LEWIS MUMFORD

BIOGRAPHY
• BIRTH :October 19, 1895 October 19, 1895
Flushing, New York, U.S
• DEATH :January 26, 1990 (aged 94)
Amenia, New York, U.S.
• NOTABLE WORKS : The city in History
Technics and civilization
The myth of the machine
• AWARDS :  Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964
Prix mondial Cino Del Duca in 1976
National Medal of Arts in 1986
Leonardo da Vinci Medal, 1969
• An American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic.
• Particularly noted for his study of cities and urban architecture, he 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.
BIOGRAPHY
• 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.
• In 1918 he joined the navy to serve in World War I and was assigned as a radio
electrician.
• He was discharged in 1919 and became associate editor of The Dial, an influential 
modernist literary journal.
• He later worked for The New Yorker where he wrote architectural criticism and
commentary on urban issues.
• 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.
• His early architectural criticism also helped to bring wider public recognition to the
work of Henry Hobson Richardson, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright.
 WORKS
The tertiary town is one which provides residential, educational and recreational facilities
In reality, a town is a mixture of all the above categories.

#Lewis Mumford has given six categories which are as follows: Eopolis, Polis,
Metropolis(Mother city), Megapolis, Tyrannopolis and Necropolis

1. Eopolis- Here, town grows as one entire unit. Its economy is based on agriculture.
2. Polis -Here town grows into a small urban unit of self contained community. It has a
commerce and industry, etc.
3. Metropolis(Mother city) -Here, the city grows to its full stature, with high population
density and large potentialities, with all facilities like water supply, drainage, electricity,
transport, commerce and industries etc. (London, Bombay and Calcutta,etc)
4. Megalopolis -It is an over grown city into a mess due to growing expansion of
industries, high rise buildings, multi track roads, mass housing, mass transportation. In its
overgrown nature, lie the germs of its decay which begin to creep in all the portion of the
city.
5. Tyrannopolis- The city shows further decay in all the fields like trade, commerce,
military power etc.
6. Necropolis- The city in the worst stage and unfit for dwelling. So, it is the city of dead
where one finds disease, famine, economic breakdown, etc. (Persepolis, Babylon etc).
 WORKS
• Mumford is still regarded as the leading 20th century authority on cities — their
history, design and communal purpose.

• Mumford believed that society could be improved through rational and ecologically
sound planning.

• Mumford contributed concepts of “a dispersed yet concentrated urban culture

integrated with nature” which were integrated along with MacKaye’s concepts into
the RPAA’s (Regional Planning Association of America) later projects.

• Master-Pupil One of Geddes' best known 'students'

The young Mumford saw Geddes as his mentor and most important teacher, someone
who prompted an intellectual awakening, while also offering an important intimacy.
“Geddes gave me the frame for my thinking: my task has been to put flesh on his
abstract skeleton”
 THEORIES
• Lewis Mumford’s theory of ‘Thanatopolis’
The conditions of the origin of the city have been discussed by different theorists.
According to Lewis Mumford the first cities that came up are not the city of the living but
of the dead. It was the thanatopolis. Among the hunter gathering Palaelithic people, it is the
dead who had a permanent dwelling not the living and men and women would return to
these ritual spaces to worship their ancestors.

• Mumford points out that for the Neolithic human beings village and home were the
creations of the women. Nurture, protection, fecundity (ability to produce offspring) were
the main tasks that had to be performed.

• Wherever containers were found we could assume that there was surplus.One of the first
feats performed by early engineers was a hole dug in the ground and sun- dried to brick
hardness in Mesopotemia.

•  HETEROGENEITY-The city came as a definite emergent in the Neolithic community (The

New Stone Age BC). It is heterogeneity that led to the formation of the city—the miner, the
woodman, the fisherman, each bringing with him the tools and skills and habits of life
formed under other pressures. The engineer, the boatman, the sailor and other occupational
groups the soldier, the banker, the merchant, the priest. Out of this complexity the city
created a higher unity.
COMMUNICATION-The city effected a mobilization of man-power, a command over long
distance transportation, an intensification of communication over long distances in space
transportation, an intensification along with a large scale development of civil engineering, and it
promoted a tremendous further rise in agricultural productivity.

RECEPTACLE OF CIVILIZATION From its origin onward the city may be described as a
structure specially equipped to store and transmit the goods of civilization, sufficiently
condensed to afford the maximum amount of facilities in a minimum space, but also capable of
structural enlargement to enable it to find a place for the changing needs and the more complex
forms of a growing society and its cumulative social heritage. The invention of such forms as the
written record, the library, the archive, the school and the university are the earliest and most
characteristic achievements of the city.

Contrary to rejecting what was already there the ‘urban revolution’ actually brought the earlier
elements of the existing culture and increased their efficacy and scope. The emergence of non-
agricultural occupations, heightened the demand for food and probably caused villages to
multiply, and still more land to be brought under cultivation. Revolution does not mean
discarding what was there earlier.

Mumford uses the term ‘implosion’ to describe this process

According to Mumford the many diverse elements of the community scattered were mobilized
and packed together under pressure, behind the massive walls of the city. The process of
urbanization had further impact on villages. More urban centres meant that more population who
is not producing food. There was no revolution but built on something that was already present.
  What is a city? Lewis Mumford (1937):

• A city is a geographic network, an economic organization, an institutional

process, a theatre of social action and an aesthetic symbol of collective unity.
• The city creates the theatre and it is the theatre.
• Has a distinct physical form (which changes over time)
• The physical form is based on social exchanges of various kinds (economic,
institutional, cultural)
• These social exchanges are predicated on specific networks
• Networks are geographical in 2 ways:
They intersect in the city in particular locations
They stretch out beyond the city to other locations in specific ways
• Like theatre, has intensity (strength) and, cities both reflect and shape the
societies in which they exist
• City project was established in 1923 by a small, informal group of visionary
planners, architects, sociologists and foresters.
• A group of planners destined to burn brightly but short lived, the RPAA
included Lewis Mumford, Clarence Stein, Benton MacKaye, Catherine Bauer,
Charles Harris Whitaker, as well as Wright, Ackerman, and others.
• The RPAA 5-fold program: Garden cities in regions , Trans-Atlantic
connections (especially with Geddes)
• Appalachian Trail projects (A Project in Regional Planning. In its original
concept, the Appalachian Trail was more than a hiking path.) Collaboration
with American Institute of Architect’s Community Planning committee to
propagate regionalism

Survey of key areas (Tennessee Valley)

Basically, it is a group that “connect a diverse group of friends in a critical
examination of the city, in the collaborative development and dissemination of
ideas, in political action and in city building projects

"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.