2. ABOUT LEWIS MUMFORD
• He was a social philosopher, historian and urban planner.
• Born on October 19, 1895 in Flushing (New York).
• Education – studied at the College of New York and in universities of Columbia
and New York, and the New School for Social Research in this city.
• Professor at several American universities, from 1951-1956
• In 1955 he was a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters United States and
received the Medal of Peace in his country in 1964.
• In 1961 England was awarded the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture Annual
recognition of services rendered through his writings in the field his specialty.
• Lewis Mumford died in New York on January 26, 1990.
• Among his works: The Culture of Cities (1938) Condition of
Man (1944), The City in History ( 1961), Interpretations and Forecasts
(1973) and Sketches from Life ( 1982). Seven of his twenty books talk
about issues of architecture and planning, while others, to give an
idea of his vast culture, approach to art, politics, education, sociology,
philosophy and religion.
3. • Worries about the ecology of the environment, the harmony of urban life,
the preservation of the wilderness, and sensitivity to organic realities.
• Mumford, ecology meant Nature in all its bio centric, holistic fullness,
with humanity forming one strand amongst many other strands in the
seamless web of life, neither above nor outside of Nature but
harmoniously integrated within it.
• Neighbourhood unit as an urban planning mechanism.
• Mumford explored the potential of this new approach to reveal the
destructive impact that technological development was having upon the
environment and to suggest a more positive alternative.
• Adapted Geddes valley section concept.
• the influences of Howard, Kropotkin and Geddes converge in
Mumford’s vision of regional cities and go on to be developed further as
poly-nuclear networks of communities and as 'Greentowns’
• He criticised the planning of World Trade centre and new york.
WHAT ARE MUMFORDS THEORIES BASED ON
4. LEWIS MUMFORD ON WHAT IS A CITY
Cities can be classified in two categories:
1. Form
• Historical development
• Physical structure
• Geographic space
• region
1. Function- a stage for human interaction
• Mumford also pushed the concept of poly-nucleated cities (cities with multiple
centers) as opposed to mono-nucleated cities (cities with one center).
• The benefit of poly-nucleated cities is that it would allow cities to keep on
expanding while being divided up into districts. In other words, it would make
the emerging sprawl more humanly comprehensible and practical, if not more
manageable.
5. Mumford’s plan for urban design :
• Densities must be low
• The size of cities must be limited
• People must live in natural , open , green environments.
• Most interaction must be kept on a primary level to assure mental
health and quality of social relationships.
• The family , as the most important primary group , as the focus of
redevelopment
• Neighbourhoods are the main units of redevelopment and settlement.
• Education, both formal and informal is stressed
• Vehicular and pedestrian traffic are separated.
• Mumford’s new cities are complete communities emphasising an
organic relationship between people and their living spaces.
Road structure: where
public transport
connects different
neighborhoods or boroughs.
Other trails shall be mostly for
pedestrian use
Vegetative areas
Are those which
They will both
around town
as the center of it.
Building area:
They go around the center
city
6. LEWIS MUMFORD’S REGIONALALISM
• Regional planning is about how the population and
civic facilities can be distributed so as to promote and
stimulate a clear and creative life throughout a whole
region—a region being any geographic area that
possesses a certain unity of climate, soil, vegetation,'
industry and culture.
• plan an area so that all its sites and resources, from
forest to city, from highland to water level, may be
soundly developed,, and so that the population will be
distributed so as to utilize, rather than to nullify or
destroy, its natural advantages.
• ruralizing the stony wastes of our cities.
• regional planning movement is summed up with
peculiar accuracy in the concept of the garden-city.
7. • Regional planning is an attempt to turn industrial decentralization—the
effort to make the industrial mechanism work better—to permanent
social uses. It is an attempt to realize the gains of modern industry in
permanent houses, gardens, parks, playgrounds and community
institutions.
• regional planning does not mean the planning of big cities beyond their
present areas; it means the reinvigoration (fill with life and energy )and
rehabilitation of whole regions so that the products of culture and
civilization, instead of being confined to a prosperous minority in the
congested centers, shall be available to everyone at every point in a
region where the physical basis for a. cultivated life can be laid down.
• the development of bioregions with clusters of small polycentric urban
developments amidst agricultural belts and parklands
• embraces both natural and built structures in the region.
• It embraces the broad range of human activities and seeks to tap into
the potential that ‘each region has [for attaining] a natural balance of
population and resources and manufactures, as well as of vegetation
and animal life’
• a region must have it’s own sense of identity deeply rooted in it’s
culture and history before it can successfully relate to another strong
culture
8. The history of cities
that historic growth should be examined on the basis of present day
conditions, and that the weight given to any particular growth should be a
function of its importance in the contemporary scheme’
To reform the cities, there is a need to have an informed grasp of the soundest features
of existing cities as well as an awareness of past planning errors. Mumford thus
critically investigated historical cities in order to divine the key elements of the city of
the future
The culture of cities
It emphasis on the factors Planning which helped guide the design and remodelling of
cities not only in the US but also in Latin America and Europe, where he argued that
technological culture had dehumanized society and
we should return to a perspective that would place the emotions, sensitivity and
ethics in the center of civilization.
"The city in its complete sense, then is a geographic plexus, an economic organization, an
institutional process, a theater of social action, and an aesthetic symbol of collective
unity." Mumford's focus is not on "the built environment" as such but rather the city as locus of
social networks and a theater in which "man's more purposive activities are focused and work
out, through conflicting and cooperating personalities, events, groups, into more significant
culminations."
What is a city
