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Planning magazine — April 1983 Lewis Mumford Critic, Colleague, Philosopher By David A. Johnson
Lewis Mumford has had an extraordinary career or, more accurately, multiple careers — as literary critic, art critic, architectural critic, and social and urban historian. Less well known is his work as an urban planner. Had Mumford limited his attention to but one of these fields, his reputation would be secure — indeed, even more secure, since, as he has often reminded us, those who labor in many fields are too often discounted as inexpert by the specialists. But seeing the whole picture has been the essential quality of Mumford's thought and career. In Sketches from Life, Mumford poignantly
recalls his struggles as a young man to become a recognized and published author,
to find romantic and sexual fulfillment, and simply to keep his young family
fed and clothed. Sketches covers the period from his birth in 1895 — illegitimate,
we are surprised to learn — to 1938 and the advent of World War II. It nicely
complements an earlier book, The Letters of Lewis Mumford
and Frederic J. Osborn,
which covers the period 1938 through 1970. "I was a child of the city," he begins Sketches. The city is New York, Whitman's "Manahatta" — Mumford calls it his "university." His childhood on the Upper West Side was both difficult and enriching. The absence of his father was compensated for by the affection of his warm, supportive, extended family, especially of his grandfather. Mumford attended public schools and graduated in 1912 from Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, one of New York's special schools for the scientifically and technically oriented. He took night classes at the City College of New York and also studied at Columbia University and the New School for Social Research, but he never completed a college degree. In 1914, in the City College biology department library, Mumford came across the writings of Patrick Geddes, a Scottish professor of biology. From this point on, Mumford became a disciple, enthralled by Geddes's philosophy of integrating the natural and social worlds. There were other influences, such as William James; Peter Kropotkin; Frederick LePlay; and the Transcendentalists, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. But none of these shaped Mumford's outlook on the world as did Patrick Geddes, particularly through his books, including City Development and the classic Cities in Evolution. Early in life, Mumford knew he wanted to be a writer. In 1919, at age 24, he became an associate editor at the Dial, a lively fortnightly. The job lasted only seven months, but it brought him into contact with John Dewey, then an editor. More important, he met here his future wife, Sophia Wittenberg. On a trip to England in 1920, Mumford was first exposed to the town planning movement led by Raymond Unwin, S. D. Adshead, and the aging Ebenezer Howard. Though he failed to see the great Geddes, who was off doing planning for Jerusalem and cities in India, Mumford was greatly stimulated by his British visit. It was the start of a lifetime association with the British town planning movement and the beginning of his role as a medium for the cross-Atlantic exchange of planning ideas. Mumford finally had an opportunity to meet his mentor when Geddes came to the U.S. in 1923 to lecture at the New School, In Sketches, Mumford describes how poorly the meeting went. (Geddes, it seems, demanded too much in the way of discipleship from those around him.) Mumford's interest in planning and his ability as a writer brought him to the attention of Charles Harris Whitaker, the editor of the Journal of the American Institute of Architects. Soon after, in 1923, Whitaker, Benton MacKaye, Clarence Stein, Henry Wright, and a handful of others, including Mumford, formed the influential Regional Planning Association of America, an informal group dedicated to social betterment through planning. Although the RPAA lasted only nine years, until 1932, it proved to be extraordinarily influential, thanks in large measure to Mumford's pen. The May 1925 issue of Survey Graphic — devoted to regional planning and edited by Mumford — is considered a classic expression of Geddes's theory of cyclical urban growth and decay (even though some modern critics have charged that Mumford misinterpreted and oversimplified Geddes's views). The RPAA became a proponent of many of the ideas Mumford brought back from England: the value of garden cities and green belts, "recentralization," and the need to reduce urban congestion. [In Mumford's lexicon, recentralization refers to the creation of new regional centers.] Some of these ideas were absorbed into the ideology of the early New Deal, influencing the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Resettlement Administration's Greenbelt towns, and MacKaye's Appalachian Trail. One only wishes that Mumford, in Sketches from Life (and Stein and MacKaye in their own memoirs), had gone into more detail about the RPAA and its members. Planning wars