, took the plausible view (also 1 38 REBEL CITIES attributable to Lewis Mumford and many others influenced by the social anarchist tradition of thinking) that capitalist processes of urbanization have destroyed the city as a functioning body politic upon which a civi­ lized anti- capitalist alternative might be b uilt:10 In a way, Lefebvre agrees, though in h is case far more emphasis is placed on the rationalizations of urban space by state bureaucrats and technocrats to facilitate the repro ­ duction of capital accum ulation and of dominant class relations.

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Peter Marcuse, "Two World Forums, Two Worlds Apart;' at www. plannersnetwork.org. Murray Bookchin, The Limits of the City, Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1 986. The history of this trend begins with Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolu tio n, Oxford: Oxford University Press (first published in 1 9 1 5) , and passes mai nly through the influential figure of Lewis Mumford, in his The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects, Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1 968. Ray Pahl, Divisions of L abo ur, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, I 984. Anatole Kopp, Ville et Revolution, Paris: Editions Anthropos, 1 967. Gerald Frug, City Making: Building Com mun ities without Building Walls, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, I 999; Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore, Spaces of Neoliberalism : Urban Restructuring in North A merica and Western Europe, Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2003.

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia
by Anthony M. Townsend
Published 29 Sep 2013

If it succeeded, Cisco would reap a nice fee for its hard work and cement itself deep within the basic operations of the city. “The popular technology of our time devotes itself to contriving means to displace autonomous organic forms with ingenious mechanical (controllable! profitable!) substitutes,” wrote urban scholar Lewis Mumford in 1961.20 Cisco seemed poised to write the next chapter in that story. But for all its promise, it was clear during a visit in the fall of 2009 that pali pali urgency was in short supply at Songdo’s technology department. From the observation deck of the soon-to-be-completed Northeast Asia Trade Tower—at 1,000 feet above the coast, it is Korea’s tallest building—Songdo looks like any of dozens of new towns that have mushroomed on the outskirts of Seoul since the 1980s.

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Jane Jacobs excoriated Howard in Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, arguing that “He conceived of good planning as a series of static acts; in each case the plan must anticipate all that is needed. . . . He was uninterested in the aspects of the city which could not be abstracted to serve his Utopia.”6 She showed little love for Geddes’s legacy, the regional planning movement, either, heaping scorn on urban historian Lewis Mumford, Geddes’s most influential and loyal disciple in America. But ignorant of Geddes’s insistence on full citizen participation in city building, Jacobs’s own work reinvented the ambitions of the Outlook Tower. Her book was itself a regional survey of sorts—a carefully studied and holistic dissection of the social ecology of urban life, delivered in plain prose to a huge public audience.

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Success of any top-down effort to shape the cities of the future will depend on bottom-up participation as well. Geddes lights the way for us. As biographer Helen Meller writes, “His objective in establishing ‘civics’ was to dispel fear of cities and mass urbanisation, and to release the creative responses of individuals towards solving modern urban problems.”46 Lewis Mumford, who after decades of correspondence (though they only met in person twice) knew him best, said: “What Geddes’s outlook and method contribute to the planning of today are precisely the elements that the administrator and bureaucrat, in the interests of economy or efficiency, are tempted to leave out: time, patience, loving care of detail, a watchful inter-relation of past and future, an insistence upon the human scale and the human purpose, above all merely mechanical requirements: finally a willingness to leave an essential part of the process to those who are most intimately connected with it: the ultimate consumers or citizens.”47 We would do well to follow Geddes’s example.

Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing Before Cybernetics
by David A. Mindell
Published 10 Oct 2002

My father nurtured my love of machines (historical, contemporary, and imagined). What I hope is the clarity of writing in this work owes more to my mother, Dr. Phyllis Mindell, than to anyone else. Between Human and Machine 1 Introduction A History of Control Systems In 1934, at the height of the machine age, Lewis Mumford laid out his vision for technology and human development. In his landmark study, Technics and Civilization , Mumford proposed a theory of phases to characterize historical periods according to their core technologies. The “eotechnic” phase of water, wood, and handcrafts served as cultural preparation for the industrial era, which arrived as the “paleotechnic” world of steam, iron, and factories.

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This translation required, among other things, ever closer couplings of human and mechanical elements through the medium of sound, couplings that left a discernible mark on feedback theory. For telephone engineers, the network listened, and it spoke. Black published his amplifier design in 1934, the same year that Lewis Mumford, in Technics and Civilization , noted technology’s ability to abstract the world. Indeed, retelling Black’s story has greater significance than simply correcting the origin myth, for it concerns the historical emergence of electrical signals as representations of the world, the technologies developed to manipulate and transmit them, and the economic and organizational conditions that made those technologies possible.

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Indeed, what is Moore’s Law—the idea that the power of computers doubles every 18 months—but a statement that progress in computing depends on progress in manufacturing? A history that includes materials, techniques, and industries reveals modern computing as part of a larger story of technology and culture, rather than the product of a discontinuous break between old and new . Analog and Digital With his idea of “technics” Lewis Mumford captured the idea that machines create and manipulate representations of the world. Indeed, the very term analog implies that a physical quantity stands for something else. Similarly, digital alludes to counting the world on our fingers. These two methods of representation reappear throughout the history of control systems, countering the view of the transition from analog to digital computing as a simple succession of superior technology.

The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World
by Simon Winchester
Published 7 May 2018

Dedication For Setsuko And in loving memory of my father, Bernard Austin William Winchester, 1921–2011, a most meticulous man Epigraph These brief passages from works by the writer Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) might usefully be borne in mind while reading the pages that follow. The cycle of the machine is now coming to an end. Man has learned much in the hard discipline and the shrewd, unflinching grasp of practical possibilities that the machine has provided in the last three centuries: but we can no more continue to live in the world of the machine than we could live successfully on the barren surface of the moon.

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“The dark side” is the American military, and in terms of new weaponry or research into the unimaginably precise, that tends to mean the U.S. Air Force. Area 51 is the dark side. DARPA is the dark side. The NSA is the dark side. The role of the dark side in this story is immense, but in today’s world, it is mainly to be only alluded to. Lewis Mumford, the historian and philosopher of technology, was one of the earliest to recognize the major role played by the military in the advancement of technology, in the dissemination of precision-based standardization, in the making of innumerable copies of the same and usually deadly thing, all iterations of which must be identical to the tiniest measure, in nanometers or better.

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It used the products of Blanchard’s gunstock machine; it also used John Hall’s milling machine, his fixtures, and his drop-forges; and its locks were made by the process invented by Honoré Blanc and perfected by Simeon North. From iron smelted in Connecticut to finished guns smelling of linseed oil (for the ashwood stock) and machine oil (for the barrel and lock), these were the first truly mechanically produced production-line objects made anywhere—they were also American and, just as Lewis Mumford had predicted, they were guns. Also, they were machine-made in their entirety, “lock, stock, and barrel.” THE NEWBORN MANUFACTURING community had other irons in the fire besides, and most of them of a decidedly nonbelligerent nature. One Oliver Evans was making flour-milling machinery; Isaac Singer introduced precision into the manufacturing of sewing machines; Cyrus McCormick was creating reapers, mowers, and, later, combine harvesters; and Albert Pope was making bicycles for the masses.

The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future
by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway
Published 30 Jun 2014

The Collapse of WesTern CivilizaTion a vieW from The fuTure naomi oreskes and erik m. ConWay The Collapse of WesTern CivilizaTion the Collapse of Choice manifests itself in society in small increments and moment-to-moment Western decisions as well as in loud dramatic struggles. Civilization —lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (1934) A View from the Future Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway the Collapse of Western Civilization A View from the Future Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway C o l u M b i a u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s n e W y o r k Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2014 Naomi Oreskes and Erik M.

Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents
by Lisa Gitelman
Published 26 Mar 2014

The social documentary form and the interests of the Joint Committee were hardly identical, but they ran parallel: part of the same culture of the 1930s characterized by the concept of culture as such, as well as by “the idea of commitment,” illuminated in Warren Susman’s fruitful analysis.29 Underlying both documentary reproduction and the production of social documentary is a general interest in documents, with documents frequently doing national—if not nationalist—work at the same time they pointed toward tensions surrounding what Mark Goble terms “the mediated life of history itself.”30 The past slips away, while modern media ironically make the present seem more historic. A “new permanent record” was accumulating on shellac disk and celluloid film, as Lewis Mumford observed, while perishable paper and the lack of both system and commitment were threatening the archival record and additional diverse items in the historical fabric—arts, artifacts, architecture—that might offer Americans access to their own past.31 In Documents of American History, one of the earliest and most influential readers or editions of primary sources designed as college textbooks, Henry Steele Commager regretted the scarcity of documents beyond those “of an official or quasi-­official character.”

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Kahana, Intelligence Work, 26; see also 23. 29. Warren I. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 166. 30. Mark Goble, Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 232. Goble discusses Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization (1934) and the form and content of history in this period, chapter 4. 31. Quoted in ibid., 225. 32. Henry Steele Commager, preface to Documents of American History, ed. Henry Steele Commager (New York: F. S. Crofts, 1935), 1:vii–viii. 33. On Lange, see Library of Congress, “Destitute pea pickers in California.

Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time
by Jeff Speck
Published 13 Nov 2012

The one characteristic that all of us share is that we come from somewhere else. Imagine two brothers eating lunch alongside a dock in Dublin, Palermo, Bombay, or Formosa and looking wistfully out to sea. One of them had the balls to get on a boat and the other one didn’t. Guess whose kids are the Americans? American mobility far precedes the automobile. Before Lewis Mumford declared that “our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf,”1 Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that “everything good is on the highway.” Soon after him, Walt Whitman waxed: “O public road, I say back I am not afraid to leave you—yet I love you. You express me better than I can express myself.”2 But it is an easy out to say that wayfaring is an inescapable part of our DNA, and ignore the other factors that make cities in the United States different from those in Canada or Australia—two other countries that at least started the way ours did.

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But it was clearly very bad for the central cities and it got even worse when the big-city mayors, desperate for jobs, amended the act to include an additional six thousand miles of inner-city expressways.7 These highways, most of which gutted minority neighborhoods, were never imagined in the original measure, which was created by people who knew better.● Even Lewis Mumford, a fan of decentralization, admitted that “the right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar, in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle, is actually the right to destroy the city.”8 Ironically, the city that resisted the greatest amount of federal highway spending was probably the nation’s capital.

Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World
by David Kerrigan
Published 18 Jun 2017

The alliance aims to get a fully automated vehicle ready for use in urban markets in the early 2020s.[197] The New Urban Environment “The current American way of life is founded not just on motor transportation but on the religion of the motorcar, and the sacrifices that people are prepared to make for this religion stand outside the realm of rational criticism. Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.” Lewis Mumford Chapter 2 set the scene by recalling the dramatic urban changes brought about by the advent and dominance of the private car over the last 100 years. Now, it’s time to start thinking about the implications of any move away from individual car ownership and/or the ability to separate car storage from your immediate location and the next time you’ll need the car.

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In a world where you can send your car to run errands without you, or summon almost immediate delivery via robots and drones from online retailers, what will become of the out of town malls created and fed by decades of car ownership? Liberating Space “The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is the right to destroy the city.” Lewis Mumford, The Highway and the City, 1957 As a result of prevalent personal car ownership, the average single-family home in the US includes a two-car garage. These two-car garages are space inefficient, often claiming around 500 square feet of what could otherwise be prime living space. Nationally across the US, that equates to about 40 billion square feet of space, or the equivalent of over 20 years’ worth of new domestic residential space construction.

Bureaucracy
by David Graeber
Published 3 Feb 2015

I would put it this way: in this final, stultifying stage of capitalism, we are moving from poetic technologies to bureaucratic technologies. By poetic technologies, I refer to the use of rational, technical, bureaucratic means to bring wild, impossible fantasies to life. Poetic technologies in this sense are as old as civilization. They could even be said to predate complex machinery. Lewis Mumford used to argue that the first complex machines were actually made of people. Egyptian pharaohs were only able to build the pyramids because of their mastery of administrative procedures, which then allowed them to develop production line techniques, dividing up complex tasks into dozens of simple operations and assigning each to one team of workmen—even though they lacked mechanical technology more complex than the lever and inclined plane.

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Though possibly, this had at least as much to with his libertarian communist political affinities than his devotion to the occult. His wife’s sister, who seems to have been the ringleader in the magical society, eventually left him for L. Ron Hubbard; on leaving NASA, Parsons went on to apply his magic to creating pyrotechnic effects for Hollywood until he finally blew himself up in 1962. 113. Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966). 114. I note that Peter Thiel, who agreed with much of the original argument of this essay, has recently come out as an antimarket promonopoly capitalist for precisely the reason that he feels this is the best way to further rapid technological change. 115.

A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next
by Tom Standage
Published 16 Aug 2021

While Charlie Chaplin satirized the relentless, dehumanizing experience of working on a production line in his film Modern Times, other observers hailed the Fordist approach as a great boon to social justice and equality. By democratizing ownership, mass production would erase social distinctions based on status goods such as cars, suggested Lewis Mumford, an American historian and philosopher: “the machine has achieved potentially a new collective economy, in which the possession of goods is a meaningless distinction, since the machine can produce all our essential goods in unparalleled quantities, falling on the just and unjust, the foolish and wise, like the rain itself.”

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Radio and television sitcoms such as Father Knows Best (1949) and Leave It to Beaver (1957) reinforced the ideal of the white, middle-class suburban idyll. Suburbia embodied prosperity and patriotism. “No man who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist,” declared William Levitt. Critics of suburbia, by contrast, worried that its dull uniformity would do corrosive damage to the American psyche. In the words of the American urbanist Lewis Mumford, writing in 1961, suburbia was “a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold.”

About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks
by David Rooney
Published 16 Aug 2021

The first watch ever to be acquired by the British Museum, in 1786, was a Puritan watch, made in about 1635 and alleged to have belonged to Oliver Cromwell, who considered himself a Puritan Moses. These everyday items provided a form of disembodied discipline for the Protestant work ethic, as Lewis Mumford, the twentieth-century chronicler of modernity, pointed out: “Time-keeping passed into time-serving and time-accounting and time-rationing.”11 It was clocks and watches, as much as sermonizing pastors, that disciplined the masses with a message of pious servitude. Personal, domestic and workplace clocks and watches, which we invited into our lives in ever-greater numbers, became our overseers and landlords, our managers and supervisors.

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Bohn, 1846), 345. 3.Translated and quoted in Otto Kurz, European Clocks and Watches in the Near East (London: The Warburg Institute, 1975), 17. 4.Quoted in Lynn Thorndike, The Sphere of Sacrobosco and Its Commentators (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 230. 5.John North, God’s Clockmaker: Richard of Wallingford and the Invention of Time (New York: Continuum, 2005), 320. 6.Edward Davis and Michael Hunter, eds., Robert Boyle: A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996 [1686]), 13. 7.Quoted in John Castle, Remarkable Clocks (unpublished manuscript, in Arthur Mitchell archive, Antiquarian Horological Society, London, 1951), 10.5. 8.Ibid., 10.16. 9.Quoted in Jaroslav Folta, “Clockmaking in Medieval Prague,” Antiquarian Horology 23, no. 5 (Autumn 1997): 408. 10. Both quotations in Charles George, “A Social Interpretation of English Puritanism,” Journal of Modern History 25, no. 4 (December 1953): 338–39. 11. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934), 14. 12. Benjamin Franklin, “Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One,” in George Fisher, The American Instructor; or, Young Man’s Best Companion, 9th edn. (Philadelphia, 1748), 375. 13. Quoted in Lauren Frayer, “Saudis Want ‘Mecca Time’ to Replace GMT,” AOL News, 11 August 2010. 14.

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
by Fred Turner
Published 31 Aug 2006

After World War II, rationalization had begun to give rise to “the man who is ‘with’ rationality but without reason, who is increasingly self-rationalized and also increasingly uneasy.” This man, continued Mills, was a “Cheerful Robot.”59 Mills’s critique could be heard echoing throughout the 1960s in works as varied as Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society (1964), John Kenneth Galbraith’s The New Industrial State (1967), Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964), Lewis Mumford’s The Myth of the Machine (1967), Theodore Roszak’s The Making of a Counterculture (1969), and Charles Reich’s The Greening of America (1970). Like Mills, these authors suggested that society was undergoing a rapid process of centralization and rationalization, a process both supported by new technologies and designed to help build them.

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The resulting social order went by a variety of names—the “technostructure” (Galbraith), the “technological society” (Ellul), and “technocracy” (Roszak). In each case, critics pointed to computers and automation as forces driving the rise of this new way of life. Though little read today, for instance, Lewis Mumford was among the most eloquent and popular of the antiautomationists. In The Myth of the Machine, he turned a cold eye on post– World War II technological research. While noting that the era had given rise to a new “experimental mode” and to such varied technologies as nuclear energy and supersonic transportation, Mumford argued that it had also brought into being a new generation of technocrats and a new generation of technologies through which they might rule: “With this new ‘megatechnics’ the dominant minority will create a uniform, all-enveloping, superplanetary structure, designed for automatic operation.

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In 1950 Innis had published an epic study of the role communication had played in various empires since the time of ancient Egypt, entitled Empire and Communications; in 1951 he published a collection of essays, The Bias of Communication. Together, these works argued that the modes of communication constituted key forces shaping a society’s structure and culture. But in fact, alongside Innis, McLuhan drew on an eclectic mix of thinkers, including Lewis Mumford, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and McLuhan’s good friends Wyndham Lewis and the anthropologist Edmund Carpenter. For insights into McLuhan’s intellectual biography, see Marchand, Marshall McLuhan; Gordon, Marshall McLuhan; Theall, Virtual Marshall McLuhan; Stamps, Unthinking Modernity; Horrocks, Marshall McLuhan and Virtuality. 22.

Foolproof: Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe
by Greg Ip
Published 12 Oct 2015

Because, ironically, the density that makes disasters so deadly in cities also makes them, most of the time, quite safe. When so many people are clustered in one place, they can be protected far more efficiently. That was one of the founding purposes of cities. “Five centuries of violence, paralysis, and uncertainty had created in the European heart a profound desire for security,” historian Lewis Mumford wrote of the origins of European cities. “Sheer necessity led to the rediscovery of an important fact… the strength and security of a fortified stronghold, perched on some impregnable rock, could be secured even for the relatively helpless people of the lowlands provided they built a wooden palisade or a stone wall around their village.”

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Nichols, Blue Mind: The Surprising Science That Shows How Being Near, In, On, or Under Water Can Make You Happier, Healthier, More Connected, and Better at What You Do (New York: Little, Brown & Company, 2014). 34 The World Bank estimates: Natural Hazards, Unnatural Disasters, 171–172. 35 In 2005, all ten: OECD, RMS, and University of Southampton, “Ranking of the World’s Cities Most Exposed to Coastal Flooding Today and in the Future,” OECD, 2007, available at http://www.oecd.org/environment/cc/39729575.pdf. 36 “Five centuries of violence”: Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1981): 14–15. 37 In India, far more: Robin Burgess, Olivier Deschenes, Dave Donaldson, and Michael Greenstone, “The Unequal Effects of Weather and Climate Change: Evidence from Mortality in India,” working paper, May 2014. 38 “There were still jobs”: Abhijit V.

Bricks & Mortals: Ten Great Buildings and the People They Made
by Tom Wilkinson
Published 21 Jul 2014

The surrealist Georges Bataille, for example, complained that ‘great monuments rise up like dams, opposing a logic of majesty and authority to all unquiet elements; it is in the form of cathedrals and palaces that church and state speak to and impose silence upon the crowds’,6 and American polymath Lewis Mumford decried the dead weight of monuments: ‘The very permanence of stone and brick, which enable them to defy time, cause them also ultimately to defy life.’7 Since the Second World War there has even been a rash of ‘counter-monuments’ intended to undermine the petrifying, didactic tone of such structures, a movement pioneered unsurprisingly in Germany, a nation still coming to terms with bad memories.

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luceneQuery=%2B%28authorId%3Apersee_79744+authorId%3A%22auteur+jafr_787%22%29&words=persee_79744&words=auteur%20jafr_787 5 Walter Benjamin, trans. Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings Vol. 4: 1938–1940, eds Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA, 2003), 391–2. 6 Georges Bataille, ‘Architecture’, trans. Dominic Faccini, October vol. 60, spring 1992, 25–6, 25. 7 Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (London, 1938), 435. 8 Bevan, 91. 9 http://wais.stanford.edu/Spain/spain_1thevalledeloscaidos73103.html 10 James Young, ‘The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today’, Critical Inquiry, 18, 2, winter 1992, 267–96, 279 11 Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans.

Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars
by Samuel I. Schwartz
Published 17 Aug 2015

In September 1957 (the same month that Walter O’Malley announced that the Dodgers would be leaving Brooklyn) the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company sponsored a symposium it called “The New Highways: Challenge to the Metropolitan Region.” In attendance was Bertrand Tallamy, Thomas MacDonald’s successor as head of the Bureau of Public Roads, now renamed the Federal Highway Administration. So was Lewis Mumford. Mumford, a sociologist, historian, and the author of The Culture of Cities and The City in History, wasn’t exactly full of admiration for the planners and builders of the Interstate Highway System. “If they had any notion of what they were doing, they would not appear as blithe and cocky over the way they were doing it.”

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They formally opposed seven out of the ten freeways described in the 1955 Trafficways Plan they had approved four years earlier, calling for an end to “the demolition of homes, the destruction of residential areas, the forced uprooting and relocation of individuals, families, and business enterprises.” In doing so, they planted the seed for what is today one of America’s most vibrant and prosperous cities. By then, Lewis Mumford wasn’t the only voice raised against building transportation systems that gave priority to the automobile. After the Embarcadero Revolt, the movement against limited-access highways really started to get traction everywhere from Australia to the Netherlands. In April of 1960, an article entitled “New Roads and Urban Chaos,” by a Harvard professor named Daniel Patrick Moynihan, argued that the Interstate Highway System was “bringing about changes for the worse in the efficiency of our transportation system and the character of our cities. . . .

The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World
by John Michael Greer
Published 30 Sep 2009

Lovelock’s dream of scientific Holy Writ simply reflects current reality: science as product has eclipsed science as process, so that people outside the scientific professions are taught to accept scientific doctrines on faith, rather than being encouraged to practice science themselves. If professional science faces extinction, there’s a real chance that it could take the scientific method with it to its grave. Some eloquent voices have argued that this might not be a bad thing. Writers such as Theodore Roszak and Lewis Mumford have pointed out that the practical benefits of science must be weighed in the balance against the dehumanizing effects of scientific reductionism and the horrific results of technology run amok in the service of ambition and greed.3 Others have argued that scientific thinking, with its cult of objectivity and its rejection of human values, is fundamentally antihuman and antilife, and the gifts it has given us are thus analogous to the gewgaws Mephistopheles offers to Faust at the price of the latter’s soul.4 These arguments make a strong case against scientism, the intellectual idolatry that treats science as a surrogate religion.

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One of the few discussions of this massive problem is Adrian Atkinson, “Collapse and the fate of cities,” City 12:1 (April 2008), pp. 79–106. 6. See, in particular, John Lukacs Historical Consciousness: The Remembered Past, Harper & Row, 1968. Chapter Twelve: Science 1. James Lovelock “A book for all seasons,”Science 280 (1998), pp. 832–833. 2. Greer, The Long Descent pp. 182–187. 3. See Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine Volume One: Technics and Human Development, 1967 and The Myth of the Machine Volume Two: The Pentagon of Power, 1972, Harcourt, Brace and World; and Theodore ­Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Post-Industrial ­Society, Doubleday, 1972. 253 254 T he E cotechnic F u t u re 4.

The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do
by Erik J. Larson
Published 5 Apr 2021

Peirce: A Life, called him “perhaps the most important mind the United States has ever produced.” The philosopher Paul Weiss, writing in The Dictionary of American Biography in 1934, described Peirce as “the most original and versatile of American philosophers and America’s greatest logician.” The cultural historian and critic Lewis Mumford placed him in the company of iconoclastic geniuses like Roger Bacon and Leonardo Da Vinci. And when Noam Chomsky, the pioneering linguistics scientist at MIT, was asked in a 1976 interview about his influences, he said, “In relation to the questions we have been discussing [concerning the philosophy of language], the philosopher to whom I feel closest and whom I’m almost paraphrasing is Charles Sanders Peirce.”1 BRILLIANT BUT ALONE Like Albert Einstein, Peirce was left-handed and thought in pictures.

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He was constitutionally incapable of playing by the rules.5 Peirce’s personal scandals and idiosyncrasies help explain why, for instance, records of his personal life—volumes of documents—remained sealed in Harvard’s Houghton Library until 1956, forty-two years after his death. His scientific and philosophical papers—including many of immense interest to computer science and especially AI—lay relatively untouched, and unpublished, in Harvard’s archives for want of a “few thousand dollars” to “guarantee the initial expense of publication,” as Lewis Mumford later put it.6 Not understanding his ideas and their significance, and unwilling to invite scandal, many of those who knew Peirce never saw his reputation restored or much of his life’s work published. Peirce himself died in obscurity, survived by his equally enigmatic second wife, Juliette, a French woman with her own somewhat checkered history.

No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea
by James Livingston
Published 15 Feb 2016

I’m not suggesting that everybody has read their books—of course we haven’t, I’m claiming instead that we take their ideas for granted, treating them as self-evident truths, just common sense. I’m also claiming that we need to free ourselves from their grip. Some of these writers are almost household names—Hannah Arendt, Richard Sennett, Christopher Lasch, Jackson Lears. Some of them have been fugitives from academic respectability—Lewis Mumford comes to mind—and some of them, like Alain de Botton and Matthew B. Crawford, still are. All of them are brilliant defenders of the ancient ideal of poiesis (although, to be fair, de Botton is more ambiguous than the others about the meanings of work). Arendt is the key figure. When she wrote The Human Condition (1958), a book originally funded by the Rockefeller Foundation as a critique of Marx, she spanned all the continents that mattered in western philosophy—she had been Martin Heidegger’s student in the late 1920s, but, unlike most other refugees in flight from Hitler’s Germany, she admired the intellectual energies of her new home in the United States.

Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism
by Peter Marshall
Published 2 Jan 1992

He did not want a Jewish State and sought co-operation with the Arabs and as a result his idea of binationalism made him ostracized by orthodox Zionists as an ‘enemy of the people’.35 The subsequent history of Israel has shown the danger of Buber’s view of the State as the ‘mother’ of communities. He should have heeded more carefully Proudhon’s insight that order is the daughter and not the mother of liberty. Lewis Mumford Lewis Mumford’s concern with the relationship between society and technology led him to adopt a strongly libertarian position. From his first work The Story of Utopia in 1922, he tried to set out the conditions for the rational use of technology for human liberation. His fundamental thesis is that from late neolithic times in the Near East two technologies have recurrently existed side by side: ‘one authoritarian, the other democratic, the first system-centred, immensely powerful but inherently unstable, the other man-centred, relatively weak, but resourceful and durable’.36 The former has become so dominant that Mumford believes we are rapidly approaching a time when our surviving democratic technics will be completely suppressed or supplanted unless we radically alter course and begin to reassert control over our runaway technology.

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It may well be that in a future federation of independent republics Kropotkin, and not Lenin, will have the last word. Influence Kropotkin undoubtedly appears as one of the most attractive of anarchist thinkers and his influence has been acknowledged by people as diverse as Kōtoku in Japan, Pa Chin in China, Gandhi in India, and Lewis Mumford and Paul Goodman in the United States. He was a major inspiration of anarchist movements in Russia and Britain, and helped shape those in France, Belgium and Switzerland. He remains the greatest exponent of a decentralized society based on a harmonious balance between agriculture and industry.

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He went on to portray vividly the alienation of the One-Dimensional Man (1964) of Western society whose creativity and ability to dissent had been undermined. He concluded that only a non-repressive civilization would be able to give natural expression to unfettered human nature although he did not go so far as to reject the need for government. At the same time, social critics like Lewis Mumford were denouncing the ‘megamachine’ of the new military-industrial complex in the United States, while Paul Goodman was reminding people of the advantages of decentralized communities. During the early part of the 1960s the ideology of the New Left remained ambiguous. The reigning orthodoxies of Liberalism and Marxism seemed exhausted and irrelevant, but there was no clear alternative.

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies
by Geoffrey West
Published 15 May 2017

The movement advocated a return to diverse, mixed-use neighborhoods architecturally as well as socially and commercially, with an emphasis on community structure through designs that enhanced pedestrian use and public transportation. Much of the thinking was inspired by the critical writings of the great urbanists Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs, who had reminded us that cities are people and not just infrastructure in the service of the automobile and corporate concrete-and-steel high-rises. Jane Jacobs gained her fame and notoriety during the 1950s and ’60s battling plans to run a four-lane limited-access highway through Greenwich Village in New York City, where she then lived.

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Jane Jacobs led the fight to stop this extraordinary encroachment, claiming that it would destroy an essential feature of the city. After a long and bitter struggle she eventually won the battle. She was much vilified during the process, and not just by politicians and developers, but by many urban planners and practitioners, including Lewis Mumford, who saw her as a flaky sentimental reactionary blocking progress and the future commercial success of New York City. In keeping with the spirit of Le Corbusier, Moses’s plans also called for multiple city blocks to be razed and replaced with upscale high-rises. Although this was carried out in many areas of the city, it went by the wayside in Greenwich Village though it did result in the development of Washington Square Village, a project owned by New York University, which was ultimately used for faculty housing.

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On the other hand, the more concrete characteristics of life such as income, health, and cultural activities clearly do. Much of what has been written about the success of cities is not much more sophisticated than elaborations on the sort of anecdotes I’ve already quoted and is, at best, intuitive analysis based on narratives much in the style of Jane Jacobs or Lewis Mumford.7 There are many academic sociological studies based on interviews and surveys that try to develop a more objective, “scientific” perspective. Urban sociology as a discipline has a long and illustrious but somewhat controversial and often surprisingly parochial history—it was even used by Robert Moses to justify blasting highways through traditional neighborhoods.

A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century
by Witold Rybczynski
Published 1 Jan 1999

That the Hall was really a large farmhouse appealed to him “quite as much as to have found the arms of some murdering Baron over a dungeon door.” JOSTLING AND BEING JOSTLED Frederick Law Olmsted, c. 1860. No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world . . . —THOMAS CARLYLE CHAPTER ELEVEN Mr. Downing’s Magazine LEWIS MUMFORD CALLED Olmsted’s combination of travel, shrewd observation, and intelligent reading “American education at its best.” He suggested that Olmsted could be considered representative of a mid-nineteenth-century American type: the self-invented man. Mumford compared Olmsted to Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and the economist Henry George, whose Progress and Poverty was one of the best-selling economic books of that time.

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Putnam’s Son’s, 1922), was followed by a companion volume, Central Park as a Work of Art and as a Great Municipal Enterprise, 1853–1895 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Son’s, 1928). For many years this collection of correspondence, reports, biographical fragments, and chronological highlights remained the chief source of firsthand information about Olmsted’s life. In 1931 the writer and architectural critic Lewis Mumford published The Brown Decades (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1931) in which he devoted much of a chapter to Olmsted. Mumford’s perceptive appreciation of Olmsted’s position in nineteenth-century America was not widely shared. In fact, by then the man whom Mumford described as having “almost single-handed laid the foundations for a better order in city building” had slipped into almost total obscurity.

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“There we were . . . ”: Frederick Law Olmsted, Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1967), 59. “A gentle undulating . . . ”: Ibid., 97. JOSTLING AND BEING JOSTLED Chapter Eleven: Mr. Downing’s magazine “American education . . . ”: Lewis Mumford, “The Renewal of the Landscape,” The Brown Decades (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931), 85. “I began life as a . . . ”: Frederick Law Olmsted, Landscape Architect, 1822–1903, ed. Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and Theodora Kimball (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1928), 83. “Everybody at home . . . ”: Frederick Law Olmsted to Charles Loring Brace, November 12, 1850, FLOP.

The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update
by Donella H. Meadows , Jørgen Randers and Dennis L. Meadows
Published 15 Apr 2004

The generations that live around the turn of the twenty-first century are called upon not only to bring their ecological footprint below the earth's limits, but to do so while restructuring their inner and outer worlds. That process will touch every arena of life, require every kind of human talent. It will need technical and entrepreneurial innovation, as well as communal, social, political, artistic, and spiritual invention. Fifty years ago Lewis Mumford recognized the magnitude of the task and its uniquely human character; it is one that will challenge and develop the humanity of everyone. An age of expansion is giving place to an age of equilibrium. The achievement of this equilibrium is the task of the next few centuries.... The theme for the new period will be neither arms and the man nor machines and the man: its theme will be the resurgence of life, the displacement of the mechanical by the organic, and the re-establishment of the person as the ultimate term of all human effort.

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A good example is the biannual WWF Living Planet Report published by World Wide Fund for Nature International, Gland, Switzerland, which provides data on trends in global biodiversity and the ecological footprint of nations. 7. See Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2000). 8. Lewis Mumford, The Condition of Man (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1944), 398-399. Chapter 8. Tools for the Transition to Sustainability 1. Donald Worster, editor, The Ends of the Earth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 11-12. 2. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lecture on "War," delivered in Boston, March 1838.

Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age
by Alex Wright
Published 6 Jun 2014

His museum would orient people to the external forces and, over time, improve their collective lot. Geddes also explored the possibilities of what he called Thinking Machines—diagrams of complex ideas that relied on visual logic rather than linear narrative forms. The American historian and New Yorker a­ rchitectural writer Lewis Mumford called it the “art of ideological cartography.”12 In 1910, Geddes traveled to Brussels at the invitation of his friend Paul Otlet. The two had met years earlier at the 1900 Paris Expo and afterward had exchanged occasional letters. They bonded over their shared interest in Comte’s positivist philosophy, which had inspired both men in pursuit of their utopian schemes.

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A faint echo of Geddes’s spirit seems to live on, however, in an exhibit titled “Edinburgh Vision,” which provides a historical perspective on the city’s evolution over the past 150 years through a combination of stereoscopic lenses, mirrors, and 3-D glasses. Elsewhere, Geddes’s legacy as an influential sociologist and town planner seems secure. His ideas about urban planning, rooted in firsthand observational research, went on to influence generations of important thinkers, including Lewis Mumford, who once praised him as a “global thinker in practice, a whole generation or more before the Western democracies fought a global war.”4 Geddes’s work continues to suggest intriguing possibilities for rethinking the architecture of information: creating physical spaces that complement and extend our ability to access large bodies of networked information.

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car
by Anthony M. Townsend
Published 15 Jun 2020

See, for example, Andrés Rodríguez-Pose and Michael Storper, “Housing, Urban Growth and Inequalities: The Limits to Deregulation and Upzoning in Reducing Economic and Spatial Inequality,” Urban Studies (September 2019), https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098019859458. 9Wrestling with Regulation The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is actually the right to destroy the city. —Lewis Mumford, 1964 Mayors may have the hardest job in the self-driving future. After the designers, developers, and engineers are long gone, they’ll have to pick up the pieces. Yet today, we focus mainly on the national reforms needed to kick-start AV innovation. The real challenge of regulating the impacts of AVs will fall on local governments—as it did in the motor age.

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(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991), 3–25. 206“bringing remote storage locations”: “Automated Trucking: A CBRE Research Perspective,” CBRE, November 17, 2017, http://www.cbre.us/real-estate-services/real-estate-industries/industrial-and-logistics/industrial-and-logistics-research/automated-trucking. 206“service firms should locate”: CBRE, “Automated Trucking.” 206“In order to feed, maintain, and entertain”: Rem Koolhaas, “The World in 2018,” The Economist, November 28, 2017, 153. 208“Rather than building AI”: Russell Brandom, “Self-Driving Cars Are Headed Toward an AI Roadblock,” The Verge, July 3, 2018, https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/3/17530232/self-driving-ai-winter-full-autonomy-waymo-tesla-uber. 209The term jaywalking: “Why Jaywalking Is Called Jaywalking,” Merriam-Webster, accessed May 23, 2019, https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/why-is-it-called-jaywalking. 209weaponized by automobile interests: Peter Norton, Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 210. 209another separate guideway: Kiger, “Designing for the Driverless Age.” 209“argued for dense multilevel traffic”: “New York Modern,” The Skyscraper Museum, October 24, 2007, https://www.skyscraper.org/EXHIBITIONS/FUTURE_CITY/new_york_modern.htm. 210“the first place in the world”: Sidewalk Labs, RFP Submission for Waterfront Toronto (New York: Sidewalk Labs, 2017), 144. 210“Carriage squares”: Renate van der Zee, “Story of Cities #30: How This Amsterdam Inventor Gave Bike-Sharing to the World,” The Guardian, April 26, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/26/story-cities-amsterdam-bike-share-scheme. 210“a small zone that will serve”: Sidewalk Labs, RFP Submission for Waterfront Toronto, 144. 211the “beeping monster”: Shirley Zhao, “Tech Worries Throw Future of Hong Kong’s First Driverless Electric Bus Route into Doubt,” South China Morning Post, March 31, 2019, https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/transport/article/3003944/driverless-electric-bus-fails-create-buzz-hong-kong. 211“Purchases are deposited at freight delivery centres”: Sustainable Urban Mobility Research Laboratory, “Shared World,” Singapore University of Technology and Design, accessed January 6, 2019, https://mobility. sutd.edu.sg/shared_world/. 211the unbuilt Minnesota Experimental City: David Grossman, “The Time Minnesota Almost Built a Doomed, Future City,” Popular Mechanics, March 31, 2018, https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a19642881/spilhaus-experimental-city-documentary/. 9. Wrestling with Regulation 213“The right to have access to every building”: Lewis Mumford, The Highway and the City (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963). 213One of the first to try: “Toronto among the Fastest Growing Tech Hubs in North America,” U of T News, July 21, 2017, https://www.utoronto.ca/news/toronto-among-fastest-growing-tech-hubs-north-america. 214potential safety, economic, and land use benefits: David Ticoll, “Driving Changes: Automated Vehicles in Toronto,” University of Toronto Transportation Research Institute Discussion Paper, October 15, 2015, https://munkschool.utoronto.ca/ipl/files/2016/03/Driving-Changes-Ticoll-2015.pdf. 214specific actions to align AV policy: “Automated Vehicles Tactical Plan,” Toronto, accessed September 10, 2019, https://www.toronto.ca/services-payments/streets-parking-transportation/automated-vehicles/draft-automated-vehicle-tactical-plan-2019-2021/. 214“Those who don’t have automobiles”: Lawrence D.

24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep
by Jonathan Crary
Published 3 Jun 2013

Whether in the mid twentieth century or today, seriality is the numbing and ceaseless production of the same. It is the weight of all the counterfinalities that inexorably act against our own intentions, our loves and hopes. Not by accident, Sartre—along with many other European critics—relied on Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization, a historical survey of rationalized forms of social organization that were dependent on an automation of behavior, on the training of humans to function habitually and repetitively. Sartre describes not only individual isolation but the seriality that underlies situations with a manifestly collective or group character.

Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence
by James Lovelock
Published 27 Aug 2019

This may be true, but in the future chips are likely to be carbon-based; a diamond chip would have speed beyond anything we can now envisage. 9 War Sadly, the power of the Anthropocene has manifested itself most forcibly in war. It has been an age made for increasingly bloody conflict, thanks to the ingenuity of our new machines. As the philosopher and historian Lewis Mumford noted in Technics and Civilization, ‘War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.’ Before 1700 warfare was brutal enough, but it was powered primarily by the hands of men and a certain amount of gunpowder. The American Civil War, which lasted from 1861 to 1865 and cost over a million lives, was the first occasion when war was powered also by the products of the Anthropocene.

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture
by Ellen Ruppel Shell
Published 2 Jul 2009

With his partner and second wife, Elsie Krummeck, he founded an architectural and design firm that developed a reputation for, among other things, fitting Fifth Avenue boutiques with lavish marble-covered entrance vestibules. This may seem a trivial matter to us today, but at the time it was a revelation. In the words of culture critic Lewis Mumford, Gruen’s lobbies lured customers like “a pitcher plant captures flies” and eliminated what he called the “phobia of entering a store.” Anyone who has paced nervously outside the entrance of a swanky boutique waiting to be “buzzed in” knows that this is not always true, but it was true enough at the time to make Gruen a star in the cloistered world of retail architecture.

