Lewis Mumford was an American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and writer known for his studies of cities and urban architecture. He believed that the chief function of cities is to convert resources into culture. Mumford was influenced by Patrick Geddes' concept of regional planning and worked to establish cities planned sustainably on a human scale with residential, cultural, commercial, and industrial areas surrounded by agricultural greenbelts. He criticized projects like Robert Moses' highways in New York for prioritizing cars over communities. Mumford's work promoted organic, sustainable urban development and influenced environmental and appropriate technology movements.

2. LEWIS MUMFORD
“The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter
into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity”.

3. INTRODUCTION
• Lewis Mumford,(October 19, 1895 – January 26, 1990) was an American historian, sociologist, philosopher
of technology, and literary critic. Particularly noted for his study of cities and urban architecture, he also had a
broad career as a writer.
• Mumford was influenced by the work of Scottish theorist Sir Patrick Geddes and worked closely with his
associate the British sociologist Victor Branford.
• Mumford was born in Flushing, Queens, New York and graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1912. He
studied at the City College of New York and The New School for Social Research, but became ill with
tuberculosis and never finished his degree.
• He later worked for The New Yorker where he wrote architectural criticism and commentary on urban issues.
Mumford's earliest books in the field of literary criticism have had a lasting impact on contemporary
American literary criticism.

4. • With the book The Brown Decades, he began to establish himself as an authority in American architecture and urban life,
which he interpreted in a social context.
• In his early writings on urban life, Mumford was optimistic about human abilities and wrote that the human race would use
electricity and mass communication to build a better world for all humankind
• In 1963, Mumford received the Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism from the College Art Association.
• Mumford received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964.
• In 1975 Mumford was made an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire(KBE).
• In 1976, he was awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca.
• In 1986, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts.
• He served as the architectural critic for The New Yorker magazine for over 30 years. His 1961 book, The City in History,
received the National Book Award.

5. PHILOSOPHY
• In his book The Condition of Man, published in 1944, Mumford characterized his orientation
toward the study of humanity as "organic humanism". The term is an important one because it
sets limits on human possibilities, limits that are aligned with the nature of the human body.
Mumford never forgot the importance of air quality, of food availability, of the quality of water, or
the comfort of spaces, because all these things had to be respected if people were to thrive.
Technology and progress could never become a runaway train in his reasoning, so long as organic
humanism was there to act as a brake. Indeed, Mumford considered the human brain from this
perspective, characterizing it as hyperactive, a good thing in that it allowed humanity to conquer
many of nature's threats, but potentially a bad thing if it were not occupied in ways that
stimulated it meaningfully. Mumford's respect for human "nature", that is to say, the natural
characteristics of being human, provided him with a platform from which to assess technologies,
and technics in general. Thus his criticism and counsel with respect to the city and with respect to
the implementation of technology was fundamentally organized around the organic humanism to
which he ascribed. It was from the perspective of organic humanism that Mumford eventually
launched a critical assessment of Marshall McLuhan, who argued that the technology, not the
natural environment, would ultimately shape the nature of humankind, a possibility that
Mumford recognized, but only as a nightmare scenario.

6. • Mumford believed that what defined humanity, what set human beings apart from other animals,
was not primarily our use of tools (technology) but our use of language (symbols). He was
convinced that the sharing of information and ideas amongst participants of primitive societies
was completely natural to early humanity, and had obviously been the foundation of society as it
became more sophisticated and complex. He had hopes for a continuation of this process of
information "pooling" in the world as humanity moved into the future.
• Mumford's choice of the word "technics" throughout his work was deliberate. For Mumford,
technology is one part of technics. Using the broader definition of the Greek tekhne, which means
not only technology but also art, skill, and dexterity, technics refers to the interplay of social
milieu and technological innovation—the "wishes, habits, ideas, goals" as well as "industrial
processes" of a society. As Mumford writes at the beginning of Technics and Civilization, "other
civilizations reached a high degree of technical proficiency without, apparently, being profoundly
influenced by the methods and aims of technics."

7. INFLUENCES
• Mumford's interest in the history of technology and his explanation of "polytechnics", along with his general
philosophical bent, has been an important influence on a number of more recent thinkers concerned that technology serve
human beings as broadly and well as possible.
• Some of these authors—such as Jacques Ellul, Witold Rybczynski, Richard Gregg, Amory Lovins, J. Baldwin, E. F.
Schumacher, Herbert Marcuse, Murray Bookchin, Thomas Merton, Marshall McLuhan, and Colin Ward—have been
intellectuals and persons directly involved with technological development and decisions about the use of technology.
• Mumford also had an influence on the American environmental movement, with thinkers like Barry Commoner and
Bookchin being influenced by his ideas on cities, ecology and technology.
• Ramachandra Guha noted his work contains "some of the earliest and finest thinking on bioregionalism, anti-
nuclearist biodiversity, alternate energy paths, ecological urban planning and appropriate technology.