At about the same time the RPAA was being formed, another effort was starting — this one to produce a regional plan for New York and environs. The work was directed by Thomas Adams, a Scotsman who had worked on Letchworth and Welwyn, garden cities outside London. Mumford was a severe critic of the monumental, multivolume survey and plan, which was underwritten by a $1 million grant from the Russell Sage Foundation and took a decade to complete. It was, he wrote in his column in The New Republic in 1932, a mass of "well-meaning half-truths and contradictory plans and prescriptions" based on unsound sociological assumptions. "The real task of transforming the inner area of the metropolis was shirked and the duty to prepare to receive larger increments of population in the immediate outlying areas was not even subjected to skeptical inquiry." Adams was shocked at the severity of the criticism. He complained that Mumford was demanding nothing less than a total reconstruction of the economic and political organization of the New York area. Indeed, that was precisely what Mumford had in mind. His model of regional planning was Henry Wright's 1926 plan for New York State. Wright, planning adviser to New York State's housing and regional planning agency, called for rechanneling urban activities away from the New York metropolitan area and out toward the Hudson Valley and the old Erie Canal corridor. Implicit in Wright's plan was the dubious assumption that the state government had both the knowledge and the means to guide growth in this direction. In his most influential book on planning, The Culture of Cities, published in 1938, Mumford said that he saw in the Adams and Wright plans a fundamental difference in planning philosophies: "Do not ignore the difference between these two orders of thinking: it underlies the approach to the whole problem of urban resettlement and rebuilding that now confronts the Western World." Planning consultant In 1938 — the year Sketches from Life concludes — Mumford's growing reputation as an urbanist resulted in an invitation to prepare a report for the Honolulu park board on the city's planning and development possibilities. His report, reprinted in City Development, stands as a practical symbol of his approach to local planning. Few planning reports have ever been better written, the images drawn so vividly that one hardly notices the absence of maps and graphic plans. The report was filled with specific suggestions. For instance, noting that the city had failed to take advantage of its waterfront, Mumford called for improved access to the beaches and a new oceanfront parkway. He deplored the excesses of uncontrolled speculative development, observing that high land costs and exorbitant rents had resulted in some of the worst slums anywhere. As in other proposals, Mumford assumed that land-use controls could achieve lower densities and more amenities without raising housing costs. He called for some of the same design elements he had observed in Sunnyside Gardens and Radburn, two New York-area planned developments of the 1920s — cul-de-sacs, narrow green strips to define neighborhoods, bypass roads around the business area, and even canals to the sea, a la Amsterdam. (Mumford lived in Sunnyside Gardens for 11 years.) Slum clearance and low-cost housing construction also were part of his plan. Above all, the creation of parks, playgrounds, and green strips was, for Mumford, the key to Honolulu's development. He made numerous suggestions for new parks along the water and in the mountains. He shocked the commissioners by proposing the designation of several beaches for nude bathing, which he himself enjoyed. Mumford understood that zoning ordinances alone would do little to realize his proposals. What was needed, he argued, was the appointment of a strong-minded planning commissioner. He also recommended that a "city plan council" of leading citizens be created to guide the staff and an advisory board of public works be established, comprising the heads of the various city departments. While this was hardly a radical reorganization proposal, it found little favor on the park board, and the board chairman, who had hired Mumford originally, was forced to resign. Regrettably, little of Mumford's far-sighted plan for Honolulu was followed. Its proposals were neither utopian nor impractical — but they were beyond the civic means and imagination of the community. In 1939, a year after the Honolulu study, Mumford got his second big chance to do some actual planning. The Northwest Regional Council, a citizen's group concerned with the states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana, invited him to "observe and critically appraise growth and development of the region." Mumford toured the area and prepared an incisive little report setting forth his ideas for "Regional Planning in the Pacific Northwest." His proposals closely followed the Regional Planning Association of America's concepts and also those of the planning division of the Tennessee Valley Authority: Hold back the expansion of the largest metropolitan centers, Portland and Seattle, and — again the recentralization theme — build smaller centers, dispersed through the Columbia River gorge and tied to the growing hydroelectric grid carrying power from the new Bonneville Dam. The impact of Mumford's report is difficult to measure, but the message must have fallen on at least a few sympathetic ears in the Northwest. Oregon's well-known reluctance to accept unrestrained growth and its commitment to environmental quality were certainly reinforced by the report. 