Mumford, Lewis (1895–1990)

U.S. social philosopher

Community is central to the ideas and writings of Lewis Mumford, one of the foremost U.S. intellectuals of the twentieth century. Born in Flushing, New York, of modest circumstances, he was a self-taught generalist who bridged such diverse fields as the history of technology, architecture, urbanism, and literary criticism. Mumford sought to restore an organic balance to what he viewed as an increasingly fragmented modern society dominated by the machine. The main trajectory of his writings, which number more than twenty books and a thousand articles and reviews, is the establishment of eutopia, or the good place, in the here and now. In eutopia, the individual is integrated with his immediate community, and the community in turn is integrated with others in the surrounding region. Distinctive cultural identities would thus be preserved even as communities became more firmly linked by advances in transportation and communication.

As a young man, Mumford became interested in community through the Scottish city planner Patrick Geddes (1854–1932) and through Ebenezer Howard (1850–1928), the originator of the British garden city movement. Both men drew extensively upon nineteenth-century communitarian ideas in their writings and sought to mitigate the worst imbalances of industrialism through rational planning. Mumford's first book, The Story of Utopias (1922), surveyed utopian literature from antiquity to the beginning of the twentieth century, and closed with a plea for garden cities, regional planning, and the reinvigoration of modern life beginning at the level of the community. His next four books focused on U.S. culture. Of this group, The Golden Day (1926) most closely examines the breakdown of late-nineteenth-century community life—best exemplified in the New England village—in both the rush to settle the western frontier and the desire to emulate European culture.

The 1920s also found Mumford actively involved with the Regional Planning Association of America, an informal think tank composed of architects, planners, and housing reformers eager to address the post–World War I housing crisis. Drawing upon garden city principles, the Association designed and constructed the neighborhood of Sunnyside Gardens in Queens, New York, and the suburb of Radburn, New Jersey. Financed by a limited-dividend corporation, the communities presented viable alternatives to standard real estate speculation. Mumford's chief contribution was to publicize the Association's efforts in various articles and essays in which he stressed the advantages of modern community planning.

From the 1930s to the early 1950s, Mumford was engaged in writing The Renewal of Life (1934, 1938, 1944, 1951), a four-volume study of Western civilization that examines interrelated developments in technology, urbanism, and society. He distilled the core [Page 950]message of the series in The Transformations of Man (1956), in which he argues for a renewal of essential human values and relationships in the face of rapid globalization. What he termed “One World” culture would be rendered meaningless without a basis in local communities everywhere. Mumford amplified many of these themes in his best-known work, The City in History (1961), a sweeping survey of urbanism from pre-history to the mid-twentieth century. Although his pessimistic conclusions regarding unchecked metropolitan sprawl and attendant environmental degradation seem bleak, he held out for the promise of individual and community regeneration, or what he deemed eutopia.

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