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His firm and its subsidiar ies controlled every link in the supply chain, from forests to lumberyards to appliance wholesalers. Dissatisfied with the cost of nails, he built a factory to make his own. By shunning middlemen, he got great deals on appliances. By shunning craft workers, he freed himself from labor pressures. He placated the unions, cutting them out without pissing them off. Some critics complained. Lewis Mumford famously dubbed Levittown an “instant slum,” but most held their collective tongues. Levittown was the future, and in the wake of the deadliest conflict in human history, the future was where people wanted to be. As cultural critic Christopher Lasch wrote in his classic The Culture of Narcissism, Americans “trivialized the past by equating it with outmoded styles of consumption, discarded fashions and attitudes.”

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations
by Nicholas Carr
Published 5 Sep 2016

If you assign a computer an overwhelmingly tedious task like spotting house numbers in video images, and then you come back a couple of hours later to find the computer checking its Facebook feed or surfing porn, you’ll know that artificial intelligence has truly arrived. REFLECTIONS November 26, 2012 MIRRORS ARE OFTEN PORTRAYED as tools of self-love. One gazes at the image in the glass as Narcissus gazed at the reflection in the water. But, as Lewis Mumford suggested in his 1934 book Technics and Civilization, mirrors would be better described as instruments of self-loathing. The looking glass isolates the physical self as an abstraction, divorcing it from “the influential presence of other men” and even from “the background of nature.” If the image one sees in the mirror is abstract, it is not ideal or mythical: the more accurate the physical instrument, the more sufficient the light on it, the more relentlessly does it show the effects of age, disease, disappointment, frustration, slyness, covetousness, weakness—these come out quite as clearly as health and joy and confidence.

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As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the fourteenth century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.” The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man.

The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy
by Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley
Published 10 Jun 2013

Hamilton, “Federalist No. 1,” p. 1. 10-2151-2 notes.indd 241 5/20/13 7:00 PM 242 NOTES TO PAGES 193–204 CHAPTER 9 The Jack Dorsey quote at the beginning of the chapter is taken from Laurie Segall, “Square CEO Jack Dorsey: I Never Wanted to Be an Entrepreneur,” CNN Money, September 10, 2012 (www.money.cann.com/2012/09/10/technology/startups/jackdorsey-techcrunch-disrupt/index.html). 1. The historian Lewis Mumford writes, “The city, as one finds it in history, is the point of maximum concentration for the power and culture of a community. . . . The city is the form and symbol of an integrated social relationship: it is the seat of the temple, the market, the hall of justice, the academy of learning. Here in the city the goods of civilization are multiplied and manifolded; here is where human experience is transformed into viable signs, symbols, patterns of conduct, systems of order. Here is where the issues of civilization are focused.” Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1938), p. 3. 2.

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy)
by Benjamin Peters
Published 2 Jun 2016

As it happened, however, Rokossovsky barely participated in the commission, leaving Kitov’s fate in the hands of his supervisors, who rejected the proposal and followed standard Soviet procedure in burning the unapproved (and irreproducible) proposal in what colleagues later referred to as Kitov’s show trial.20 “Hence the paradox in technics,” as Lewis Mumford put it: “war stimulates invention, but the army resists it!”21 Incensed by Kitov’s critique, the unchecked commission exacted further retribution by revoking his Communist Party membership for the following year and dismissing him from military leadership, his position as the director of Computational Center-1 of the Ministry of Defense, and effectively his once meteoric military career.

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—‘elektronnyi sotsializm’?” Ekonomicheskaya istoriya, 124–138 (Moscow: Trudi istoricheskogo faku’teta MGU 15, 2011), 109. 20. For a hagiographic biographical blurb (in Russian) on Konstantin Konostantinovich Rokossowski, see his memorial site, accessed July 25, 2012, http://www.rokossowski.com/bio.htm. 21. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harvest Book, 1934). 22. Kitov, “Chelovek, kotoryi vynes kibernetiku iz sekretnoi biblioteki.” 23. For more on Soviet military, see Roger R. Reese, The Soviet Military Experience (New York: NP, 2000), and William E. Odom, The Collapse of the Soviet Military (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 24.

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
by Howard Rheingold
Published 24 Dec 2011

The problem that would concern Ellul most acutely would not be technique itself but the historic human inability to protect valued qualities of life from technique’s relentless quantification, mechanization, and digitization of everything—including, but not limited to, the very codes of life and processes of biological evolution, the biochemistry of thought and emotion, and the creation of artificial life-forms totally divorced from the realm of flesh. Technique has enabled humans to attain powers we attributed only to the gods a few generations ago. The question is whether we have the wisdom to use our power-tools without amputating something vital. In 1967, Lewis Mumford, in The Myth of the Machine, proposed that the most powerful and dehumanizing invention was not a visible machine but a social machine in which humans were treated as components in a massive hierarchical system for building pyramids and skyscrapers, empires and civilizations.46 Mumford conjectured origins for what he sometimes called “the megamachine” in a prehistoric arrangement that maps perfectly onto Foucault.

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John Leyden, “NTT DoCoMo Pays $217m to Put Spam Back in the Can,” The Register, 7 April 2001, <http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/5/20182.html > (18 March 2002). 43. Harold Lasswell, in Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. J. Wilkinson (New York: Knopf, 1964), x. 44. Ibid., 8283. 45. Ibid. 46. Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1966). 47. Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1976). 48. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Martin Hei-degger: Basic Writings, ed. David Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). 49.

Reset
by Ronald J. Deibert
Published 14 Aug 2020

At the heart of these recommendations to retreat is a familiar kind of romanticism, a plea for going “back to nature” that has a long pedigree, stretching back at least to the eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and echoed in criticism of popular entertainment and mass consumer culture going back decades, as in Bill McKibben’s The Age of Missing Information, written largely in response to television, or Lewis Mumford’s The Pentagon of Power, which advocates for a return to a Da Vinci–inspired arts and crafts communitarianism.396 The concept of a digital retreat is appealing on many levels. There is a simplicity to it that makes it alluring. It is true that one thing we need to recover is our connection to the natural world.

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Retrieved from https://gizmodo.com/i-cut-the-big-five-tech-giants-from-my-life-it-was-hel-1831304194 These don’t go far enough for virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier: Lanier, J. (2018). Ten arguments for deleting your social media accounts right now. Henry Holt. Bill McKibben’s The Age of Missing Information … or Lewis Mumford’s The Pentagon of Power: McKibben, B. (2006). The age of missing information. Random House; Mumford, L. (1970). The pentagon of power: The myth of the machine. Vol. 2. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. We now live in a “global village” (to borrow McLuhan’s phrasing): McLuhan, M. (1962). The Gutenberg galaxy: The making of typographic man.

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
by James C. Scott
Published 8 Feb 1999

Descartes's vision conjures up the urban equivalent of the scientific forest: streets laid out in straight lines intersecting at right angles, buildings of uniform design and size, the whole built according to a single, overarching plan. The elective affinity between a strong state and a uniformly laid out city is obvious. Lewis Mumford, the historian of urban form, locates the modern European origin of this symbiosis in the open, legible baroque style of the Italian city-state. He claims, in terms that Descartes would have found congenial, "It was one of the triumphs of the baroque mind to organize space, to make it continuous, reduce it to measure and order."6 More to the point, the baroque redesigning of medieval citieswith its grand edifices, vistas, squares, and attention to uniformity, proportion, and perspective-was intended to reflect the grandeur and awesome power of the prince.

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It must be laid out at a stroke, fixed and frozen forever, as if done overnight by Arabian nights genii. Such a plan demands an architectural despot, working for an absolute ruler, who will live long enough to complete their own conceptions. To alter this type of plan, to introduce fresh elements of another style, is to break its esthetic backbone. -Lewis Mumford, The City in History In Mumford's epigraph to this chapter, his criticism is directed at Pierre-Charles L: Enfant's Washington in particular and at baroque urban planning in general.' Greatly amplified, Mumford's criticism could be applied to the work and thought of the Swiss-born French essayist, painter, architect, and planner Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, who is better known by his professional name, Le Corbusier.

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They note the streets or terrain that would be difficult to traverse, watercourses that might impede military movement, the attitude of the local population, the difficulty of their accents, the locations of markets, and so on. 5. Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), p. 6, quoted in Harrison, Forests, pp. 1 1 1-12. 6. Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1961), p. 364. 7. Ibid., p. 387. 8. Quoted in ibid., p. 369. 9. Thomas More's utopian cities, for example, were to be perfectly uniform, so that "he who knows one of the cities will know them all, so exactly alike are they, except where the nature of the ground prevents" (More's Utopia, quoted in ibid., p. 327). 10.

Austerity Britain: 1945-51
by David Kynaston
Published 12 May 2008

‘Another V.J. day spent quietly at home,’ wrote Haines on the 16th. ‘So glad of the rest.’30 The election, the atom bomb, the end of the world war: all within a matter of weeks. It was a moment, inevitably, for taking stock. Frederic Osborn, starting on the 14th a long letter to the great American urban prophet Lewis Mumford, pondered the political upheaval: What has happened is a very big step in the British revolution – a shift of power to meet new conditions and new ideas. Britain will not willingly go far towards Communism; it will remain at heart a free-enterprise nation . . . It does not accept the state-monopoly solution, despite Laski and Aneurin Bevan; and sooner or later it will revolt against the facile solution of state ownership and be driven to expedients of entirely new kinds, which Labour philosophy at present scornfully scouts.

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Those shadows, after all, had now been banished, and for most people their reward was to return to their gardens and cars – cars that in time might even be a different colour than black. This was a truth that Frederic Osborn recognised. ‘In Welwyn, where everyone has a house and a garden, we find a moderate desire for social and communal life,’ he wrote to Lewis Mumford in August 1946 from his garden city. ‘The demand has definite limits; I am more communal in my habits than most people are. I find many women dislike the idea of nursery school and crêches; they want to look after their own children. And young men and women prefer lodgings to hostels.’ How, then, was a more communally minded society to be encouraged?

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‘Relatively to the knowledge and aspirations of the times, the wholesale building of multi-storey flats at 40 an acre today in Stepney or Bermondsey is less enlightened than the building there of terrace-houses at much the same density 100 years ago,’ he declared in the spring issue of Town and Country Planning. And by July he was inveighing to Lewis Mumford about how ‘in London just now the authorities are building eight and ten storey flats, intended for families’, though with an average floor area of only 650 square feet, compared to the 1,000 or 1,050 square feet for ‘the current two-storey house’. Yet ‘Royal personages open these wonder-flats, admire the gadgets, the central heating and hot water, the automatic lifts, etc.

Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider
by Weimar Gay
Published 31 Dec 2001

Americans are always anxious about the ways we house ourselves. In the 1890s, America’s big cities were said to be divided by class conflict and deadened by the rapid pace of life. In the 1920s, America’s rural towns were ridiculed as culturally blighted and narrow-minded. In the 1960s, America’s new suburbs were vilified by Lewis Mumford in The City in History as “a multitude of uniform unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly at uniform distances on uniform roads, in a treeless command waste inhabited by people of the same class, the same incomes, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold manufactured in the same central metropolis.”

This Is Only a Test: How Washington D.C. Prepared for Nuclear War
by David F. Krugler
Published 2 Jan 2006

If, as philosopher Martin Heidegger contended, most persons evade contemplation of their mortality by immersing themselves in the exigencies of daily life, then how likely was it they would imagine their own annihilation, that of the species too, in an atomic war, and join civil defense programs? To save civilization there was no other choice, according to civil defense supporters. Lewis Mumford had his doubts. In a brilliant essay, Mumford, better known for his architectural criticism, imagined four global situations involving atomic weapons. In the first three, nations use atomic bombs against one another, killing tens of millions, even pushing homo sapiens to the brink of extinction.

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Civil Defense Stalled,” WP, September 12, 1952; Engineer Commissioner memorandum, December 4, 1952, box 228, folder 4102, RG 351, BOC; DCD, Information Bulletin, September 29, 1952, Office of Civil Defense Memoranda Orders, Washingtoniana. “Public Apathy Still Cripples Defense Plans,” WS, June 8, 1951. Robert Jay Lifton, “Imagining the Real: Beyond the Nuclear ‘End,’ ” in Lester Grinspoon, ed., The Long Darkness: Psychological and Moral Perspectives on Nuclear Winter (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986), 79–99. Lewis Mumford, “Social Effects,” Air Affairs (March 1947): 370–82. Søren Kierkegaard, “The Sickness Unto Death,” in Robert Bretall, ed., A Kierkegaard Anthology (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), 344. Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 293.

Chasing the Moon: The People, the Politics, and the Promise That Launched America Into the Space Age
by Robert Stone and Alan Andres
Published 3 Jun 2019

However, before the flight there had been talk that the crew might be given an option to proceed onto the lunar surface five hours earlier. And about ninety minutes after landing, Armstrong indeed sent word that he would prefer to exit the lunar module at roughly 9:00 P.M. EDT. Some Americans made a point of saying that they wouldn’t bother to watch any coverage of Apollo 11. Lewis Mumford, one of the country’s leading intellectuals, described the Apollo program as “a symbolic act of war [by a] megatechnic power system, in the lethal grip of the ‘myth of the machine.’ ” Only a few minutes after the Eagle had touched down, Walter Cronkite wondered aloud how young Americans dismissive of the space program were reacting to the news.

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“The hopes and the dreams” Gene Kranz, Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), p. 283. Armstrong later said Neil Armstrong, quoted in Apollo 11: Technical Crew Debriefing, July 31, 1969 (Houston: Manned Spacecraft Center, 1969), p. 60. “A symbolic act” Lewis Mumford, “No: ‘A Symbolic Act of War…’ ” NYT (July 21, 1969), p. 6. “How can anybody” CBS News, “Man on the Moon,” (July 20, 1969). “Old-fashioned humanist” CBS News, “Man on the Moon,” (July 20, 1969). Astronauts deemed Neil Armstrong, “The Moon Had Been Awaiting Us a Long Time,” Life (August 22, 1969): p. 25.

The Idea of Decline in Western History
by Arthur Herman
Published 8 Jan 1997

An admirer of the nineteenth-century anarchist tradition and a close student of earlier antitechnic critics such as Lewis Mumford and Paul Goodman, Bookchin embraced Marcuse’s idea that postscarcity society represented a profoundly new and dangerous development for civilization. In 1966 Bookchin published Crisis of the Cities, in which he predicted that America’s industrial cities were spreading “like a rampant cancer” into the hinterland, destroying wilderness, agricultural land, and waterways. Technological civilization, he claimed, was placing “an intolerable burden” on the environment, or what Lewis Mumford had called the “biosphere.” Like Marcuse, however, Bookchin also thought that new technologies such as wind power could bring “land and city into a rational and ecological synthesis.”

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It was indeed a mighty god.”)4 In the modernist version of technological pessimism, the machine destroys man’s humanity by casting him into an artificial, fluorescent-lit cultural darkness. This barbaric reversion underlies the antitechnic vision of the modern West we find in critics such as Walter Benjamin, Lewis Mumford, and Jacques Ellul in The Technological Society: Men now live in conditions that are less than human. Consider the concentration of our great cities, the slums, the lack of space, air, of time, the gloomy streets and sallow lights that confuse night and day. Think of our dehumanized factories, our unsatisfied senses, our working women, our estrangement from nature.

Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity
by Edward Tenner
Published 8 Jun 2004

Acclaim for EDWARD TENNER’s OUR OWN DEVICES “Insightful and provocative.… Tenner has become a worthy successor to such luminaries as business philosopher Peter Drucker, social critic Lewis Mumford, and historian Lynn White in connecting technology’s past, present, and future.” —Nature “Fascinating.… Delves into, mulls over, and teases apart eye-glasses, shoes, chairs, and other innovations that have changed our bodies in unexpected ways.” —Scientific American “Ambitious, stimulating work.… The lesson Tenner transmits so cogently, unpredictably, and delightfully is that in the best designs ease and complexity cohabit, furthering and reflecting evolution itself.”

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One of the most incisive and influential critics of technology, Jacques Ellul, argued powerfully that modern humanity is enmeshed in such omnipresent, interlocking technological institutions that technology and technique are inseparable. Ellul begins his most important work, The Technological Society, by insisting, against Lewis Mumford, that the machine is only a result of technique, not its source. Mumford established historical periods based on energy—hydraulic, coal, electrical; Ellul sought to understand the spirit behind the power sources and machinery. For him, technology was the product of the ancient Near East; in Western antiquity and medieval Christianity, it was always subordinated to other principles.

The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention
by William Rosen
Published 31 May 2010

The transfer of motion from one plane to another—converting the straight-line motion that was intrinsic to any piston-operated engine into the regular power supplied by a rotating wheel—turned out to be as big a challenge as building the steam engine itself. And as important. In the words of the twentieth-century critic Lewis Mumford, “The technical advance which characterizes32 specifically the modern age is that from reciprocating to rotary motions.” To understand this statement requires (forgive the pun) circling back to the branch of mechanics that describes the transformation of motion from one direction to another, otherwise known as kinematics.

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Clarke, Tour Through the South of England, quoted in Howard Jones, Steam Engines. 21 Adventurers, in turn, appointed “captains” Anthony Burton, Richard Trevithick, Giant of Steam (London: Aurum Press, 2000). 22 “shareholders might grumble” Ibid. 23 One of them, the Great County Adit Ibid. 24 88 lb. in London Hills, Power from Steam. 25 “raise as much water as two Horses” Ibid. 26 As a result of the hostility Ibid. 27 “all the cast iron” Ibid. 28 at least one Boulton & Watt engine was too large Ibid. 29 It was in response to these demands Ibid. 30 “All the world are agape” Marshall, James Watt. 31 “I think that these mills represent” Birmingham Central Library and Adam Matthew Publications, The Industrial Revolution: A Documentary History. Series One: The Boulton and Watt Archive and the Matthew Boulton Papers from the Birmingham Central Library. 32 “The technical advance which characterizes” Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, 1934). 33 “continuous rotary motion” Lynn White, “The Act of Invention: Causes, Contexts, Continuities, and Consequences,” Technology and Culture 3, no. 4, March 1962. 34 Arabs were using them White, Medieval Technology and Social Change. 35 The earliest visual evidence of a crankshaft Ibid. 36 “to render the motion more regular and uniform” Hills, Power from Steam. 37 Watt had not believed George Selgin and John Turner, “James Watt as Intellectual Monopolist: Comment on Boldrin and Levine,” International Economic Review 47, no. 4, November 2006. 38 “I know the contrivance is my own” Watt to Boulton, April 28, 1781, in Robinson and Musson, James Watt and the Steam Revolution. 39 “timmer [timber]… turned on my little lathey [lathe]” “William Murdock” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 40 “I wish William could be brought to do” Ibid. 41 “the most active man and best engine erector I ever saw” Birmingham Central Library and Adam Matthew Publications, The Industrial Revolution: A Documentary History.

Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences
by Edward Tenner
Published 1 Sep 1997

(Conservative Beacon Hill residents discouraged their children from setting up households on "made land" because it was infra-dig, not because it was inferior digging.) It was the following generations that saw a level of technological transformation unequaled ever since. Electrification of industry helped create what the historian and critic Lewis Mumford was to call a "neotechnic" era of power grids in place of steam engines and new alloys and materials alongside steel and other conventional ones. Mumford urged a new political and social order to decentralize work from grimy urban factories to smaller, electrically powered workshops dotting the countryside.

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And the consequences of a Rube Goldberg technology are definitely intended.28 a Misgivings Official America held fast to technological optimism throughout the Depression and the Second World War. The Tennessee Valley Authority, the Hoover Dam, the streamlined defense plants, the large-scale production of penicillin—each seemed to show that despite the troubles of the economy, rational planning could conquer almost any task. Even critics of technology like the early Lewis Mumford believed that properly implemented, it could promote a more humane life. Science and technology appeared to be benign alternatives to the greed and irrationality that were thought to have brought about the Depression. While atomic weapons turned Mumford and others against this vision, even these terrible instruments had done what they were intended to do.

Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis
by Benjamin Kunkel
Published 11 Mar 2014

Among Federici’s potent arguments is that so-called reproductive labor, done preponderantly by women, deserves the same sort of monetary compensation as the “productive” labor of workers on the job market. The idea bears some resemblance to the “basic communism” proposed by the (non-Marxist) American polymath Lewis Mumford, in Technics and Civilization (1934), according to which a minimum income is due all members of society. Writing in the midst of the Depression, Mumford was still admirably capable of utopian accents, and concluded his magisterial survey of technological developments over five centuries with a call to “socialize creation”: The creative life, in all its manifestations, is necessarily a social product.