'The City' Mumford's planning-related work in 1939 was capped by the production of the now-classic film "The City," produced by the American Institute of Planners with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation. Mumford wrote the commentary and Aaron Copland created the musical score. It was and still is a powerful work of motion picture art. Its message was unequivocal: Build for people, recentralize, use the lessons learned in Radburn, the Greenbelt program, and the TVA. Preparations for World War II diverted the country's — and Mumford's — attention from domestic concerns, however. Before many other intellectuals could muster the courage to do so, Mumford joined those who were calling for immediate mobilization against the threat of fascism. His only son, Geddes, died in the fighting in Italy. It was a heavy blow, but, characteristically, Mumford turned his grief into a celebration of his son's short life in a touching recollection of Geddes's childhood and adolescent years, Green Memories. Hollywood offered to buy the book for a film but Mumford, not surprisingly, declined. Mumford vigorously denounced the Allied firebombing of Tokyo and Dresden and the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We had, he declared, degraded our morality to the level of our foes. Rebuilding London The wartime destruction of London and other British cities offered an opportunity for rebuilding. In 1943, Mumford was invited by the British publication, Architectural Review, to comment on the new plan for the county of London prepared by Patrick Abercrombie and J. H. Forsham. (Like other American intellectuals, Mumford enjoyed a more appreciative audience in England than at home; his views were eagerly sought and respected there. He once complained to Frederic Osborn, "My own countrymen, who have an unholy respect for the 'expert,' never think of calling upon me for my opinion in the fashion that you or the Architectural Review did.") Just as he had criticized Thomas Adams's plan for the New York region, Mumford rejected the underlying premises of Abercrombie's plan, which called for holding the population of London stable. Instead, Mumford wanted to reduce population, build more parks, and lower housing densities. A year later, his criticism probably influenced Abercrombie's regional plan for London, a follow-up to the county plan. Great Britain's Town and County Planning Act of 1946, with its greenbelt and new town features, also was a major victory for the recentralist views of Mumford and his British fellow believers. Even though not all his criticisms took hold (witness the overbuilding of postwar London), Mumford was lionized by the British planning establishment. In 1946, he received the Ebenezer Howard Memorial Medal and was made an honorary member of the Royal Town Planning Institute. Professional recognition Nor was he entirely ignored by American planners. In 1948, he addressed the conference of the American Society of Planning Officials in New York City, speaking on the "Goals of Planning." (The primary one: "the good life.") In 1951, he received an appointment as a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania. He later was a visiting professor at MIT, and in 1955 he was named an honorary member of the American Institute of Planners. Mumford's well-known New Yorker column, "Sky Line," which ran on an occasional basis for 32 years (from 1931 to 1963), provided a forum for his views on the changing urban and surburban scene. There was much grist for his mill in the 1950s and 1960s. The baby boom and rapid suburbanization resulted in an unprecedented decentralization, based on the automobile. It was not the kind of dispersal Mumford had hoped for. Moreover, the negative side effects of the automobile and its ubiquitous freeways were destroying the urban life and fabric he so ardently cherished. Mumford attacked these issues head on in a series of New Yorker essays entitled "The Roaring Traffic's Boom" (reprinted in 1956 in From the Ground Up). In the series, Mumford, who in the 1920s and 1930s was an admirer of New York City parks commissioner Robert Moses, excoriated the "Master Builder" for wreaking havoc on his city in the name of progress. Moses returned the fire, denouncing Mumford as an "outspoken revolutionary" ... "anti-urban," and calling him unqualified, because he "has constructed little else" besides his writing. What a pity these two contemporaries, both children of the same city, couldn't have merged their personas into one being, the doer and the