Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Box 6.1 Lewis Mumford
Lewis Mumford was an American historian and urban critic. He argued that the rise of the
modern industrial city had been driven by greed and had seen urban planning prioritize
the needs of economic development ahead of those of people and nature. Mumford was
particularly critical of the processes of suburbanization. Within the suburbanization process
he felt that the requirements of automobile travel had become the main focus of the urban
planner. Mumford also argued that suburbs had the effect of alienating people from each
other (as they now had to spend longer in the private space of the motorcar) and from the
natural world (as suburbanization often meant that many in the city had farther to travel to
reach nature). Through his writing on the city (which culminated in his epic 1961 tome The
City in History) and his involvement with planning organizations (such as the Regional
Planning Association of America) he called for the wiser, regionally based planning of urban
development. He argued that by planning cities at a regional scale the needs of both urban
development and nature could be more effectively balanced. Mumford also felt that modern
cities could learn a lot from the urban forms that were common in medieval cities, where
much more diverse forms of urban space existed and closer ties were apparent between
the city and its surrounding environment.
Key reading
Luccarelli, M. (1995) Lewis Mumford and the Ecological Region: The Politics of Planning, The Guildford
Press, London
The next significant phase of urbanization
would occur in the twentieth century and see
the rise of a distinctively American style of
urbanization. Unlike its densely packed European
counterpart, the American city of the twentieth
century was a city that was defined by the spatial
expansion of the city. This new urbanization
process was facilitated by the rise of mass transit
systems (including both public transport and
the motorcar), and led to the creation of a new
urban phenomenon: sprawl (see Wolch et al,
2004). If London, Paris and New York were the
quintessential industrial cities, it would be cities
such as Los Angles and Las Vegas that would come
to represent the new urban form (see Soja, 1989;
Davis, 1999). Two main characteristics define
sprawling cities such as Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
First is their rapid pattern of urban growth. Taking
Los Angeles as an example, as late as the 1870s the
See Lewis Mumford's short documentary
film on the industrial city by searching for
'Lewis Mumford on the City' on YouTube.
of Manchester, England. In 1760, when England
was still a predominantly rural-dwelling country,
the population of Manchester stood somewhere
between 30,000 and 45,000 people (Mumford,
1961: 455). By 1801 this population had risen to
72,000, and by 1851 to 303,382; that is nearly
a sevenfold increase in the size of the city in the
space of 91 years (Mumford, 1961: 455). Such
patterns of rapid urbanization were replicated in
other industrial centres such as Birmingham and
would culminate in London becoming the first
modern city to have an urban population in excess
of 1 million people.