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier
by Edward L. Glaeser
Published 1 Jan 2011

One problem with policies that subsidize sprawl is that car-based living imposes environmental costs on the entire planet. The patron saint of American environmentalism, Henry David Thoreau, was another antiurbanite. At Walden Pond, he became so “suddenly sensible of such sweet beneficent society in Nature” that “the fancied advantages of human neighborhood” became “insignificant.” Lewis Mumford, the distinguished architectural critic and urban historian, praised the “parklike setting” of suburbs and denigrated the urban “deterioration of the environment.” Now we know that the suburban environmentalists had it backward. Manhattan and downtown London and Shanghai, not suburbia, are the real friends of the environment.

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Levitt wasn’t going to bottom-fish, as he had in Norfolk. He was building a high-quality product, at least for its time. The homes had modern appliances and sturdy construction. He master-planned the community. It had, and has, parks and schools and plenty of green space. Although the result—Levittown—drove highbrow critics like the New Yorker’s Lewis Mumford to fits of literary condescension, the town’s low prices and relative opulence made it wildly popular with ordinary folks. The critics may have been right in decrying the endless monotony of similarly styled ranch and colonial buildings, but tenements were hardly architectural masterpieces either.

On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World
by Timothy Cresswell
Published 21 May 2006

Wandering minstrels, troubadours, crusaders, pilgrims, and some peripatetic monks existed, for periods of time, outside of the obligations of place and roots. So-called wandering Jews lived outside the web of obligations and duties that marked feudalism. For this reason they were looked down upon and distrusted. As Lewis Mumford put it: The unattached individual during the Middle Ages was one condemned either to excommunication or to exile: close to death. To exist one had to belong to an association—a household, manor, monastery or guild. There was no security except through group protection and no freedom that did not recognize the constant obligation of a corporate life.

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Dodgshon, The European Past: Social Evolution and Spatial Order (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Education, 1987), chapter 6. 26. John C. Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 27. Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters (Oxford: Polity Press, 1987), 39. 28. Ibid., 40. 29. Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961), 269. 30. Leslie Feldman, Freedom as Motion (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2001); John Rutherford, The Troubadours: Their Loves and Their Lyrics: With Remarks on Their Influence, Social and Literary (London: Smith Elder, 1873). 31.

Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us
by Will Storr
Published 14 Jun 2017

It was feared the future would be a ‘technocracy’ in which freedom and individuality would be crushed and the population dominated by machines of coercion, conformity and control. Computers were seen as a war technology that would be co-opted by the collective powers of government and corporation and used against us. ‘The dominant minority will create a uniform, all-enveloping, super-planetary structure, designed for automatic operation,’ wrote Lewis Mumford in his 1967 book, The Myth of the Machine. ‘Instead of functioning actively as an autonomous personality, man will become a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal whose proper functions, as technicians now interpret man’s role, will either be fed into the machine or strictly limited and controlled for the benefit of de-personalised, collective organisations.’

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As sociologist Professor John Hewitt so adroitly puts it, ‘The era of “character” vanished:’ Dilemmas of the American Self, John P. Hewitt (Temple, 1989), p. 96. It was feared the future would be a ‘technocracy’ in which freedom: From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner (University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 29. wrote Lewis Mumford in his 1967 book, The Myth of the Machine: Quoted in From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner (University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 29. a five-month trip to China as a theology student: Carl Rogers: The Quiet Revolutionary, Carl R. Rogers and David E. Russell (Penmarin, 2002), p. 62.

Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain
by John Grindrod
Published 2 Nov 2013

Peter and Alison Smithson, a recently qualified and increasingly influential pair of architects, described them as ‘English towns as off the mark as any English scene by Hollywood’.35 And they didn’t stop there. ‘Drive or walk into any example of the garden city idea and you will lose your sense of direction in the wide streets that lead nowhere. Wide tarmac rivers wave off in every direction, any of them may be the way out.’36 Even Lewis Mumford, American planner and friend of garden city champion Frederic Osborn, wasn’t convinced by these early postwar experiments: ‘Because the new planners were mainly in revolt against congestion and squalor, rather than in love with urban order and cooperation, the new towns do not yet adequately reveal what the modern city should be.’37 The new town planners were bewildered by the vehemence of these reactions to their masterworks.

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Richards, ‘Failure of the New Towns’, Architectural Review, July 1953, p31 33 Gordon Cullen, ‘Prairie Planning in the New Towns’, Architectural Review, July 1953, p36 34 J. M. Richards, ‘Failure of the New Towns’, Architectural Review, July 1953, p32 35 Peter and Alison Smithson, Ordinariness and Light, Faber, 1970, p25 36 Peter and Alison Smithson, Ordinariness and Light, Faber, 1970, p26 37 Lewis Mumford in David Kynaston, Family Britain, Bloomsbury, 2010, p345 38 Frederick Gibberd in Gibberd, Hyde Harvey and White, p112 39 Roger Berthoud, The Times, 16/12/77, p14 40 Frederick Gibberd in Gibberd, Hyde Harvey and White, p6 i A decade later when the Gulbenkian Foundation bestowed a £3,000 grant for the town to commission a sculpture, The Times remarked on the modernist tone of the existing examples that ‘so far there is no one on horseback’.

Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks (Cambridge Studies in the Emergence of Global Enterprise)
by Andrew L. Russell
Published 27 Apr 2014

Their work is exemplified in movements that embrace open science, open access publishing, open source software, open innovation business strategies, open education, and so on.1 President Barack Obama’s “Open Government Initiative,” announced on his first day in office in 2009, captured the collective spirit of these efforts: “We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in government.”2 The ideology of openness, as it is articulated and practiced in the early twenty-first century, would have surprised the critic and historian of technology Lewis Mumford. In his 1964 essay, “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics,” he wondered: “Why has our age surrendered so easily to the controllers, the manipulators, the conditioners of an authoritarian technics?”3 The advocates of openness, however, have not surrendered so easily. Instead, they sense the dawn of a radical, almost utopian transformation in which power hierarchies are flattened, secret activities are made transparent, individuals are empowered, and knowledge itself is democratized.

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David, “Understanding the Emergence of ‘Open Science’ Institutions: Functionalist Economics in Historical Context,” Industrial and Corporate Change 13 (2004): 571–589; Steven Weber, The Success of Open Source (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2004); Peter Suber, Open Access (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012); Henry Chesbrough, Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2003); Michael A. Peters and Rodrigo G. Britez, eds., Open Education and Education for Openness (Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers, 2008). 2 Barack Obama, “Transparency and Openness in Government,” The White House, http://www.whitehouse.gov/open (accessed August 19, 2010). 3 Lewis Mumford, “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics,” Technology & Culture 5 (1964): 1–8. See also David E. Nye, “Shaping Communication Networks: Telegraph, Telephone, Computer,” Social Research 64 (1997): 1067–1091. 4 Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996); Thomas L.

Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers
by Stephen Graham
Published 8 Nov 2016

The viewer ‘would then see before him an immense structure, four or five times as large as the greatest hotels in America, about twice or three times as wide, and over 2000 feet high … In a grand hotel communication between these floors would be by means of an elevator; in the mine would be in use the same contrivances, but instead of an “elevator” it would be called a “cage”.’16 Brechin draws here on legendary American urban critic Lewis Mumford (1895–1990). Using Mumford’s ideas of the capitalist ‘mega machine’ – where financial industries constitute an economic apex based ultimately on the exploitative and dangerous processes of mining, especially of gold and silver17 – he stresses that De Quille’s vision is even more evident in the contemporary context of super-tall 1 km towers, 3 to 4 km ultra-deep mines, and super-deep pits and quarries.

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Guardian, 25 November 2013; and Arboleda, ‘Spaces of Extraction’, p. 2. 8Björn Wallsten, ‘The Norrköping Iron and Copper Mine, Linköping University, 2013, available at iei.liu.se. 9Arboleda, ‘Spaces of Extraction’, p. 5. 10Maristella Svampa, ‘Commodities Consensus: Neoextractivism and Enclosure of the Commons in Latin America’, South Atlantic Quarterly 114:1, 2015, pp. 65–82. 11Figures cited in Arboleda, ‘Spaces of Extraction’, p. 6. 12See Saskia Sassen, ‘A Savage Sorting of Winners and Losers: Contemporary Versions of Primitive Accumulation’, Globalizations 7:1/2, 2010, pp. 23–50. 13Rem Koolhaas, ‘Elevator’, in Koolhaas, ed., Fundamentals: 14th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice: Marsilio, 2014. 14Gray Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin, University of California Press: Berkeley, 2003. 15Ibid., p. 67. 16Dan De Quille, History of the Big Bonanza: An Authentic Account of the Discovery, History and Working on the World-Renowned Comstock Silver Lode of Virginia City, Nevada, Hartford, CN: American Publishing Co., 1877, p. 322. 17From base to apex, Mumford’s ‘pyramid of mining’ centres on mining, metallurgy, mechanisation, militarism and finance. See Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization, Berkeley: University of California, 2010 [1937]. 18See Gavin Bridge, ‘The Hole World: Scales and Spaces of Extraction’, Scenario Journal 05: Extraction, Fall 2015. 19Brechin, Imperial San Francisco, p. 70. 20Mimi Sheller, Aluminum Dreams: The Making of Light Modernity, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 25. 21It must be remembered, of course, that the Burj houses hotels, offices and restaurants as well as apartments.

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand
by John Markoff
Published 22 Mar 2022

Brand took his inspiration for the size and format of the first Catalog from Steve Baer’s oversize Dome Cookbook, which had been published the previous year, and drew together his drawings of geometric shapes, handwritten memories of building various domes, typewritten instructions, and black-and-white photos. Baer, introduced to Brand by Steve Durkee, was an early example of the diverse assembly of technophiles Brand organized Tom Sawyer–style to help create the Catalog. A fellow army vet, Baer had originally been inspired by Lewis Mumford to view technology as a positive force for society, and he played a key role in the design of the dome residences at the early Colorado commune Drop City. Brand was gradually moving away from LSD, but he still had a penchant for psychedelics. For a while an E tank of nitrous oxide, ordered weekly, was a permanent fixture at the Truck Store office.

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Space is part of the wildness in which lies ‘the preservation of the world.’ ” The ensuing debate stretched over multiple issues of the Quarterly and brought out a series of big names on both sides of the issue, including Lynn Margulis, Wendell Berry, Paul and Anne Ehrlich, E. F. Schumacher, Lewis Mumford, Buckminster Fuller, Ernest Callenbach, David Brower, Carl Sagan, Gary Snyder, and Russell Schweickart. None of the attacks were more bitter than Berry’s, whose writings on agriculture and the environment had been showcased in the Catalog. Calling Brand’s enthusiasm a “warmed-over Marine Corps recruitment advertisement,” he wrote, “As you represent it, a space colony will be nothing less than a magic machine that will transmute little problems into big solutions.

The Human Cosmos: A Secret History of the Stars
by Jo Marchant
Published 15 Jan 2020

And as time became more accurate, it was also less negotiable. Life was increasingly ruled not by events or natural cues, but the inexorable march of the clock. Historians generally pinpoint this period as laying the ground for capitalism and the Industrial Revolution: according to the influential twentieth-century historian Lewis Mumford, “The clock, not the steam engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age.” The precisely made gears and technological expertise necessary for clockmaking led to the development of machinery that allowed automated mass production.* But more important was the increased regulation and coordination of work and workers, and the change in attitudes toward time.

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an obsession with time: North, God’s Clockmaker; David Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); John Scattergood, “Writing the Clock: The Reconstruction of Time in the Late Middle Ages,” European Review 11 (2003): 453–74; Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, reprint ed., 2010); Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). “temporal discipline”: Landes, Revolution in Time, 59. “pray and pray often”: Landes, Revolution in Time, 61.

Vanishing New York
by Jeremiah Moss
Published 19 May 2017

In the very heart of the “commercial” city on Manhattan Island south of 59th Street, the inspectors in 1922 found nearly 420,000 workers, employed in factories. Such a situation outrages one’s sense of order. Everything seems misplaced. One yearns to re-arrange the hodge-podge and to put things where they belong. Critic Lewis Mumford savaged the plan, writing in New Republic that it represented a “sociological failure” and existed for “the interests and prejudices of the existing financial rulers.” You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to see that the financial rulers wanted a sociological failure, to disrupt the progressive working class of New York, dividing whites from blacks, to protect and expand their own power.

…

Again and again, we will hear the same insistence that this kind of urban change is natural and inevitable. But these are lies. As author Ta-Nehisi Coates has remarked, “white flight was a triumph of social engineering.” URBAN RENEWAL, SLUM CLEARANCE, AND BLOCKBUSTING In his 1932 critique of the Regional Plan, Lewis Mumford presciently noted that what the RPA had prepared was an elaborate scheme “to lead the population farther and farther out into the suburbs, without bothering to ask what will become of the wasted districts that remain.” But maybe they did ask. Maybe they knew. Even the new highways and bridges that led whites and ethnics out of the city to the suburbs were conceived by the RPA.

Wasps: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy
by Michael Knox Beran
Published 2 Aug 2021

They stare out at us from the canvases of Sargent, well-to-do but uncertain young people, the splendor of whose poses is diminished by a certain vacuousness in their expressions, an emptiness in their eyes. Some committed suicide; others were sent to lunatic asylums or languished in self-doubt and nervous debility, an affliction they knew as neurasthenia, for which reading Dante was the only cure. Oppressed by the gloom of what the critic Lewis Mumford called the Brown Decades, in which coal smoke and perverse fashions combined to color the world with “mediocre drabs, dingy chocolate browns, sooty browns that merged into black,” they suffered, in lugubrious rooms furnished somberly in walnut, from obscure hurts and identified with the roi mehaignié—the wounded king—of the Grail legend.

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The most insightful work on agora or plasquagórazza culture has been done almost entirely by Europeans, and almost entirely in the years between 1790 and 1940: Burke’s theory of the “little platoon,” Wordsworth’s evocation of provincial Cumbria and the “high value he set upon customariness, upon all that is habitual, local, rooted in the ground,” Coleridge’s vision of the provincial nucleus “round which the capabilities” of a place “may crystallize and brighten,” Ruskin’s studies of Venice, Pater’s “Denys L’Auxerrois” and his other agora fantasies, Fustel de Coulanges’ work on the Roman city and Jacob Burckhardt’s studies of Greek and Renaissance culture, the agora scholarship of Camillo Sitte, Johan Huizinga, and Werner Jaeger. (Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition was published in 1958, but belongs in spirit to the earlier period.) With the possible exceptions of Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs (whose work was devoted rather to the large urban center than to the plasquagórazza forum) and of such expatriates as T. S. Eliot and Hemingway, no American has made a comparable contribution. The Roosevelts with the clergy (and King George VI and Queen Elizabeth) outside St.

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“trained and public-spirited caste”: Edmund Wilson, “John Jay Chapman,” in Wilson, The Triple Thinkers and the Wound and the Bow: A Combined Volume (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1984), 150. “grey debris”: Walt Whitman, “When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d.” “mediocre drabs”: Lewis Mumford, The Brown Decades: A Study in the Arts of America 1865–1895 (New York: Dover, 1955), 5. “a dying race”: Adams, Life of George Cabot Lodge, 130. plutocracy that had outstripped it: Seymour Martin Lipset believed that WASP Progressives were “American Tory radicals—men of upper-class backgrounds and values, who as conservatives helped to democratize society as part of their struggle against the vulgar nouveaux riche businessman.”

Team Human
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 22 Jan 2019

We described ourselves as living in a “clockwork universe” John of Sacrobosco, De Sphaera Mundi (On the Sphere of the World), c. 1230, available at http://www.esotericarchives.com/solomon/sphere.htm. Dennis Des Chene, Spirits and Clocks: Machine and Organism in Descartes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). We sought to operate faster George Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). Lewis Mumford, Myth of the Machine (Boston: Mariner, 1971). Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage, 1993). Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). It’s not just treating machines as living humans; it’s treating humans as machines John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2000). 38.

Future Shock
by Alvin Toffler
Published 1 Jun 1984

Human work will move out of the factory and mass office into the community and the home. Machines will be synchronized, as some already are, to the billionth of a second; men will be desynchronized. The factory whistle will vanish. Even the clock, "the key machine of the modern industrial age," as Lewis Mumford called it a generation ago, will lose some of its power over human, as distinct from purely technological, affairs. Simultaneously, the organizations needed to control technology will shift from bureaucracy to Ad-hocracy, from permanence to transience, and from a concern with the present to a focus on the future.

…

MC-67 (P-27C-1) US Department of Commerce. 394 Family ritual is examined in [5], p. 32. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN 401 Dewey and Hutchins are quoted in [112], the dedication and p. 70. 401 The Barzun reference is from [101], p. 125. 402 The significance of the clock is explored in "The Monastery and the Clock" by Lewis Mumford in [293], p. 61. See also the excellent paper entitled "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism" by E. P. Thompson in Past and Present, December, 1967, pp. 56-97. 403 Snow is quoted from [306], p. 12. 406 For a description of McDonald's proposal see "Beyond the Schoolhouse" by Frederick J.

The State and the Stork: The Population Debate and Policy Making in US History
by Derek S. Hoff
Published 30 May 2012

Later in the decade, this argument was turned on its head; as the suburbs, bulging with Baby Boomers, came under attack for their conformity and anti-intellectualism, theorists claimed that an increasing numeric mass of people exacerbated the stultifying conformity of consumer-driven “mass society.” Lewis Mumford, a famous critic of the American city, even worried that population increase had driven cemeteries to the edges of the cities. He complained that without a dramatic change of course, “the demand for open spaces for the dead threatens to crowd the quarters of the living on a scale impossible to conceive in earlier urban cultures.”138 Because many quality-of-life arguments concerned the landscape, they fell within the purview of mainstream conservationists.

…

See Pells, Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age, esp. the discussion of the “problems of prosperity” beginning on 188. 135. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “The Challenge of Abundance,” The Reporter, May 3, 1956, 8. 136. For a summary of The Affluent Society, see Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith, chap. 13. 137. John Kenneth Galbraith, “Economics and Environment,” AIA Journal, September 1966, 57. 138. Lewis Mumford, “The Natural History of Urbanization,” in Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, ed. William L. Thomas Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 395. 139. Samuel Hays introduces this line of inquiry in Beauty, Health, and Permanence, noting that the environmental movement’s new concern with “amenities” in the 1960s emerged from and reinforced the postwar rise of postmaterialist values (266).

Chief Engineer
by Erica Wagner

The story of its construction, one of the greatest emblems of “progress” in the nineteenth century, is such a dramatic tale of vision, innovation, and endurance in the face of extraordinary odds that it overshadows—understandably, perhaps—the rest of its builder’s life. At the same time, if you stop a few dozen pedestrians walking across the bridge and ask them who brought it into being, they won’t be able to give you an answer. The architectural historian Lewis Mumford—who wrote of the “clean exaltation” engendered by a walk over the Brooklyn Bridge, also admired “the tradition of anonymity” cloaking the identities of most engineers. Washington’s life is, in itself, a striking one. Born in 1837, he lived to be nearly ninety, and so his years spanned the most American of centuries.

…

Modern Industries: A Series of Reports on Industry and Manufactures, As Represented in the Paris Exposition in 1867 by Twelve British Workmen. London: Macmillan, 1868. Morris, Jan. Fisher’s Face. London: Viking, 1995. Morton, Nathaniel. New England’s Memorial. Boston: Congregational Board of Publication, 1855. Mumford, Lewis. Sidewalk Critic: Lewis Mumford’s Writings on New York. Edited by Robert Wojtowicz. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998. Opening Ceremonies, New York and Brooklyn Bridge, May 24, 1883. Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Eagle Job Printing Department, 1883. Paris Universal Exhibition 1867, Complete Official Catalogue. London: J.

Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality From Camp Meeting to Wall Street
by Jackson Lears

The rise of dictatorships abroad had encouraged Americans to find signs of madness in foreign leaders. Hitler’s frenetic posturing made him and his followers seem deranged. But the men who were building and testing atomic weapons introduced a new kind of madness into public policy. In March 1946, on hearing of the plan to test two atomic bombs on Bikini Atoll, Lewis Mumford announced: “Gentlemen, you are mad!” The gentlemen in question were the strategists planning the tests, and the “fatal symptom of their madness,” Mumford wrote, was “the solemn conviction that they are normal, responsible people, living sane lives, working for reasonable ends. Soberly, day after day, the madmen continue to go through the undeviating motions of madness: motions so stereotyped, so commonplace, that they seem the normal motions of normal men, not the mass compulsions of people bent on total death.”

