Lewis Mumford

Mumford surveyed five thousand years of cities to reach one thesis: the city was born as a container — of grain, of knowledge, of memory — and whenever it has been good it has been good for that reason, not for its size or its trade. His measure of urban success is what kind of life it allows, not how much it produces.

He was among the harshest critics of car-based urbanism and American suburban sprawl, which he denounced as they happened. He defended instead the medium-sized city, Howard's garden city properly understood, and the regional planning he learned from Geddes.

Born in New York in 1895 and dead in 1990, Mumford was a critic, historian and essayist without a university degree, a disciple of Patrick Geddes and the New Yorker's architecture columnist for thirty years. Technics and Civilization (1934) and The Culture of Cities (1938) fixed his method, which reads the city as an expression of the technics and values of each age, and from the Regional Planning Association of America he defended with Clarence Stein garden cities and balanced regions against the congested metropolis.

The City in History (1961), which won the National Book Award, travels from the origins of the city to the megalopolis and warns that the city of the automobile destroys what makes the city valuable; The Highway and the City (1963) attacked Robert Moses's expressways. He argued with Jane Jacobs, whom he reproached for scorning planning, and coined the megamachine to name unchecked technical power. His regionalist and ecological vision anticipated sustainable urbanism.