8. Saw Patrick Geddes(concept of work place and folk) as his mentor
In his early efforts to sustainable cities:
He wanted planners and architects to understand these priorities
• human health
• organic needs over illusionary needs
• historical influence and not speed, money and power.

9.  Came into significance when he criticised the principles of
Robert Mosses, the master planner of New York City
 Mumford apposed Mosses project of building a 4 lane
highway all across the city
 Mumford called Moses THE UNBUILDER as he was
proposing projects that would displace neighborhoods and
communities.
 It was due to the visions and criticism by Mumford that the
highway project was never executed.
highways that were to cut through the five boroughs.
Manhattan ,Brooklyn ,Queens ,The Bronx ,Staten Island

10. MUMFORD’S CRITIQUE OF THE
WORLD TRADE CENTER, 1970
• “characteristic example of the purposeless
giantism and technological exhibitionism
that are now eviscerating the living tissue of
every great city”
• “their duty to funnel more motor traffic into
the city, through new bridges and tunnels,
than its streets and its parking spaces can
handle..”
In “What is a City?”(1937) Mumford lays out his fundamental propositions about
• city planning
• the human potential, both individual and social, of urban life.
The city, he writes, is “a theater of social action,” and everything else – art, politics,
education, commerce – serve only to make the “social drama . . . more richly
significant, as a stage-set, well-designed, intensifies and underlines the gestures of
the actors and the action of the play.”

11. • The REGIONAL PLANNING ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA established the “regional city” as a
social reformist response to the problems of the congested industrial cities. The RPAA’s objective
was to create a series of equal and non-hierarchical communities by integrating Howard’s garden
city, Perry’s neighbourhood unit, the exclusion of industries, and a segregated traffic solution.
• Essentially a reworking of the British “garden city,” the regional city would be planned on a
sustainable scale with requisite residential, cultural, commercial and industrial components.
• Furthermore, the regional city would be surrounded by an agricultural greenbelt that would supply
its food as well as delineate its borders from neighboring communities.
THE CONCEPT OF REGIONAL CITIES

12. AUROVILLE, TAMIL NADU
Auroville is an experimental township in Viluppuram district mostly in the state of Tamil Nadu, India with
some parts in the Union Territory of Puducherry in South India.
CONCEPT :
• to build a city with an optimum mix of densities and appealing urban forms and amenities
• the surrounding Green Belt will be a fertile zone for applied research in the sectors of food production, forestry,
soil conservation, water management, waste management, and other areas which assist sustainable development.

13. The Plaza complex houses the community kitchen and other facilities required for the inhabitants, particularly those of the
Residential Zone, and includes a department store, library, restaurant, communication centre and multipurpose public space. This
complex is located in the Residential Crown.
The complex will integrate several eco-friendly practices-water harvesting, waste treatment and use of alternative energy. The
solar bowl, is one of the largest in the world and it provides energy required for cooking meals for 1000 persons at a time in the
community kitchen
DEVELOPMENT MODELS PLAZA & SOLAR KITCHEN
1 - SOLAR KITCHEN
7 - PEDESTRIAN
BOULEVARD
2 - CROWN ROAD 8 - SEMI PAVED AREA
3 - PARKING 9 - PLAZA COVERED
4 - POUR TOUS - FINANCIAL
SERVICE
10 - PLANNED GREEN
AREA
5 - MEDIA CENTRE AND
LIBRARY
11 - MAHALAKSHMI PARK
6 - EXPANSION

14. Creativity, a residential community, has been conceived as having housing units grouped into 6 clusters of 50-60 members
each
A central spine or pedestrian street runs through the site in a crescent shape serving all 6 clusters. This street is thus the
main area of interaction
pathway running perpendicular to it links the recreation area and the green corridor, and provides a quiet walkway and
ambience.
'CREATIVITY' - URBAN ECO-COMMUNITY

15. PLANNING
SERVICE NODE: utilizing spaces created at intersections for city services.
Nodes, located at the boundary of the township, would regulate most of the visitors' traffic. The visitor would shift to a
non-polluting transport mode to visit the various places in the township. It would also provide a space (for social as
well as economic purposes) for interaction between Auroville and the surrounding villages. It will include tourist
related facilities and services.