…

“There is much to fear”: Clinton Rossiter, “Constitutional Dictatorship in an Atomic Age,” Review of Politics 2 (1949), 418. “scare the pants off”: Cited in Boyer, Bomb’s Early Light, 70. “to preserve our civilization”: Eugene Rabinowitch, “Five Years After,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 7, no. 1 (Jan. 1951), 3. “Gentlemen, you are mad!”: Lewis Mumford, “Gentlemen, You Are Mad!” Saturday Review of Literature, March 2, 1946, 5, 6. “scare hell out of the American people”: Arthur Vandenberg, cited in Greg Herken, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State (1977), 282–84. “The atom bomb”: Wyndham Lewis, America and Cosmic Man (1949), 244.

The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York
by Caro, Robert A
Published 14 Apr 1975

He was a seminal thinker, perhaps the single most influential seminal thinker, in developing policies in these fields, and the innovator, perhaps the single most influential innovator, in developing the methods by which these policies were implemented. And since parks, highways and urban renewal, taken together, do so much to shape cities' total environment, how then gauge the impact of this one man on the cities of America? The man who was for thirty years his bitterest critic, Lewis Mumford, says: "In the twentieth century, the influence of Robert Moses on the cities of America was greater than that of any other person." With his power, Robert Moses built himself an empire. The capital of this empire was out of public sight—a squat, gray building crouching so unobtrusively below the Randall's Island toll plaza of the Triborough Bridge that most of the motorists who drove through the toll booths never even knew that the building existed.

…

Moses applied these labels generously, branding them not only onto labor leaders ("radical, left-wing") and New Deal Brain Trusters (Rexford Tugwell he assailed as a "Planning Red") and urban planners who dared to offer suggestions for the future of New York City ("regarded in Russia as our greatest builder," was how he characterized Frank Lloyd Wright; he called Lewis Mumford "an outspoken revolutionary"; Walter Gropius, he said, was seeking to change the American system by advocating "a philosophy which doesn't belong here"; planners in general, he said, are "socialists," "revolutionaries" who "do not reach the masses directly but through familiar subsurface activity.

…

And then he suddenly realized that he was hearing at last what he had been seeking for so long—a shaping vision of how to plan the most heavily populated and densely congested metropolitan region in the world—hearing it pouring out of a man who had never in his life held any official or unofficial planning position. The author continued interviewing planners and public officials. Eventually he was to hear such a vision—conflicting, of course, but of similar grand scale and scope—from two men: elderly Lewis Mumford and young Lee Koppelman, a brilliant planner from Long Island. He was never—in a hundred interviews—to hear it again. Except when, months later, he finally got to interview Paul Moses' brother. During his young manhood Robert Moses was the uncompromising idealist, specifically anxious to "help" the "lower classes."

Why Liberalism Failed
by Patrick J. Deneen
Published 9 Jan 2018

At best we can try to limit our children’s access to the internet, but Turkle seems resigned to dim prospects of fundamentally changing the current dynamic.3 These recent works follow in the tradition established by critics of technology who emphasize the way that technology changes us and, in particular, destroys long-standing ways of life, attacking the very basis of culture. There is a long tradition of cultural criticism, ranging from Lewis Mumford’s critiques of modernism to Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society, which emphasizes the way the “technique” of technology erases everything in its path in the name of utility and efficiency, and more recently to Wendell Berry, who has argued that machine technology has its own logic, which tends to destroy the practices and traditions of a community.

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
by James Gleick
Published 1 Mar 2011

/ Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”) It is an ancient observation, but one that seemed to bear restating when information became plentiful—particularly in a world where all bits are created equal and information is divorced from meaning. The humanist and philosopher of technology Lewis Mumford, for example, restated it in 1970: “Unfortunately, ‘information retrieving,’ however swift, is no substitute for discovering by direct personal inspection knowledge whose very existence one had possibly never been aware of, and following it at one’s own pace through the further ramification of relevant literature.”♦ He begged for a return to “moral self-discipline.”

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♦ “KNOWLEDGE OF SPEECH, BUT NOT OF SILENCE”: T. S. Eliot, “The Rock,” in Collected Poems: 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1963), 147. ♦ “THE TSUNAMI OF AVAILABLE FACT”: David Foster Wallace, Introduction to The Best American Essays 2007 (New York: Mariner, 2007). ♦ “UNFORTUNATELY, ‘INFORMATION RETRIEVING,’ HOWEVER SWIFT”: Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, vol. 2, The Pentagon of Power (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1970), 182. ♦ “ELECTRONIC MAIL SYSTEM”: Jacob Palme, “You Have 134 Unread Mail! Do You Want to Read Them Now?” in Computer-Based Message Services, ed. Hugh T. Smith (North Holland: Elsevier, 1984), 175–76. ♦ A PAIR OF PSYCHOLOGISTS: C.

Road to ruin: an introduction to sprawl and how to cure it
by Dom Nozzi
Published 15 Dec 2003

Progress is certainly being made, in Gainesville and elsewhere, but at a glacial pace. I’ll bet Dom Nozzi was at work when the need became apparent for a balanced, straight-forward text that breaks past the usual shrill rhetoric about cars and traffic. While it is written for popular readers, Road to Ruin also picks up and advances an important scholarly thread stirred by Lewis Mumford, furthered by Jane Jacobs, and more lately coalesced into practice by the New Urbanists and Smart Growthers. A two-part formula about land use and transportation was associated with twentieth-century city planning in America, especially in the rapidly changing Sun Belt. First, the formula assumed that land uses would remain separate and kept low in their intensity and density.

Thinking in Systems: A Primer
by Meadows. Donella and Diana Wright
Published 3 Dec 2008

I express my admiration and gratitude to all its members. I also have drawn from thinkers in a variety of disciplines, who, as far as I know, never used a computer to simulate a system, but who are natural systems thinkers. They include Gregory Bateson, Kenneth Boulding, Herman Daly, Albert Einstein, Garrett Hardin, Václav Havel, Lewis Mumford, Gunnar Myrdal, E.F. Schumacher, a number of modern corporate executives, and many anonymous sources of ancient wisdom, from Native Americans to the Sufis of the Middle East. Strange bedfellows, but systems thinking transcends disciplines and cultures and, when it is done right, it overarches history as well.

The Techno-Human Condition
by Braden R. Allenby and Daniel R. Sarewitz
Published 15 Feb 2011

We know that the dependence of modern market economies on continual growth means that we have to keep inventing and consuming new technologies, whether we really Level I and Level II Technology 33 need them or not-indeed, it is not clear what "need" means in our modern framework, Abraham Maslow to the contrary.3 Moreover, this process of continual innovation, productivity enhancement, and economic growth leads to apparently unavoidable spasms of severe unemployment and socioeconomic disruption and transformation, along with the wealth creation that seems to have become an underpinning for civil stability. Technology, that is, seems at once to render the idea of progress more concrete and more perplexing-and more suitable for academic research and debate. Writing in the early 1930s, Lewis Mumford called this the "ambivalence" of the machine, which, he observed, "is both an instrument of liberation and one of repression." "It has," Mumford continued, "economized human energy and it has misdirected it. It has created a wide framework of order and it has produced muddle and chaos. It has nobly served human purposes and it has distorted and denied them.,,4 In this light, then, the area of innovation lumped under the term "human enhancement" can be understood as simply the latest version of the technology-and-progress Rorschach test, and transhumanism as a claim for old-fashioned, technologyinduced progress-for things, generally, getting better because of the development and use of technologies, in this case applied directly to making human bodies, genomes, and brains better than they have ever been before.

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World
by Steven Johnson
Published 28 Sep 2014

It set in motion a reorientation of society that was more subtle, but no less transformative, than the reorientation of our place in the universe that the telescope engendered. “The most powerful prince in the world created a vast hall of mirrors, and the mirror spread from one room to another in the bourgeois household,” Lewis Mumford writes in his Technics and Civilization. “Self-consciousness, introspection, mirror-conversation developed with the new object itself.” Social conventions as well as property rights and other legal customs began to revolve around the individual rather than the older, more collective units: the family, the tribe, the city, the kingdom.

The Big Shift: Navigating the New Stage Beyond Midlife
by Marc Freedman
Published 15 Dec 2011

My own research on the history of retirement in the United States led me to similar conclusions about the construction of life stages. While the economic institution of retirement grew steadily in the twentieth century, especially after the introduction of Social Security in the early 1940s, this time in life became seen as a problem period in the years after World War II. In the 1950s, for example, Lewis Mumford argued that at no point in society had any group been so rejected as older people were at that time. But then it all changed. Beginning in the 1950s, we turned that stage of life from a dreaded desert to a cherished destination, transforming it into a cornerstone of the American Dream. A leisured retirement became a symbol of a life well lived, and whoever got there first was deemed all the more successful.

The End of Traffic and the Future of Transport: Second Edition
by David Levinson and Kevin Krizek
Published 17 Aug 2015

So things became less convenient for the carless — the farther things are spread out, the less effective is walking or public transit — and thus the more people got cars. The growth in infrastructure supply fed the growth in demand; the ascent for the summit of Mount Auto was relentless. Evoking the idea perhaps first popularized by Lewis Mumford,19 Tony Downs, in his 1992 book Stuck in Traffic, described what he called the "Iron Law of Congestion."20 By expanding capacity (i.e., building a road), much, though rarely all, of the additional capacity gets used in the short term by people switching routes, modes, and time of travel. Longer term impacts (i.e., development or behavior change) further reinforce the phenomenon.21 22 The race to the summit of Mount Auto persisted for almost a century.

Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time
by David Prerau
Published 1 Jan 2005

In the face of dogged opposition by one Parliament after another, it seemed that Willett’s cause had been lost along with its galvanizing champion. Few could have imagined that his cherished idea would soon find renewed support, in a most unlikely quarter, under the pressure of world war. Chapter Two From Sun Time to Standard Time The clock, not the steam engine, is the key machine of the modern industrial age. —Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization William Willett’s proposal for daylight saving time was scorned by many for its artificiality. Yet Willett did not propose “to change from natural time to artificial time,” as Winston Churchill told Parliament, “but only to substitute a convenient standard of artificial time for an inconvenient standard of artificial time.”

Aerotropolis
by John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay
Published 2 Jan 2009

We have always chosen to live in cities for the wealth of networks they create—the elaborate webs of kinship and commerce delivering sustenance and security. That promise hasn’t changed since the agora and acropolis, but the size and scope of cities have. Cities grew by shrinking the distances within and between them, using technology to expand their grids and cover more ground. Lewis Mumford, cities’ foremost historian, recognized them by their elements, many of which were in place by the time of the ancient Greeks and are still in use today: “the walled enclosure, the street, the house-block, the market,” even the office. But Mumford confused the lobster with its shell. Cities molt and outgrow their shapes, regularly exploding into new ones when the opportunity arises, typically when a new form of transport arrives on the scene.

…

I drew upon source materials provided by Gale International, Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, and interviews with Gale International’s Stan Gale and John Hynes, KPF’s Jamie von Klemper, and Cisco’s Wim Elfrink. Figures on the scope and scale of urbanization are drawn from published reports by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT), including State of the World’s Cities 2010/2011. Lewis Mumford’s quote is from The City in History. Marx’s “annihilation of space by time” appears in the Grundrisse (1857), and Melvin Webber’s notion of the “elastic mile” appears in his essay “Culture, Territoriality, and the Elastic Mile.” Joel Garreau’s Edge City was a particular inspiration; his transportation-determinist view toward cities is a foundational principle of this book.

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
by Nancy Isenberg
Published 20 Jun 2016

And rather than lift up everyone, the system tended to favor those who were already middle class, or those working-class families with steady incomes.23 Suburban subdivisions encouraged buyers to live with their “own kind,” constantly sorting people by religion, ethnicity, race, and class. The esteemed architectural critic Lewis Mumford described Levittown as a “one-class community.” In 1959, the bestselling author and journalist Vance Packard summed up the suburban filtration process as “birds-of-a-feather flocking.” As we have so often seen, the importance of animal stock, and of “breed” generally, remained on the tip of the American tongue when idiomatic distinctions of class identity were being made.24 In 1951, the Levitts opened their second development, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, after U.S.

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For lack of variety in suburbs, see Sidonie Matsner Gruenberg, “The Challenge of the New Suburbs,” Marriage and Family Living 17, no. 2 (May 1955): 133–37, esp. 134; David Reisman, “The Suburban Dislocation,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 314 (November 1957): 123–46, esp. 134. For Lewis Mumford’s critique, see Penn Kimball, “‘Dream Town’—Large Economy Size: Pennsylvania’s New Levittown is Pre-Planned Down to the Last Thousand Living Rooms,” New York Times, December 14, 1952; and Vance Packard, The Status Seekers: An Exploration of Class Behavior in America and the Hidden Barriers That Affect You, Your Community, Your Future (New York: David McKay Co., 1959), 28. 25.

Planet of Slums
by Mike Davis
Published 1 Mar 2006

Planet of Slums • M I K E DAVIS V VERSO London • New York First published by Verso 2006 © Mike Davis 2006 All rights reserved The moral rights of the author have been asserted 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F OEG USA: 180 Varick Street, New York, NY 10014-4606 www.versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN 1 - 8 4 4 6 7 - 0 2 2 - 8 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Typeset in Garamond by Andrea Stimpson Printed in the USA for my darlin' Koisin Slum, semi-slum, and superslum ... to this has come the evolution of cities. Patrick Geddes1 1 Quoted in Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospeds, New York 1961, p. 464. Contents 1. The Urban Climacteric 1 2. The Prevalence of Slums 20 3. The Treason of the State 50 4. Illusions of Self-Help 70 5. Haussmann in the Tropics 95 6. Slum Ecology 121 .7. SAPing the Third World 151 •8.

The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems-And Create More
by Luke Dormehl
Published 4 Nov 2014

This objective could occasionally be clouded (or else speeded up) by a naive enthusiasm for the means of getting there: not by anything so unquantifiable as ethical concerns, but rather by an enthusiasm for the ingenuity, elegance and “spectacular effectiveness” of man’s ability to dream up solutions. As Ellul’s observation proves, this approach is not therefore a new one, and the founders of Google and the heads of the various high-tech companies I discuss are not the first people to display what the late American sociologist Lewis Mumford called the “will-to-order”—meaning the desire to make formulaic sense of the world. Writing in the 1930s, long before the birth of the modern computer, Mumford noted that automation was simultaneously for “enlarging the mechanical or sensory capacities of the human body” and “for reducing to a measurable order and regularity the processes of life.”

To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death
by Mark O'Connell
Published 28 Feb 2017

Čapek’s term “robot” was, after all, taken from the Czech word for “forced labor.” The image and valence of the human body has always shaped how we think about machines; humans have always succeeded in reducing the bodies of other humans to mechanisms, components in systems of their own design. As Lewis Mumford put it in his book Technics and Civilization, written during the early years of the Great Depression: Long before the peoples of the Western World turned to the machine, mechanism as an element in social life had come into existence. Before inventors created engines to take the place of men, the leaders of men had drilled and regimented multitudes of human beings: they had discovered how to reduce men to machines.

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
by Walter Isaacson
Published 6 Oct 2014

The hippie and antiwar movements were both wary of computers, at least initially. The hulking mainframes with whirring tapes and blinking lights were seen as depersonalizing and Orwellian, tools of Corporate America, the Pentagon, and the Power Structure. In The Myth of the Machine, the sociologist Lewis Mumford warned that the rise of computers could mean that “man will become a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal.”7 At peace protests and hippie communes, from Sproul Plaza at Berkeley to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, the injunction printed on punch cards, “Do not fold, spindle or mutilate,” became an ironic catchphrase.

…

See also, “More Than Just Digital Quilting,” Economist, Dec. 3, 2011; Victoria Sherrow, Huskings, Quiltings, and Barn Raisings: Work-Play Parties in Early America (Walker, 1992). 6. Posters and programs for the acid tests, in Phil Lesh, “The Acid Test Chronicles,” http://www.postertrip.com/public/5586.cfm; Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987), 251 and passim. 7. Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 29, from Lewis Mumford, Myth of the Machine (Harcourt, Brace, 1967), 3. 8. Markoff, What the Dormouse Said, 165. 9. Charles Reich, The Greening of America (Random House, 1970), 5. 10. Author’s interview with Ken Goffman, aka R. U. Sirius; Mark Dery, Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (Grove, 1966), 22; Timothy Leary, Cyberpunks CyberFreedom (Ronin, 2008), 170. 11.

Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
by David Brooks
Published 1 Jan 2000

After Marion left for HarperCollins, I was honored to have Alice Mayhew take on the project. A writer couldn’t hope for a more responsive editor. She seemed to ponder every word in this manuscript, and her comments improved it in ways great and small. Finally, there is my family. My parents moved to Wayne, Pennsylvania, because Lewis Mumford said pre—World War I suburbs are the best places to live in the United States. Going to high school there, I thought the place was bourgeois and reactionary, which it was. But now it’s changed and I’ve changed and I realize what a wonderful community it is. I’m grateful to my parents and my brother, Daniel, for our happy life there.

Protocol: how control exists after decentralization
by Alexander R. Galloway
Published 1 Apr 2004

The provocative but tantalizingly thin Pandemonium: The Rise of Predatory Locales in the Postwar World from architect Branden Hookway, looks at how cybernetic bodies permeate twentieth-century life. Other important theorists from the field of computer and media studies who have influenced me include Vannevar Bush, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Marshall McLuhan, Lewis Mumford, and Alan Turing. I am also inspired by Lovink’s new school of media theory known as Net criticism. This loose international grouping of critics and practitioners has grown up with the Internet and includes the pioneering work of Hakim Bey Introduction 18 and Critical Art Ensemble, as well as newer material from Timothy Druckrey, Marina Gržinić, Lev Manovich, Sadie Plant, and many others.

The Dark Net
by Jamie Bartlett
Published 20 Aug 2014

But it was not only the optimists commenting on the possibilities presented by this strange new world. For every starry-eyed vision of future utopias there was an equally vivid dystopian nightmare. As Licklider dreamt of a harmonious world of human–computing interaction, the literary critic and philosopher Lewis Mumford worried that computers would make man ‘a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal’. In 1967, one professor warned presciently in the Atlantic magazine that network computing would create an ‘individualised computer-based federal record-keeping’. As the optimism about the possibilities of the internet reached its zenith in the 1990s, so a growing number worried about the effect it was having on human behaviour.

The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City
by Alan Ehrenhalt
Published 23 Apr 2012

Mass migration means, to me, at least, a reversal in which a much greater proportion of the residents of a large metropolitan area will live near the center of the city than have lived there for the past thirty or forty years. Robert Fishman, one of America’s most respected urban historians, believes that a “fifth great migration” is taking place. This amplifies the contention of Lewis Mumford in the 1920s that there had been three previous ones (west across the frontier in the early nineteenth century; from farms to factory towns a few decades later; and to the great metropolitan centers around the beginning of the twentieth century), and Mumford’s accurate prediction that there would soon be a fourth, decentralizing population away from city centers and into empty suburban land, as the twentieth century unfolded.

The Clock Mirage: Our Myth of Measured Time
by Joseph Mazur
Published 20 Apr 2020

We can feel it through our bones with a relaxed acuteness that is good enough for a normal life. When, now and then, we need a sharper sense of time, we look at a clock. Lena could be right. We needn’t look further for the answer to the celebrated question. Look no further. Time is us. We are the clock. NOTES Preface 1. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1934), 17. 1. Trickling Waters, Shifting Shadows Epigraph: Titus Maccius Plautus, Comedies of Plautus, Translated into Familiar Blank Verse, by the Gentleman Who Translated The Captives, [translated by Bonnell Thornton] (London: T.

The Twittering Machine
by Richard Seymour
Published 20 Aug 2019

This is not really about ‘social media’. The term ‘social media’ is too widely used to be wished away, but we should at least put it in question. It is a form of shorthand propaganda.5 All media, and all machines, are social. Machines are social before they are technological, as the historian Lewis Mumford wrote. Long before the advent of the digital platforms, the philosopher Gilbert Simondon explored the ways in which tools generate social relationships. A tool is, first, the medium of a relationship between a body and the world. It connects users in a set of relationships with one another and the world around them.

