Lewis Mumford was an influential urban planner and writer. He believed cities should be planned to account for their relationship to the environment and communities. Mumford advocated for limiting urban growth to promote efficiency. He supported Ebenezer Howard's garden city model and championed poly-nucleated cities. Mumford studied cities and their architecture. He criticized unchecked urban sprawl and advocated for an organic relationship between people and their living spaces.

1. LEWIS MUMFORD
BY:
SHOURYA SHARMA
SWATI SINGH
VEDANT MATHUR

2. PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY
•“THE CITY IS ABOVE ALL ELSE A THEATER OF
SOCIAL ACTION.” – LEWIS MUMFORD
•He describes the need for planning to effectively
account for a city’s relationship to the
environment and spiritual values of the
communities.
•Planners need to recognize the social nucleus of
cities as the inter-relationship of schools,
theaters, community centers etc., because those
are what lay the outlines of an integrated city.
•Mumford suggested limitations on :-
population,
density and
urban growth
to promote efficiency
•He championed Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City
ideal with his work on poly-nucleated cities.

3. PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY
•Particularly noted for his study of cities
and urban architecture, he had a broad
career as a writer.
•Influenced by -
Sir Patrick Geddes ; worked with his
associate Victor Branford, and also Frank
Lloyd Wright
MedalofFreedom
“in the name of sanity, he has
constantly worked to rescue and
extend the qualities of urban life
that will preserve and stimulate the
human spirit of western civilization”

4. Troutbeck Lake Sept. 6, 1965
Leedsville - Looking South July 20,
1958
View of Manhattan Traffic from NJ
Palisades (1917)
Cathedral of St. John (1917) Brooklyn Bridge
Fortieth Street on a
Rainy Day, Nov. 1916
Manhattan from Top of
Palisades (Aug. 18, 1917)
From the Library at 42nd
Street (1918)

5. THE HYBRIDIZEDCITY
Mumford offered ideas for how to recapture the new city vitality in the new, expansive urban form –
•Mumford’s hybridized city - A hybrid approach can deal with current urban conditions where distinctions
between urban and rural have blurred, promoting new images of an interconnected city-landscape rather
than viewing cities as a corruption of nature.
•By greater attention to cultural and ecological landscape identity
•Existing landscape can generate infrastructure
•Urbanism formed by cultural interaction in the landscape over time
•Integrating and conserving natural built environment and human settlement
•Looking into systems of order that pre-exist in the landscape and underly a heterogeneous cultural cohesion
within particular regions.
•Pursuing an urbanization that maintains the identity of place by effectively integrating these categories and
preventing homogeneous and clumsy settlements.
Above a buried stream channel, a hedgerow colonizes the parking lot, reclaiming a lush, biodiverse link to the
forest.

6. A Search for URBAN COMPLEXITY
•In his book, The City in History, Mumford introduces the idea of emergence as key to understanding how a city
develops –
•Defines the city as a “complex and unstable pattern for ongoing transformations”
•The city has broken open and has been largely demagnetized, with the result that we are witnessing a sort of
devolution of urban power into a state of randomness and unpredictability
•Mumford said that the interactions generated by the spatial qualities of the bounded historic city must find a new
impetus in the “exploded” city.
•Mumford valued an interspersed urban and rural characters, what he called a “GREEN MATRIX.”
•The SCALE and GEOGRAPHY of the city influences its level of Urbanism.
•Suburbs of the city were cramped urban space, but at the same time offered a type of settlement where domestic
requirements could respond to landscape qualities, favoring minimal built-up environment.

7. A network of social and ecological
connections is forecast to interweave over
time.
Alternative to “SPECULATIVE REAL ESTATE
GRID”
Mumford demonstrates a network of
REINFORCED ECOLOGIAL and SOCIAL
CONECTIONS around which a city can
develop over-time

8. SOME OF HIS IDEAS
UrbanCivilization
•Critical of urban sprawl
•The structure of modern cities is partially responsible for many social problems.
•Urban planning should emphasize an organic relationship between people and their
living spaces.

9. ViewofCities
“Cities have some of the human attributes of personality. That they show
character, moods, visible gestures of welcoming or rejecting is something
that men have known almost since they began to live in cities.”
TheEndangeredCity
•Robert Moses had a comprehensive plan for NY and unprecedented power to carry
it out; Lewis Mumford was one of those critics most responsible for preventing him
from driving that plan to completion.
•Mumford called Moses the unbuilder. Displacing neighborhoods and communities.
•In 1958 Moses threatened to build a four-lane highway through Washington Square
and Mumford opposed him. Koch said Mumford was a deciding factor.
The plan was ultimately nixed in
1962 due to widespread
disapproval from the public (and
from Lewis Mumford).

10. Mumford’sCritique oftheWorldTradeCenter,1970
•“characteristic example of the purposeless
giantism and technological exhibitionism
that are now eviscerating the living tissue of
every great city”
•Port Authority executives “their duty to
funnel more motor traffic into the city,
through new bridges and tunnels, than its
streets and its parking spaces can handle..”

11. RethinkingPriorities
“a need for a conception of what constitutes a valid human life, and how
much of life will be left is we go on ever more rapidly in the present
direction. What has to be challenged is an economy that is based not on
organics needs, historic experience, human aptitudes, ecological
complexity and variety, but upon a system of empty abstractions: money,
power, speed, quantity, progress…
TechnicsandCivilization
Polytechnic – different modes of technology providing a complex
framework to solve human problems
Monotechnic – technology only for its own sake, which oppresses
humanity as it moves along its own trajectory. An example of
monotechnic is the modern American transportation network. Reliance
on cars which become an obstacle to walking, bicycle and light rail.

12. Megamachines
•Large hierarchical organizations are megamachines, a machine using
humans as its components.
•Some examples of megamachines,
Buildings of the Pyramids
Armies of the world
PentagonofPower
•Powerful symbol that allowed him to vent some of his most profound
concerns about the incongruity between technological potential and
societal woes.
•He emphasizes the electronic computer’s insidious impact on personal
privacy and autonomy. To him the computer is merely another overrated
tool, vastly inferior to the human brain; in the wrong hands, however, an
extraordinarily dangerous one.

13. HumanFeelings
“The test of maturity, for nations as well as individuals, is not the increase
in power but the increase of self-understanding, self-control, self
direction and self-transcendence. For in a mature society, man himself,
and not his machines or his organizations, is the chief work of art”.
(written later in life)
EDINBURGH :
Whence Urban Conservation

14. Robert J. Gibbs, ASLA, PLA, CNU-A, President,
Gibbs Planning Group, is a leading urban
planning consultant who has contributed to
over 400 master plans across the U.S.,
including Alexandria, Birmingham, Charleston,
Detroit, Disney, Houston, Marquette and
Naples. He also planned Michigan’s first ten
New Urban communities and Form Based
Codes. He founded GPG in 1988, and has
prior experience with JJR/Smith and Taubman
Centers.
ROBERTGIBBS

15. In 2012, Gibbs was honored by the Clinton Presidential Library for
his life’s contributions to urban planning and development and by
the City of Auckland, New Zealand for his planning
innovations. Gibbs is a charter member of the Congress for the
New Urbanism, gives frequent lectures and has co-authored four
books. Gibbs authored the Urban Retail Form Based Code
Module, and in 2012 published Principles of Urban Retail Planning
and Development. The book has received wide acclaim and was
described by the APA as “…Not all sweetness and light, but one
planners can ill afford to ignore.”