thinker joined — Moses's action with Mumford's philosophy — the integrated figure that Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., had embodied a century earlier. But the action and the thought were incompatible. Moses had succumbed to the idea of power, while Mumford clung to the power of the idea. [See "Robert Moses in retrospect," September 1981.] On Jane Jacobs Despite his lifelong commitment to city rebuilding, Mumford was an early critic of the urban renewal program of the 1960s. In his view, urban renewal, though sound in its original intentions and legislation, had degenerated into a boondoggle for developers. But when Jane Jacobs, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, rather unfairly attacked the planning profession for destroying rather than preserving cities, Mumford neatly placed the arguments for city renewal into perspective. In a New Yorker column entitled "Mother Jacobs's Home Remedies for Urban Cancer" (reprinted in The Urban Prospect), he rebutted Jacobs far better than any other writer or planner had done. By making development issues like these both important and understandable, Mumford greatly enhanced the standing and identity of the planning profession in the eyes of the public. Other concerns were growing as well. In 1960, Mumford spoke on "Planning and Nuclear Warfare: The Non-Governmental Side" at the AIP annual conference. He also addressed the nuclear threat in his most successful book, The City in History. (Published in 1961, it was based partly on the earlier The Culture of Cities, which actually is a better book in its treatment of planning.) He repeated his warning about the nuclear peril later in "The Myth of the Machine" series. His early stand against American participation in the Vietnam War was equally controversial, although fully consistent with his philosophy. Ecological planning It was also in the mid-1960s that Mumford's commitment to regional planning brought him into contact with two ecological planners, lan McHarg and Artur Glikson. Mumford enthusiastically wrote the introduction to McHarg's influential 1969 book, Design with Nature. Glikson, an Israeli architect-planner, shared Mumford's admiration for Patrick Geddes, and Mumford introduced Glikson to the remaining RPAA founders — Stein and MacKaye. It was a kind of passing of the torch to the next generation, with Glikson absorbing the old RPAA ideas and carrying them off to build new towns in Israel and Holland and prepare a regional plan for the the island of Crete. The vigorous ideas of the Geddes disciples had found a new hearing thanks to the environmental movement, although Glikson's career was cut short by his death in 1966, at age 55. His writings subsequently were edited by Mumford and published as The Ecological Basis of Planning. Beware of the quantifiers How do we assess this man, Lewis Mumford, and his influence on planning? For one thing, he has forced his ideas on us with a tenacity that we might envy and emulate. He has compelled us to think comprehensively, which is, after all, one of the claims of the planning profession. He has challenged us to see beyond the limits of our immediate constraints to a longer view (yet another of our professional claims). He has rooted the profession in the rich literary and aesthetic traditions of our country. He has taught us to be wary of those quantifiers who obscure rather than enlighten us about the important issues and problems we face. He has shown us the way to a balanced view of city life and city planning — how to be simultaneously radical and conservative in the best meanings of those words. He has shown us how to love the good things in cities while hating the bad, without having to wear anti-city or pro-city labels. He has shown us how a few committed people with powerful and humane ideas can make things happen. He has shown us the essential relationships between architecture, urban design, and planning. He has shown us how housing and planning are linked, how urban and regional planning must be fused, and how regional and national policy are necessarily connected. He has shown us how to be gentle, human, and civilized. For all his criticism of planners as specialists, for all his asking us to do the impossible even as we struggle to do the difficult, for all that we sometimes disagree with his premises and proposals, we should be proud that he is a member of the American community of planners and that he and we may call each other colleague. In a 1934 essay called "The Metropolitan Milieu," Mumford wrote: "An honest man looms high. He is a lighthouse on a low and treacherous coast." For six decades now, Lewis Mumford has been such a lighthouse, warning us of dangerous hidden shoals and guiding us to safe harbors. May the lighthouse continue to shine for years to come. David A. Johnson, AICP, a native New Yorker,
directs the graduate school of planning at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.
He is working on a book on the history of planning in the New York region.
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