The New Class Conflict
by Joel Kotkin
Published 31 Aug 2014

The American intelligentsia, notes historian Michael Lind, has been “all but united in its snobbish disdain for America’s working-class and middle-class suburbs.” They included, Lind suggests, the children of the affluent, who “could afford to live and play” in what he calls “the expensive bohemias in New York, San Francisco, and other big cities.”73 As early as 1921, Lewis Mumford described the emerging “dissolute landscape” as “a no-man’s land which was neither town nor country.” Decades later urban author Robert Caro described the new rows of small houses at the edge of New York as “blossoming hideously,” as families fled venerable, but dirty and crowded, parts of Brooklyn and Manhattan for more spacious tree-lined streets further east, west, south, and north.74 These early critics saw suburbs as often largely homogenous and spiritually stultifying.

Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age
by Annalee Newitz
Published 2 Feb 2021

Robert Graves built on Frazer’s work in the 1940s with a wildly popular book called The White Goddess, which argued that European and Middle Eastern mythologies all came from a primal cult devoted to a goddess who governed birth, love, and death. Graves’ work electrified anthropologists and the general public. As a result, people of Mellaart’s generation were primed to see ancient civilizations through the lens of goddess worship. Few scholars questioned his interpretation. Meanwhile, celebrated urban historians Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs were quick to embrace the idea that Mellaart had finally discovered the remains of a civilization that thrived in a time before humans had rejected female power. Mellaart went far beyond Frazer’s and Graves’ claims about goddess worship by suggesting Çatalhöyük was an ancient matriarchy where women ruled over men.

Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military
by Neil Degrasse Tyson and Avis Lang
Published 10 Sep 2018

Interplanetary space is the next arena where the soft power of technological bravado, augmented by the lure of unlimited resources, urges us to take flight. 9 A TIME TO HEAL On July 21, 1969—the day the New York Times banner headline read “MEN WALK ON MOON: ASTRONAUTS LAND ON PLAIN; COLLECT ROCKS, PLANT FLAG”—the paper also provided space for reactions from several dozen notable individuals: the Dalai Lama, R. Buckminster Fuller, Jesse Jackson, Charles Lindbergh, Arthur Miller, Pablo Picasso. Some were enthusiastic, some were ambivalent, Picasso was completely uninterested. The admired historian of cities and technology Lewis Mumford was disgusted. Five years earlier, Mumford had received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Now he felt impelled to describe the foremost scientific and technical achievements of the modern era—rockets, computers, nuclear bombs—as “direct products of war,” hyped as research and development for military and political ends that would shrivel under rational examination and candid moral appraisal.

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NEH and NEA each got a 1.3% increase; CPB’s funding remained the same as 2016. For 2018 figures, see William Thomas, “Final FY18 Appropriations: Department of Defense,” FYI Bull. 40, Apr. 5, 2018. See also the American Institute of Physics’ continually updated “Federal Science Budget Tracker,” www.aip.org/fyi/federal-science-budget-tracker. 9. A TIME TO HEAL 1.Lewis Mumford, “No: ‘A Symbolic Act of War . . . ,’ ” New York Times, July 21, 1969, query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=9804E3DB1738E63ABC4951DFB1668382679EDE (accessed May 5, 2017); “Reactions to Man’s Landing on the Moon Show Broad Variations in Opinions. Some Would Forge Ahead in Space, Others Would Turn to Earth’s Affairs,” New York Times, July 21, 1969, 6–7, timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1969/07/21/issue.html (accessed Sept. 18, 2017). 2.See generally Daron Acemoglu, Mikhail Golosov, Aleh Tsyvinski, and Pierre Yared, “A Dynamic Theory of Resource Wars,” Quarterly J. of Economics (2012), 283–331, economics.mit.edu/files/8041 (accessed Oct. 9, 2017).

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World
by Steven Johnson
Published 15 Nov 2016

He arrived in the United States not speaking a word of English, but by 1939 he was performing with a theater troupe in Manhattan and designing boutiques on Fifth Avenue. He developed a signature style in the shop designs, with open-air arcade entrances flanked by giant plate-glass displays arrayed with goods. The new storefronts delighted consumers and merchants alike, though critics like Lewis Mumford grumbled that the facades captured their customers the way “a pitcher plant captures flies or an old-style mousetrap catches mice.” During the 1940s, Gruen’s design practice boomed; he built dozens of department stores across the country. Echoing Le Corbusier’s famous line about a house being a “machine for living,” Gruen began calling his store environments “machines for selling.”

Mysteries of the Mall: And Other Essays
by Witold Rybczynski
Published 7 Sep 2015

And when critical disagreement does occur, as it has over Gehry’s proposed design for the Eisenhower Memorial, it tends to take the form of people shouting at each other, an architectural Firing Line. If there was a golden age of architectural prose, it might have been the 1960s and 1970s, thanks to magazines such as The Architectural Forum in the United States and AD in Britain, the criticism of Lewis Mumford, Reyner Banham, and Martin Pawley, and the scholarship of John Summerson, James Ackerman, Nikolaus Pevsner, and Vincent Scully. These writers have remained, for me, models of how one ought to write about architecture. I have had the luxury of picking my own topics rather than being assigned subjects, so if the choice sometimes seems eccentric, there is no one to blame but myself.

Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life
by Colin Ellard
Published 14 May 2015

Unlike small, nomadic groups of Bush People, pastoral settlers growing crops for food soon found themselves living in larger settlements and investing labor in infrastructure that made nomadism impractical. These larger, fixed groupings of people brought about pressures for new social arrangements, trade, political hierarchies, and according to Lewis Mumford in his encyclopedic The City in History,23 a “citadel” mentality in which occupants of a large settlement began to place themselves into defensive opposition against the wildness of nature. Over the course of centuries, this opposition brought with it the walls, ramparts, tools, and weapons—in other words, technology—that allowed the urban environment to flourish as a full antinomy to the immersion in the wild that characterized earlier nomadic hunting cultures like that of the Bush People.

The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion
by Virginia Postrel
Published 5 Nov 2013

These designs create a sense of excitement, purpose, and accomplishment, while leaving enough mystery to disguise any inefficiency, costs, or hardship. They glamorize Soviet planning. But no political campaign promoted the glamour of planning more effectively than the 1939 New York World’s Fair, which blended political propaganda with commercial promotion. The social critic Lewis Mumford, who shaped the fair’s theme, described its goal as telling “the story of this planned environment, this planned industry, this planned civilization.”60 At the fair’s central exhibit, the Democracity housed in the signature Perisphere, visitors looked down on a model of the “perfectly integrated garden city of tomorrow.”

Death of the Liberal Class
by Chris Hedges
Published 14 May 2010

They wrap ideas in a language so obscure, so abstract, so preoccupied with arcane theory that the uninitiated cannot understand what they write. They make no attempt to reach a wider audience or enrich public life. Compared to the last generation of genuine, independent public intellectuals—Jane Jacobs, Paul and Percival Goodman, William H. Whyte, Lewis Mumford, C. Wright Mills, and Dwight Macdonald—they have produced nothing of substance or worth. Their work has no vision, other than perhaps calling for more diverse voices in the academy. It is technical, convoluted, self-referential, and filled with so much academic jargon that it is unreadable. This is a sample of what poststructuralists, in this case Jameson, believe passes for lucid thought: In periodizing a phenomenon of this kind, we have to complicate the model with all kinds of supplementary epicycles.

Data Action: Using Data for Public Good
by Sarah Williams
Published 14 Sep 2020

Geddes's calls, in writings and lectures, for new representational strategies often fell on deaf ears, mostly because his arguments were extremely difficult to follow—and he was said to have a difficult and argumentative personality.29 Yet, at the heart of his position was the belief that to make planning decisions we must truly understand the people, the geography, and how the two interact, all the while involving the public in the practice of observation. These ideas have had a lasting impact on regional town planning and have influenced many regional planners (including Lewis Mumford) in addition to the methods laid out in these pages.30 Geddes is one of the first to bring out the limitations of data analytics, namely the problem of trying to quantify the qualitative nature of cities. While he himself advocated for the development of data, he investigated alternative ways of communicating the insights found within through data visualization.

A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet
by Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore
Published 16 Oct 2017

Descartes’s cogito funneled vision and thought into a spectator’s view of the world, one that rendered the emerging surfaces of modernity visible and measurable and the viewer bodiless and placeless. Medieval multiple vantage points in art and literature were displaced by a single, disembodied, omniscient, and panoptic eye.33 In geometry, Renaissance painting, and especially cartography, the new thinking represented reality as if one were standing outside it. As the social critic Lewis Mumford noted, the Renaissance perspective “turned the symbolic relation of objects into a visual relation: the visual in turn became a quantitative relation. In the new picture of the world, size meant not human or divine importance, but distance.”34 And that distance could be measured, catalogued, classified, mapped, and owned.35 The modern map did not merely describe the world; it was a technology of conquest.

Ayn Rand and the World She Made
by Anne C. Heller
Published 27 Oct 2009

Meanwhile, she scoured the works of architectural and social historians and compared their attitudes to those of Wright. She found most of them to be conventional thinkers, unwitting collectivists, or worse. She gave her villain, Ellsworth Toohey, the pretenses and mannerisms of those she especially disliked: the elegant theoretician Lewis Mumford, who cast a cold eye on technology and praised the architecture of communal life; Heywood Broun, a popular syndicated columnist, champion of the underdog, and founder of the pro-Communist Newspaper Guild; Clifton Fadiman, The New Yorker’s book critic and host of the popular radio show Information Please, from whom Toohey received his encyclopedic memory; and British socialist Harold Laski.

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imploring him to see her: Letters to FLW dated December 12, 1937, and November 7, 1938 (LOAR, pp. 108–111); thanks to the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Taliesin West, Scottsdale, Ariz., for authentication of Wright’s letters to AR. compared their attitudes to those of Wright: February 23, 1937 to November 28, 1937 (JOAR, pp. 122–44). Lewis Mumford: Mumford was the author of an architectural survey called Sticks and Stones. Toohey’s fictional history of architecture was called Sermons in Stone. “You could sense the bared teeth behind [his] smile”: BBTBI. Toohey in the flesh: BBTBI. in 1935: December 26, 1935 (JOAR, p. 89). “You held a leash”: TF, p. 691.

Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and Its Effect on Our Lives
by Catherine Lutz and Anne Lutz Fernandez
Published 5 Jan 2010

It is the reverse of freedom when we are trapped in ubiquitous traffic jams instead of pursuing the activities we love, wrapped in the chains of car loan indebtedness, and stuck in the quagmire of a foreign policy tethered to the supply of oil. The myth of car freedom causes us to ignore these costs and ask our government to spend more of our tax dollars on more roads and lanes, despite research that shows that those new lanes will become as congested as before within just a few years. We don’t see, as Lewis Mumford once quipped, that this transportation strategy is like dealing with obesity by buying a bigger belt. DAD’S JEWELRY, MOM’S TAXI, AND DETROIT FAMILY VALUES How much we invest in the cars we buy and how often and for what purposes we drive are entwined with our sense of what kind of man, woman, even what kind of parent we want to be.

On Writing Well (30th Anniversary Edition)
by William Zinsser
Published 1 Jan 1976

The questionnaire also left room for any comments we might feel impelled to make—an opportunity the panelists seized avidly, as we found when the dictionary was published and our comments were released to the press. Passions ran high. “Good God, no! Never!” cried Barbara W. Tuchman, asked about the verb “to author.” Scholarship hath no fury like that of a language purist faced with sludge, and I shared Tuchman’s vow that “author” should never be authorized, just as I agreed with Lewis Mumford that the adverb “good” should be “left as the exclusive property of Ernest Hemingway.” But guardians of usage are doing only half their job if they merely keep the language from becoming sloppy. Any dolt can rule that the suffix “wise,” as in “healthwise,” is doltwise, or that being “rather unique” is no more possible than being rather pregnant.

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 21 Mar 2013

See Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010) and Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011). 2. Look at Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas for the earliest notions of real time and existence compared with human-defined days and years. See Lewis Mumford, Harold Innis, David S. Landes, and Jeremy Rifkin for understandings that bring us through the Industrial Age and even into digital culture. My own historical and theoretical frameworks build on their works. 3. For more on this pre–Axial Age spiritual outlook, see Karen Armstrong’s A History of God (New York: Ballantine Books, 1993). 4.

The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Netwo Rking
by Mark Bauerlein
Published 7 Sep 2011

As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the fourteenth century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.” The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man.

Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution
by Janette Sadik-Khan
Published 8 Mar 2016

When, in an effort to ease that traffic, the eight-lane road is expanded by 25 percent to ten lanes, the city will eventually have ten lanes of traffic and nearly 25 percent more traffic, not 25 percent less. What’s most dismaying about this planning principle is that it has been almost universally ignored over the last half century. Writing in 1955, at the dawn of the interstate age and the Moses era, urbanist Lewis Mumford observed that trying to address congestion by building more traffic lanes is like trying to prevent obesity by loosening one’s belt. As we have seen, the road tells you how it wants to be used, and conventional traffic studies don’t factor in what invariably happens when motorists—who are people, not mathematical constants—are greeted by a wider road: they drive more.

Data and the City
by Rob Kitchin,Tracey P. Lauriault,Gavin McArdle
Published 2 Aug 2017

That condition is both an opportunity (these strangers are potential customers for our services, they might teach us something we would like to learn, bring us excitement, love or consolation), as well as a challenge (can we trust these strangers? Will they not thwart our ambitions?). Cultural critics have argued that the city is a cultural system that balances these two sides of the equation. As Lewis Mumford wrote: Now, the great function of the city is . . . to permit, indeed to encourage and incite the greatest possible number of meetings, encounters, challenges between all persons, classes and groups providing, as it were, a stage upon which the drama of social life may be enacted, with the actors taking their turns as spectators, and the spectators as actors.

The Cultural Logic of Computation
by David Golumbia
Published 31 Mar 2009

It is those in power, and those who align themselves with existing structures of power, who are most often (but not exclusively) served by the advancement of computerization, and who make the fullest use of computers; it is they who endorse most fully the computational rhetoric and the computational beliefs that have become so widespread in our society. Following a line of criticism that extends at least as far back as Kant (at least on one interpretation of Kant’s views), and that has recent avatars in figures as diverse as established scholars like Lewis Mumford (1934, 1964), Harold Innis (1950, 1951), Jacques Ellul (1964, 1980, 1990), Joseph Weizenbaum, Martin Heidegger, Norbert Wiener (1954, The Cultural Functions of Computation p5 1964), Terry Winograd, and Theodore Roszak (1986), and more recent writers like Langdon Winner (1977, 1988), Mark Poster (1990, 2000, 2006), Michael Adas, Philip Agre (1997), Christopher May (2002), Kevin Robins and Frank Webster (1999), Alison Adam, McKenzie Wark, Scott Lash (2002), Vincent Mosco, Dan Schiller, Lisa Nakamura, and others discussed below, I argue that computationalism meshes all too easily with the project of instrumental reason.

Public Places, Urban Spaces: The Dimensions of Urban Design
by Matthew Carmona , Tim Heath , Steve Tiesdell and Taner Oc
Published 15 Feb 2010

The above discussion gives rise to two particular and related notions of urban design – first as a means of restoring or giving qualities of continuity and synergy to otherwise individual, often inward-focused, urban developments (i.e. to improve overall place quality), and second as a means of joining up a fragmented (and sometimes a somewhat estranged) set of professions. Joining Up the Urban Environment Sternberg (2000) argues that urban design’s primary role is to reassert the ‘cohesiveness of the urban experience’. Drawing upon the ‘organicist’ school of thought – a school that had influenced Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford and, more recently, Alexander (1987, 1979) and Alexander et al (1977) – he notes how the organicists observed that‘… modern society (especially its central dynamic mechanism, the market) atomised community, nature and city. Inspired by biological metaphors and philosophical concepts of vitalism, the organicists set out to reassert the natural growth and wholeness that a ‘mechanical’ market society would tend to undermine.’

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In the 1980s and early 1990s, economic development was pursued wherever it could be nurtured. In the late 1990s and early twenty-first century, it had a more urban focus, with cities and city regions seen as key sites and engines of economic development. In the USA, for example, drawing on Lewis Mumford’s prediction of a ‘fourth migration’, Fishman (2005, 2008a) describes a ‘fifth migration’ and a rebirth of the American city, due, in part, to the presence of relatively cheap housing close to the downtown regional employment cities and accessible to the suburbs:‘… reurbanism has been a major cultural force, challenging the suburban car culture with the classic urban values of density, walkability and diversity.

QI: The Book of General Ignorance - The Noticeably Stouter Edition
by Lloyd, John and Mitchinson, John
Published 7 Oct 2010

(There were eighty entrances at ground level, seventy-six for ordinary spectators and four for the imperial family.) The confusion of the exit with a specialised vomit chamber appears to be a recent error. The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary finds Aldous Huxley using the term in his 1923 comic novel, Antic Hay, but notes that the usage is ‘erron[eous]’. Lewis Mumford in The City in History (1961) compounded the confusion by saying the exits were named after the chambers where gluttons threw up ‘in order to return to their couches empty enough to enjoy the pleasures of still more food’. The problem with this theory is that no Roman writer ever refers to them, nor have any purpose-built rooms that fit the bill been found.

The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness Out of Blame
by Pete Walker
Published 1 Jan 1995

THE EMOTIONAL AND SPIRITUAL CARNAGE OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION People whose course of life has reached a crisis must confront their collective past as fully as a neurotic patient must unbind his personal past: long-forgotten traumas in history may have a disastrous effect upon millions who remain unaware of them. – Lewis Mumford In tracing my heritage of abuse and neglect, I intuitively lamented my way through many long-forgotten generations on that lonely Christmas Eve, until I came to what still strikes me as the origin of our terrible epidemic of dysfunctional parenting. In a lucid, movie-like viewing, I saw with my mind’s eye families ravaged en masse by the Industrial Revolution.

The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us
by Diane Ackerman
Published 9 Sep 2014

New York: Mariner, 2003. Thomas, Keith. Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Thomas, William, ed. Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth: An International Symposium under the Co-chairmanship of Carl O. Sauer, Marston Bates, and Lewis Mumford. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956. Thurschwell, Pamela. Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Tobias, Michael, ed. Deep Ecology. Rev. ed. San Marcos, CA: Avant, 1988. Todd, Kim. Tinkering with Eden: A Natural History of Exotics in America.

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry
by John Markoff
Published 1 Jan 2005

The San Francisco Midpeninsula during the sixties and early seventies witnessed an epochal intersection of science, politics, art, and commerce, a convergence comparable to that at such landmark places in history as Vienna after World War I. Beginning in the fifties, the computer had come under attack as a symbol of large, centralized, bureaucratic institutions. Lewis Mumford, writing in The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power, asserted that the electronic computer had been created in opposition to human freedom and denounced the computer technicians who worked at creating superhuman machines. In the course of a single decade, however, that worldview changed.

Rush Hour: How 500 Million Commuters Survive the Daily Journey to Work
by Iain Gately
Published 6 Nov 2014

Keats was equally scathing about the auto suburbs for which the Edsel had been built: ‘For literally nothing down… you too can find a box of your own in one of the fresh-air slums we’re building round the edges of American cities… inhabited by people whose age, income, number of children, problems, habits, conversation, dress, possessions, and perhaps even blood type are also precisely like yours.’ The historian and sociologist Lewis Mumford had similarly harsh words: the home suburbs of auto-commuters were ‘a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless, communal waste, inhabited by people of the same caste, the same income, [who eat] the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold’.

The Future of Money
by Bernard Lietaer
Published 28 Apr 2013

The following hard 'money question' synthesizes the socioeconomic dilemma that this Age Wave presents: How will society provide the elderly with the money to match their longevity? 2. Information Revolution Two hundred years ago, Benjamin Franklin claimed that if everyone were to work productively, the working day would need be only five hours. Sixty years ago, Bertrand Russell, the English philosopher, and Lewis Mumford, an American authority on culture, both estimated that a 20-hour working week should be enough time to produce all the necessary goods and services in our society. For the past 30 years, many economists have forecast reduced working weeks or retirement at age 38. The New York Times predicted on October 19, 1967 that 'By the year2000, people will work no more than four days a week and less than eight hours a day.

The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square
by James Traub
Published 1 Jan 2004

And then the commissioners returned to their commercial preoccupations: the very fact that Manhattan was an island, they noted, ensured that the price of land was “uncommonly great”; so “principles of economy” would have to be given more weight than might otherwise have been prudent. Thus, no plazas. Generations of urban thinkers, from Frederick Law Olmsted to Lewis Mumford, have reeled in horror at a master plan that obliterated topography in favor of the endless multiplication of identical units, and could find no larger rationale for doing so than cost. And yet everything about the plan bears the stamp of this new democratic republic: its simplicity and horror of adornment; its blunt practicality; its faith in the marketplace as a democratic instrument, equally open to all.

Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike
by Eugene W. Holland
Published 1 Jan 2009

Denumeration via models—the State as model of realiza­ tion, with its model citizens, parents, students, soldiers, prisoners, and so on, as produced by the ideological State apparatus—is now accompanied and, to some extent, superseded by denumeration via modulation: the practically instantaneous capture of digitized information in the immedi­ ate service of axiomatization, bypassing the State, most institutions, and subjectivity itself.134 Deleuze and Guattari call this high-speed cybernetic mode of denumera­ tion enslavement because autonomous subjectivity is no longer relevant or even functional: consumer preferences are not measured by opinion polls or focus groups but by galvanic skin response and pupil dilation; book runs are calculated not from book orders placed by professors in advance of each semester but by up-to-the-minute Amazon-dot-com rankings and mass-aggregated consumer feedback (as in Simon and Schuster’s “MediaPredict” project135); rental car pricing no longer depends on the ad placed weekly in the Sunday paper but on split-second calculations of availabil­ ity, cost, and profit margins. In so-called machinic enslavement, human bodies and brains become parts of what Lewis Mumford calls a social megamachine. Yet the drawback with calling this mode of denumeration enslavement is that—putting aside for a moment the predominant use to which it is now put—this kind of information feedback is precisely what makes digitally mediated markets so responsive as distributed-intelligence mechanisms for collective decision making.

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto
by Stewart Brand
Published 15 Mar 2009

When defense against raids by nomadic Apaches and Navajos became irrelevant after the conquest by whites, the Pueblos all dispersed into scattered buildings (except where high-rise density is maintained partly for tourists, as at Taos and Acoma). “The earliest meaning of ‘town,’ said the urban scholar Lewis Mumford, “is an enclosed or fortified place.” Agriculture, it appears, was an early invention by the dwellers of walled towns to allow their settlements to keep growing, as in Geoffrey West’s formulation. Today’s megacities rely on the same flow of innovation. A 2006 UN-HABITAT report proposed thatCities are engines of rural development. . . .

The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be
by Moises Naim
Published 5 Mar 2013

In 1955, General Motors, one of the early adopters and paradigmatic examples of the M-form management structure, became the first US corporation to net more than $1 billion in a year as well as the largest corporation in the United States, in terms of its revenues as a proportion of gross domestic product (roughly 3 percent); it employed more than five hundred thousand workers in the United States alone, offered consumers eighty-five different models to choose from, and sold about 5 million cars and trucks.23 Mass-production principles were also being expanded to industries such as homebuilding by businessmen like Bill Levitt, a former Navy construction worker who pioneered suburban development by building affordable middle-class homes by the thousands. But the apparent triumph of the behemoth organizations that produced this Cold War cornucopia of goods and services also stirred worries. Architecture critics like Lewis Mumford complained that the new Levittowns were monotonous and the houses too spread out to create a real community. Irving Howe, the literary and social commentator, decried the postwar years as the “Age of Conformity,” and in 1950 the sociologist David Riesman bemoaned the loss of individualism under institutional pressure in his influential book The Lonely Crowd.24 And these were not the only concerns raised.

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory
by Kariappa Bheemaiah
Published 26 Feb 2017

In light of the pace of change that we currently witness, this can be accepted as a fair statement if we are to accept that every technology that has been invented, is being invented and will be invented follows the very same formula - they are combinations of technologies that already existed and do not come out of sheer inspiration alone. This might seem like a common-sense statement to some and in the past, philosophers, historians, sociologists and economists, such as Lewis Mumford, George Basalla, Joel Mokyr and Paul Romer, have come up with anecdotal theories that state this as a concept. But if we are to respect the Popperian scientific method to making a claim, then we need to consult the research that pertains to this subject to prove our hypothesis. More importantly, if we are to state that technology is created by combining bits and pieces of previous technological inventions, then we also need to extend this hypothesis to the process of invention as it is invention that generates new technologies.

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties
by Christopher Caldwell
Published 21 Jan 2020

“Management is, in the end”: Phil Rosenzweig, “Robert McNamara and the Evolution of Modern Management,” Harvard Business Review, December 2010. They claimed the percentage: Samuel P. Huntington, “The Bases of Accommodation,” Foreign Affairs, July 1968. “mad rationality”: Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995 [1968]), 78. Roszak attributes the phrase to Lewis Mumford. “lunatic realism”: Theodore Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Post-Industrial Society (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1972), xxix. “We are what went wrong”: Loren Baritz, Backfire: A History of How American Culture Led Us into Vietnam and Made Us Fight the Way We Did (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998 [1983]), 349.

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy
by Christopher Mims
Published 13 Sep 2021

early cars and trucks: United States Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, America’s Highways, 1776–1976: A History of the Federal-Aid Program (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1977). 2 million trucks: Athel F. Denham, 20 Years’ Progress in Commercial Motor Vehicles (Detroit: Automotive Council for War Production, 1943). the “townless highway”: Benton MacKaye and Lewis Mumford, “Townless Highways for the Motorist,” Harper’s, August 1931. consolidation of power: Eric Jaffe, “How Highway Construction Helped Hitler Rise to Power,” Bloomberg CityLab, June 6, 2014, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-06-06/how-highway-construction-helped-hitler-rise-to-power. Autobahn was under construction: Nico Voigtlaender and Hans-Joachim Voth, “Highway to Hitler” (working paper, National Bureau of Economic Research, January 2021).

The Theory of the Leisure Class
by Thorstein Veblen
Published 10 Oct 2007

Iam fides et pax … Audet: ‘now neglected faith and peace, and ancient honour and shame, dares to return’ (Horace, ‘Carmen Saeculare’). 1 Joseph Dorfman, Thorstein Veblen and His America (New York, 1961), 422. 2 Bernard Rosenberg, Thorstein Veblen (New York, 1963), 1. It is heady to realize that dealing with Veblen’s career prompts paying attention to the disparate work of (among others) Lester Ward, Jacques Loeb, William James, William McDougall, James Frazer, Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Edward Tylor, Lewis Mumford, Max Weber, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, John Maynard Keynes, Charles S. Peirce, George Mead, and John Dewey. Rick Tilman’s The Intellectual Legacy of Thorstein Veblen: Unresolved Issues (Westport, Conn., 1996) makes this point very well, since ‘legacy’ is the key word when it comes to assessing Veblen’s influence over the developing fields of biology, sociology, evolutionary psychology, physiology, political science, and anthropology. 3 The following comments from the Yale Review and the Journal of Political Economy are cited in Dorfman’s Thorstein Veblen and His America, 191–2. 4 Adorno, ‘Veblen’s Attack on Culture’ (1941), cited in Rick Tilman and Jo Lo Simich (eds.), Thorstein Veblen: A Reference Guide (Boston, 1985), 50. 5 After Veblen’s death in 1929, a tabulation of the sales of his ten books over his lifetime revealed that only 40,000 copies were ever sold.

City on the Verge
by Mark Pendergrast
Published 5 May 2017

For the city’s large homeless population, however, the BeltLine meant very little other than further displacement. CHAPTER 6 MANSIONS AND CAT HOLES It is our utopias that make the world tolerable to us: the cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live. —Lewis Mumford, The Story of Utopias, 1922 Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these? Oh, I have ta’en Too little care of this! —William Shakespeare, King Lear It’s difficult for most of us to conceive of what it’s like to be homeless, to have no safe place to call our own.

High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline
by Jim Rasenberger
Published 15 Mar 2004

Aesthetes objected to the towers because they were ugly—“annoyingly familiar,” as Glenn Collins put it in the New York Times Magazine, resembling “two shiny new sticks of Arrow staples, standing on end.” “Tall buildings are an outmoded concept—this is Victorian thinking,” wrote the renowned critic Lewis Mumford of the towers. “They are not economically sound or efficient—in fact they are ridiculously unprofitable….” The Trade Center’s fate, predicted Mumford, “is to be ripped down as nonsensical.” This was a fate many seemed to wish upon the World Trade Center in those days. It was, as BusinessWeek described it, “the colossus nobody seems to love.”

The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move
by Sonia Shah

“Uncontrollable aggressiveness” resulted from crowding, the zoologist and TV host Desmond Morris wrote. It had been “proved conclusively with laboratory experiments.” The journalist Tom Wolfe compared crowds of New Yorkers “running around, dodging, blinking their eyes, making a sound like a pen full of starlings or rats.” The critic and philosopher Lewis Mumford wrote of the “ugly barbarization” of humans due to “sheer physical congestion,” which had been “partly confirmed” by Calhoun’s experiments in rats. The “freedom to breed,” Hardin argued, had become “intolerable.” Scientists started to refer to human population growth10 not as the happy outcome of prosperity and improved health but as a silent killer that would violently erupt.

Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet
by Roger Scruton
Published 30 Apr 2014

Kunstler has gone on to argue (in The Long Emergency) that suburbanization – which is the only consensual solution to the disaster – is unsustainable, and that America is preparing an extended emergency for itself when the oil runs out.272 Jacobs and Kunstler belong to a tradition of urban thinking that began in Europe with Pugin’s Contrasts and the Gothic revival and which culminated in America with Lewis Mumford’s acclaimed work of 1937, The City in History. Mumford takes the tightly packed and field-surrounded medieval city as his ideal. What made the medieval city so compact, however, was not the aesthetic of the street and the square, so much as the need to wall every community against its enemies. The aesthetic of the European city is as much a response to war and pillage as to the demands of settlement and trade.

Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World
by Henry Grabar
Published 8 May 2023

The conventional wisdom in Chicago, for example, had been that the 1954 opening of the record-breaking Grant Park Garage would help ensure that the population of the Windy City was not eclipsed by that of Los Angeles. (It did not.) In 1957, at a conference in Hartford, the urban historian Lewis Mumford postulated that cities would never be able to build their way out of car traffic. It would progress, he said, “until that terminal point when all the business and industry that originally gave rise to the congestion move out of the city, to escape strangulation, leaving a waste of expressways and garages behind them.”

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology
by Kentaro Toyama
Published 25 May 2015

My colleague Jonathan Donner, an expert on mobile phones in the developing world, pointed me to a 1970 paper on the “knowledge gap hypothesis,” in which the authors reported that public-service messaging delivered through mass media was better absorbed by wealthier, more educated households.52 Lewis Mumford, a prominent twentieth-century technology critic who was part skeptic and part contextualist, wrote a two-volume work called The Myth of the Machine, in which he mentions in passing that technology “supported and enlarged the capacities for human expression.”53 And Philip Agre, another computer-scientist-turned-technology-analyst, wrote prescient articles about the Internet in politics.

This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers
by Andy Greenberg
Published 12 Sep 2012

Later, as a professor at New York University and the University of California, Chaum became obsessed with the problem of anonymity and its political implications, neglecting his teaching for a year to pore over the entire literature of the social benefits and evils of protecting individuals’ identity, works by thinkers like Thomas Kuhn and Lewis Mumford. He came out of that personal study surer than ever of his views on privacy, and it was soon after that he unleashed the article that would ignite an entire generation of crypto-focused anonymity advocates. It was titled “Security without Identification: Transaction Systems to make Big Brother Obsolete.”

To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland's Global Diaspora, 1750-2010
by T M Devine
Published 25 Aug 2011

His contemporary, Patrick Geddes, also established a world-class reputation through his studies of the new cities that were transforming all the industrializing countries and his conviction that life for their citizens could be improved through effective planning and a serious effort to understand the environment. Today Geddes is recognized as a central influence on sociology and planning and as the father of urban environmentalism, whose American disciple, Lewis Mumford, shaped our understanding of the modern city. Thus it was that nineteenth-century Scotland became the progenitor of a range of exciting new disciplines. There was little evidence of academic inertia or moribund thinking.21 The impact abroad of this domestic intellectual energy was partly manifested in institutional form.

Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight
by David A. Mindell
Published 3 Apr 2008

Strangelove (1964), about an automated Soviet machine that triggers the end of the world, and his 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), in which an intelligent computer murders American astronauts. Also during Apollo, Jacques Ellul’s book The Technological Society (published in 1965 in English) challenged the increasing dominance of ‘‘technique’’ in human culture. In 1967 Lewis Mumford named the ‘‘megamachine’’ as the aggregate of technology, social organization, and management that suppressed individual human values. Human and Machine in the Race to the Moon 13 Philip K. Dick published Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep in 1968 (later made into the film Blade Runner), recasting traditional demarcations between humans and machines.

Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition
by Charles Eisenstein
Published 11 Jul 2011

But even granting the premise that “I am my own,” the implicit assumption that artistic and intellectual creations arise ex nihilo from the mind of the creator, independent of cultural context, is absurd. Any intellectual creation (including this book) draws on bits and pieces of the sea of culture around us, and from the fund of images, melodies, and ideas that are deeply imprinted upon the human psyche, or perhaps even innate to it. As Lewis Mumford puts it, “A patent is a device that enables one man to claim special financial rewards for being the last link in the complicated social process that produced the invention.”3 The same is true of songs, stories, and all other cultural innovations. By making them private property, we are walling off something that is not ours.

The Streets Were Paved With Gold
by Ken Auletta
Published 14 Jul 1980

In truth, while preparing this book I originally intended to include a solutions chapter. I came to fear, however, that it would be misleading. After talking to and reading “the experts,” I discovered none had a magic potion, a still-secret plan to restore New York. Increasingly, I became convinced that the sum of the “solutions” would not equal the sum of the problems. Perhaps Lewis Mumford captured the ambivalence I feel about New York when he said, “I am an optimist about possibilities and a pessimist about probabilities.” I am too angry to be cynical, yet too skeptical to be evangelical. So I’ve just tried to tell the truth as I see it about a very big story. Chapter One The Rotting Apple PRINCE PROSPERO was an indefatigable, some might say an impervious man.

Finding Community: How to Join an Ecovillage or Intentional Community
by Diana Leafe Christian
Published 14 Jun 2007

Today many people associate the idea of intentional community only with the hippie communes of the 1970s, but that šurry of collectivism was just the most recent of a series of waves of interest in experimental common living arrangements that goes back many centuries. The history of the earlier waves is told in many books, among which one of the Šrst and most charming was Lewis Mumford’s 1922 classic The Story of Utopias, which affectionately cataloged utopias of both escape and reconstruction. As Mumford and others have pointed out, these waves often coincide with periods in which society as a whole becomes uninspiring or unbearable. Economic depressions spawn utopian experiments, as do times of cultural decline.

Underland: A Deep Time Journey
by Robert Macfarlane
Published 1 May 2019

William Weaver (1972; London: Vintage, 1997), pp. 98–9. 149 ‘there is a layer of urban stratigraphy . . . unearthed below ground’: Wayne Chambliss, personal communication, May 2018. 149 ‘infrastructure that supports urban life . . . above the surface of the earth ‘: Pierre Belanger, ‘Altitudes of Urbanisation’, Tunnelling and Underground Space Technology 55 (January 2016), 5–7: 5. 149 ‘Complex subterranean spaces . . . above and below ground’: Graham, Vertical, p. 5. 151 ‘The cold in these underground corridors . . . exchanged addresses’: TAP, p. 89. 152 The city of the dead antedates . . . every living city: Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: Har-court & Brace, 1961), p. 7. 154 ‘most photographed barn in America’: Don DeLillo, White Noise (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 128. 155 ‘ feeding the rat’: Al Alvarez, Feeding the Rat: A Climber’s Life on the Edge (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 155 ‘recod[es] people’s normalised relationships to city space’: Bradley Garrett, Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City (London: Verso, 2014), p. 6. 156 I was especially struck by the manic systematicity of much explorer practice: see, for more on the connection-delirium of contemporary infrastructure-mappers, Shannon Mattern’s dazzling essay ‘Cloud and Field’, Places Journal (August 2016) <https://placesjournal.org/article/cloud-and-field>. 156–7 ‘London deserted . . . what a place to explore!’

The Profiteers
by Sally Denton

While president of the student engineering society at Harvey Mudd—the prestigious college of science, math, and engineering located in Claremont, California—Mello came of age at the height of the Vietnam War. The native Californian steeped himself in the works of progressive historians and sociologists, scientists and philosophers, Beat poets and literary figures, essayists and educators, radical priests and counterculture peace activists. “Nixon wanted me in Vietnam. But I was reading Lewis Mumford, Ivan Illich, Gary Snyder, and the Berrigans.” From those thinkers, Mello formed his self-described “strong sense of social responsibility.” Upon graduating with distinction in 1971, Mello watched as peers went to work for the weapons laboratories. “I was disgusted by what I saw in the engineering world, disgusted by the Vietnam War and the global environmental catastrophe unfolding.”

Ayn Rand Cult
by Jeff Walker
Published 30 Dec 1998

When he had finally read the published novel, he complimented Rand on the extent of her research and the worthiness of her individualist cause, and said he liked Toohey’s characterization, but he didn’t say that he particularly liked the book. Rand took Wright’s comments as her most cherished rave ever. Famed architecture critic Lewis Mumford did say of Wright upon his death what Rand wanted Roark to project: “He lived from first to last like a god: one who acts but is not acted upon.” Pierpont notes that in Roark’s as opposed to Wright’s life, there are “no family, no mistakes, no uncertainties: this is the ideal man, hewn from the Nietzschean rock face of the author’s will to dream,” conveyed in a “simplified monumentalizing style” whose only counterpart is Socialist Realism.

Retrofitting Suburbia, Updated Edition: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs
by Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson
Published 23 Mar 2011

Furthermore, recent historical scholarship is bringing to light the ways in which socioeconomic, ethnic, and racial diversity have always been characteristic of suburban settings, despite generations of commentators who assumed otherwise. (See Figure 2–1.) Historian Becky Nicolaides points out how the scathing mid-century critiques of Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, and William Whyte created “a recognizable cultural icon that lives on even in the popular culture of our own day.” She cites the “hellish ’burbs” depicted in recent films like American Beauty and the popular television series Desperate Housewives.2 Despite these persistent stereotypes and critiques, a close look will reveal that there is a great deal of demographic diversity within suburbs and, with retrofitting, increasing diversity in physical patterns as well.

The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community
by Ray Oldenburg
Published 17 Aug 1999

In the brief period since The Great Good Place was published, many books have appeared with similar themes. America seems to be undergoing a massive reassessment. In the simplest terms, we got where we wanted to go but now we aren’t happy about where we are. We have become a suburban nation—the only one in the world. Our migration from both the inner cities and the rural hinterland was, as Lewis Mumford once put it, “a collective effort to live a private life.” We aimed for comfort and well-stocked homes and freedom from uncomfortable interaction and the obligations of citizenship. We succeeded. As if to seal our fate, zoning ordinances were copied and enforced all over the land, prohibiting the stuff of community from intrusion into residential areas.

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World
by Naomi Klein
Published 11 Sep 2023

“an object among other objects”: Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 89. “relate to our self in the third person”: Nancy Colier, “The Branding of the Self,” Psychology Today, August 15, 2012. “A foolish consistency”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Journals, ed. Lewis Mumford (New York: Doubleday, 1968), 95. “is a machine”: Lilly Singh, “I’ll See You Soon…,” YouTube, November 12, 2018, at 2:43. “Come for the nectar of approval”: Richard Seymour, The Twittering Machine (London: Indigo Press, 2019), chapter 2, part IX. “several dozen executions”: Alison Flood, “Naomi Wolf Accused of Confusing Child Abuse with Gay Persecution in Outrages,” The Guardian, February 8, 2021.

The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance
by Henry Petroski
Published 2 Jan 1990

A wandering mountaineer, attracted by the particles of a strange, black substance clinging to the roots of the fallen tree, soon had the people of the countryside excitedly discussing the mysterious mineral. The year 1565 is actually, of course, the date of publication of Konrad Gesner’s book. Even Lewis Mumford, in the list of inventions appended to his famous Technics and Civilization, also dates the introduction of the lead pencil itself as 1565 and appears to credit Gesner with its invention. But this is certainly more than the naturalist claimed for himself, and all that seems certain is that plumbago was available and widely appreciated, especially by naturalists and artists.

Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism
by Stephen Graham
Published 30 Oct 2009

, Independent, 23 March 2008. 25 Davis, ‘Urbanization of Empire’, 12. 26 Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, London: Verso, 2006. 27 Davis, ‘Urbanization of Empire’, 11. 28 See Loïc Wacquant, ‘The Militarization of Urban Marginality: Lessons from the Brazilian Metropolis’, International Political Sociology 2: 1, 2008, 56–74. 29 See Humansecurity-cities.org., Human Security for an Urban Century, 9. 30 Davis, ‘Urbanization of Empire’, 15. 31 Zygmunt Bauman, ‘City of Fears, City of Hopes’, London: Goldsmiths College, University of London, New Cross, 2003, 16, available at www.goldsmiths.ac.uk. 32 Mike Davis, ‘Sand, fear and money in Dubai’, in Denis and Monk, eds, Evil Paradises, New York: New Press, 2007, 51. 33 See Max Weber, The City, Glencoe, IL.: Free Press, 1958; Lewis Mumford, The City in History, New York: MJF Books, 1961. 34 See Christopher Gravett, Medieval Siege Warfare, Oxford: Osprey Publishing. 35 Marshall Berman, ‘Falling Towers: City Life After Urbicide’, in Dennis Crowe, ed., Geography and Identity, Washington: Maisonneuve Press, 1996, 172–192. 36 Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence, Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 1987. 37 Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, New York: Harper Collins, 1973, 398. 38 See Felix Driver and David Gilbert, ed., Imperial Cities, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. 39 Goonewardena and Kipfer, ‘Postcolonial Urbicide’. 40 See Davis, ‘Urbanization Of Empire’, 9; Anthony King, Urbanism, Colonialism and the World Economy, London: Routledge, 1991. 41 Pierre Mesnard y Méndez, ‘Capitalism Means/Needs War’, Socialism and Democracy 16: 2, 2002. 42 See Henri Lefebvre, The Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 1, London: Verso, 1991; Kipfer and Goonewardena, ‘Colonization and the New Imperialism’. 43 Eyal Weizman and Phil Misselwitz, ‘Military Operations as Urban Planning’, Mute Magazine, August 2003. 44 Ibid. 45 In 1847 Bugeaud wrote perhaps the first Western manual of urban warfare, La Guerre des Rues et des Maisons [The War of Streets and Houses], republished in 1997 by Jean-Paul Rocher, Paris. 46 Eyal Weizman, introduction to ‘The War of Streets and Houses’, by Thomas Bugeaud, web exclusive, Cabinet 22, Summer 2006, available at www.cabinetmagazine.org. 47 Ibid. 48 Martin Shaw, War and Genocide, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003. 49 See Mike Davis, Dead Cities, and Other Tales, New York: New Press, 2003, chapter 3. 50 Martin Shaw, ‘New Wars of the City: Relationships of “Urbicide” and “Genocide’’’, in Stephen Graham, ed., Cities, War and Terrorism, Oxford: Blackwell, 2004, 143. 51 Laura McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. 52 Martin Shaw, ‘New Wars of the City’, unpublished manuscript, 2001, available at www.martinshaw.org. 53 Ryan Bishop and Greg Clancey, ‘The City-as-Target, or Perpetuation and Death, in Graham, ed., Cities, War and Terrorism, 54–73. 54 See José Luis Sert and International Congresses for Modern Architecture, Can Our Cities Survive?

The Forgotten Man
by Amity Shlaes
Published 25 Jun 2007

Much later, critics would write about the dams’ effect on people—F. A. Gutheim would call the TVA an example of “the architecture of public relations” and say that from “the conception of the scheme to its final execution you feel that each decision has been made in the light of the fact that the public would come, look, and judge by what it saw”; Lewis Mumford would write in the New Yorker of TVA that “the pharaohs did not do any better.” Visitors were beginning to come to see the new marvel. At some points during the Depression the number of visitors at Norris, Wilson, and Wheeler would rise to a thousand a day. In Washington, the whole story seemed an early proof of the success of the New Deal experiment, and it showed that the TVA was beginning to put the United States back where it belonged in world competition.

Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right
by Jennifer Burns
Published 18 Oct 2009

Through Toohey, Rand would code leftism as fey, effeminate, and unnatural, as opposed to the rough-hewn masculinity of Roark’s individualism.19 Before she saw Laski, Toohey was an abstracted antithesis of Roark. But a socialist intellectual fit her purposes just as well, even as the characterization shifted the novel ever closer to a commentary on current events. Laski was not the sole inspiration, for Rand also used bits of the American critics Heywood Broun, Lewis Mumford, and Clifton Fadiman to round out Toohey’s persona. Fitting Toohey so squarely into the leftist literary culture signaled Rand’s emerging dual purposes for the book and ensured that when it was finally published, the novel would be understood as a political event as much as a literary achievement.

Capitalism in America: A History
by Adrian Wooldridge and Alan Greenspan
Published 15 Oct 2018

Cities that had always suffered from severe racial problems, with real-estate agents enforcing housing segregation and the police forces largely in the hands of whites, exploded during the civil rights movement. Black citizens rioted. Black mayors were elected in many cities, addressing past injustices, but in the process driving more whites to the suburbs. In 1968, Lewis Mumford had worried about the “progressive dissolution” of America’s cities. A decade later that dissolution had become rampant. The mirror image of the decline of the cities was the continued rise of the suburbs. Manufacturing companies moved into suburban areas. By 1981, about two-thirds of all U.S. manufacturing was suburban.22 America became a land of edge cities as back-office functions moved to office parks and retailing moved to shopping malls.

Your Computer Is on Fire
by Thomas S. Mullaney , Benjamin Peters , Mar Hicks and Kavita Philip
Published 9 Mar 2021

In the same spirit that Hegel noted that Minerva’s owl takes flight in the dusk, so too does ethics only stretch its wings after algorithms have already been, in the military jargon, “deployed.” The robots will never take over—that has never been the crisis. Rather, robotic analysis of the future took over our minds and language many decades ago. As Lewis Mumford opened his 1934 masterpiece Technics and Civilization, our species became mechanical before machines changed the world. Not only is tech human, people are the original machines. The globe is ablaze, and few have the collective language to call to put it out. This book sounds out a call for that language.

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation
by Carl Benedikt Frey
Published 17 Jun 2019

Looking at this slow process it is not surprising that it took some time before the complementary organisational, procedural, and cultural behavioural innovations transformed into economic growth.48 Many historians have pointed to the significance of accurate time measurement to economic progress. The French historian Jacques Le Goff has called the birth of the public clock a turning point in Western society.49 And the historian Lewis Mumford has gone so far as to suggest that not the steam engine but the mechanical clock was the machine that made the industrial age.50 While this might seem exaggerated, there can be no doubt that the clock changed Western life in general, and the pace of work in particular. New cultural attitudes about punctuality already began to emerge in the late Middle Ages.

Piracy : The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates
by Adrian Johns
Published 5 Jan 2010

Between 1920 and 1945 one can see the beginnings of, for example, sociologies of invention (in S. C. Gilfillan’s Sociology of Invention), science (in R. K. Merton’s classic papers), and technology (in W. G. Ogburn’s work). There also appeared a psychology of creativity (with patent officer Joseph Rossman’s Industrial Creativity), and a grand theory of technology and society (with Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization). In some cases these initiatives were closely related to each other. Gilfillan, for instance, dedicated his Sociology of Invention – originally a Columbia Ph.D. thesis – to, among eight friends, Ogburn, Rossman, and Merton; another dedicatee was Kaempffert. The questions they conceived – about the role of the researcher, the nature of invention, the relations between creativity and society, and the responsibilities of science – were to a large degree shared, and took shape in the context of this crisis.

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload
by Daniel J. Levitin
Published 18 Aug 2014

All bits are created equal After writing this, I discovered the same phrase “all bits are created equal” in Gleick, J. (2011). The information: A history, a theory, a flood. New York, NY: Vintage. Information has thus become separated from meaning Gleick writes “information is divorced from meaning.” He cites the technology philosopher Lewis Mumford from 1970: “Unfortunately, ‘information retrieving,’ however swift, is no substitute for discovering by direct personal inspection knowledge whose very existence one had possibly never been aware of, and following it at one’s own pace through the further ramification of relevant literature.”

Energy and Civilization: A History
by Vaclav Smil
Published 11 May 2017

In 1800 the inhabitants of Paris, New York, or Tokyo lived in a world whose energetic foundations were no different not only from those of 1700 but also from those of 1300: wood, charcoal, hard labor, and draft animals powered all of those societies. But by 1900 many people in major Western cities lived in societies whose technical parameters were almost entirely different from those that dominated the world in 1800 and that were, in their fundamental features, much closer to our lives in the year 2000. As the historian Lewis Mumford (1967, 294) summed up, “Power, speed, motion, standardization, mass production, quantification, regimentation, precision, uniformity, astronomical regularity, control, above all control—these became the passwords of modern society in the new Western style.” Examples of these changes abound, and from them I have selected just a few global accomplishments to illustrate the magnitude of those rapid gains.

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
by Yochai Benkler
Published 14 May 2006

Liberal political theory must first recognize and understand it before it can begin to renegotiate its agenda for the liberal state, progressive or otherwise. 44 The Role of Technology in Human Affairs 45 The first methodological choice concerns how one should treat the role of technology in the development of human affairs. The kind of technological determinism that typified Lewis Mumford, or, specifically in the area of communications, Marshall McLuhan, is widely perceived in academia today [pg 17] as being too deterministic, though perhaps not so in popular culture. The contemporary effort to offer more nuanced, institution-based, and politicalchoice-based explanations is perhaps best typified by Paul Starr's recent and excellent work on the creation of the media.

Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age
by Lizabeth Cohen
Published 30 Sep 2019

For the definitive biography of James Michael Curley, see Jack Beatty, The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley (1874–1958) (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1992).   15. Harvey Cox, The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 95–97; the Brandeis quote is attributed to Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961), 495. The Cox quotation was brought to Logue’s attention; Stonewall J. McMurray III to Logue, August 11, 1965, EJL, Series 6, Box 150, Folder 433, 1.   16. “Urban Development Prospects as Seen by Edward Logue,” speech given to a Boston College Citizen Seminar, April 12, 1960, CR, April 16, 1960, 318.   17.

Empire of Guns
by Priya Satia
Published 10 Apr 2018

Ashton acknowledged war’s role in fueling the iron industry through demand for cannon, gun carriages, shot, and firearms. Ordnance contracts were like “Food of the Gods.” By the early 1930s, that reality had acquired a moral charge, not least because of the rise of Nazism. The American historian Lewis Mumford’s 1934 work Technics and Civilization argued that industrialism emerged from militarism but saw that reality negatively, as an indictment of industrialism. This systemic critique emerged just as British public opinion began to sharply condemn the conspicuous villainy of arms firms—perhaps the interwar peace movement’s greatest campaign.

Steve Jobs
by Walter Isaacson
Published 23 Oct 2011

“The best music came from here—the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Joan Baez, Janis Joplin—and so did the integrated circuit, and things like the Whole Earth Catalog.” Initially the technologists and the hippies did not interface well. Many in the counterculture saw computers as ominous and Orwellian, the province of the Pentagon and the power structure. In The Myth of the Machine, the historian Lewis Mumford warned that computers were sucking away our freedom and destroying “life-enhancing values.” An injunction on punch cards of the period—“Do not fold, spindle or mutilate”—became an ironic phrase of the antiwar Left. But by the early 1970s a shift was under way. “Computing went from being dismissed as a tool of bureaucratic control to being embraced as a symbol of individual expression and liberation,” John Markoff wrote in his study of the counterculture’s convergence with the computer industry, What the Dormouse Said.

The Rough Guide to New York City
by Martin Dunford
Published 2 Jan 2009

If you’re on your own, QUE E NS After Astoria, the #E, #R, and #V trains run north of Sunnyside and Woodside, historically Irish enclaves now also home to many Asian and Latino immigrants. You’re not missing too much if you skip these neighborhoods on your way to the more interesting Jackson Heights, though planning enthusiasts may want to see the Sunnyside Gardens development, a utopian working-class “garden city” built in 1924 with encouragement from Eleanor Roosevelt and Lewis Mumford; take the #7 train (which runs straight through Sunnyside and Woodside) to the 46th Street stop and walk north on 46th (the opposite direction from the Art Deco “Sunnyside” sign on Queens Boulevard). 251  Roosevelt Avenue, Jackson Heights QUE E NS take a stroll down 35th and 37th avenues between 78th and 88th streets to get a feel for the architecture.

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
by David Graeber and David Wengrow
Published 18 Oct 2021

Symbolic and likely also practical associations between monumental architecture and the activities of ships’ crews are also suggested for the later Bronze Age stone temples of Byblos (Jbeil) in Lebanon, a port town with close trading and cultural links to Egypt (see Wengrow 2010b: 156); and ethnographic descriptions of how team-skills transfer from boat-handling to the manipulation of heavy stone-work can be found, for instance, in John Layard’s classic ethnography of a Melanesian island, Stone Men of Malekula (1942). London: Chatto and Windus. 95. The production line analogy is inspired by Lewis Mumford on the ‘mega-machine’, where he famously argued that the first complex machines were in fact made of people. The ‘rationalization’ of labour typical of the factory system was, as scholars like Eric Williams long ago suggested, really pioneered on slave plantations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but others have recently pointed out that ships around that time, both merchant and military, seem to have been another major zone of experimentation, since being on board such vessels was one of the few circumstances where large numbers of people were assigned tasks entirely under a single overseer’s command. 96.

The Rough Guide to New York City
by Rough Guides
Published 21 May 2018

Sunnyside and Woodside After Astoria, the E and R trains run north of Sunnyside and Woodside, historically Irish enclaves but now also home to many Asian and Latino immigrants (Woodside, especially, has some authentic Thai restaurants). You’re not missing too much if you skip these neighbourhoods on your way to the more interesting Jackson Heights, though planning enthusiasts may want to see the Sunnyside Gardens development, a utopian working-class “garden city” built in 1924 with support from Eleanor Roosevelt and Lewis Mumford. Arrival and departure By train and subway For Sunnyside, take the #7 train to the 46th Street stop and walk north on 46th (the opposite direction from the Art Deco “Sunnyside” sign on Queens Boulevard). East of Sunnyside, the #7 train swings away from Queens Boulevard and heads up narrower Roosevelt Avenue.

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor
by David S. Landes
Published 14 Sep 1999

Europe enjoyed a monopoly of corrective lenses for three to four hundred years. In effect they doubled the skilled craft workforce, and more than doubled it if one takes into account the value of experience.5 3. The mechanical clock. Another banality, so commonplace that we take it for granted. Yet Lewis Mumford quite correctly called it “the key-machine.”6 Before the invention of this machine, people told time by sun (shadow sticks or dials) and water clocks. Sun clocks worked of course only on clear days; water clocks misbehaved when the temperature fell toward freezing, to say nothing of long-run drift as a result of sedimentation and clogging.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
by Shoshana Zuboff
Published 15 Jan 2019

Each elaborated a complete conception of a distinct logic of power, each imagined a society defined by the full flourishing of that power, and each was utopian from the point of view of the form of power that it described.68 However, their public reception could not have been more different: Walden Two was dismissed as a dystopian nightmare and ignored by the general public for more than a decade.69 Orwell’s 1984 was immediately canonized as a dystopian masterpiece and the distillation of the twentieth century’s worst nightmares. The two utopias have often been confused with each other in their content and aims: Time magazine’s 1971 cover story on Skinner described Walden Two as raising “the specter of a 1984 Orwellian society that might really come to pass.” The great historian and literary critic Lewis Mumford once described Walden Two as a “totalitarian utopia” and a depiction of “hell,” but in fact these characterizations are a persistent and, as we shall see, dangerous confusion. Although both books have been described as depictions of totalitarianism, the forms of power that each describes are profoundly different.

Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
by William Cronon
Published 2 Nov 2009

Odum, American Regionalism: A Cultural-Historical Approach to National Integration (1938); and N.S.B. Gras and Henrietta M. Larson, eds., Casebook in American Business History (1939), esp. 385–402. Among sociologists, R. D. McKenzie, The Metropolitan Community (1933), is the most systematic attempt to look at the metropolis in its regional context. The many works of Lewis Mumford are also relevant; see in particular The Culture of Cities (1938); and The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (1961). For the United States, the classic work on early western cities remains Richard C. Wade, The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western Cities, 1790–1830 (1959), which does not, however, deal much with issues of metropolitan dominance; it is overloaded with detail, and its themes can be gotten quickly from Wade’s earlier article “Urban Life in Western America, 1790–1830,” AHR 44 (1958): 14–30.

A People's History of the United States
by Howard Zinn
Published 2 Jan 1977

This was in part the result of the grand strategy of the major political parties. In part it was the result of the fact that almost all the chief avenues to mass opinion were now controlled by large-scale publishing industries. Some writers tried to break through: Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Lewis Mumford. F. Scott Fitzgerald, in an article, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” said: “It was borrowed time anyway—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of a grand duc and the casualness of chorus girls.” He saw ominous signs amid that prosperity: drunkenness, unhappiness, violence: A classmate killed his wife and himself on Long Island, another tumbled “accidentally” from a skyscraper in Philadelphia, another purposely from a skyscraper in New York.

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)
by Robert J. Gordon
Published 12 Jan 2016

“The lawn was a barrier—a kind of verdant moat separating the household from the threats and temptations of the city.”28 As the outskirts of cities were developed after 1870, property covenants often required that houses be set back a certain distance from the street and sidewalk. The change in the appearance of the urban space was described by Lewis Mumford: “Rows of buildings no longer served as continuous walls, bounding streets that formed a closed corridor: the building, divorced from its close association with the street, was embosomed in the landscape and deliberately absorbed by it.”29 The feasibility of large lawn areas surrounding houses was facilitated by the invention, in the 1860s, of the lightweight lawnmower.

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin
Published 18 Dec 2007

Conant, pp. 279–304; Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, pp. 417–20; see also Barton J. Bernstein, “Seizing the Contested Terrain of Early Nuclear History;” Uday Mohan and Sanho Tree, “The Construction of Conventional Wisdom,” and the essays by Norman Cousins, Reinhold Niebuhr, Felix Morley, David Lawrence, Lewis Mumford, Mary McCarthy and other early critics of the bombings, reprinted in Bird and Lifschultz, Hiroshima’s Shadow, pp. 141–97, 237–316. 318 Lawrence tried to reassure: Childs, An American Genius, p. 366; Herken, Brotherhood of the Bomb, p. 140. 318 “it is our firm opinion”: Smith and Weiner, Letters, pp. 293–94 (JRO to Stimson, 8/17/45). 319 “no alternative to”: Ibid., pp. 300–1; JRO to Ernest Lawrence, 8/30/45. 319 “You will believe”: Ibid., pp. 297–98; JRO to Herbert Smith, 8/26/45; JRO to Frederick Bernheim, 8/27/45. 319 “Dear Opje”: Chevalier, Oppenheimer, p. xi. 319 “Circumstances are heavy”: The Day After Trinity, Jon Else, transcript, p. 65, JRO to Haakon Chevalier, 8/27/45, The Day After Trinity, supplemental files; Herken, Brotherhood of the Bomb, p. 142. 320 “I have a sense”: JRO to Conant, 9/29/45, JRO Papers. 320 Incredibly, a formal offer: Smith and Weiner, Letters, p. 300. 320 “I have very mixed”: Ibid., pp. 301–2. 320 “Kitty didn’t often”: Jean Bacher, interview by Sherwin, 11/5/87, pp. 3–4.

The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan
by Sebastian Mallaby
Published 10 Oct 2016

There was a Levittown, in fact, just across the inland lake to the west of the Fairless steel works; but whichever suburb you visited, the cookie-cutter houses were planted at fixed distances from each other, “inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group,” as the architectural critic Lewis Mumford complained.3 Newcomers were invited to cookouts, potlucks, car wash drives, and family swim days. You joined or you were ostracized. The consumerism on the roads, the intimidating scale of the steel works, the clipped-lawn residential settlements: all signaled the changes that surrounded Greenspan.