Visionaries of Regenerative Design II: Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
Ian McHarg described Mumford as “the most knowledgeable and wisest man” he had ever known (McHarg, 1996). Lewis Mumford was an educated critique of humanity’s design follies during the 20th century. For over 30 years, he wrote as an architectural critic for The New Yorker magazine. His articles and books covered the modern phenomenon of urbanization and the difference between healthy and pathological cities. He wrote on the dangers and potential of technology, modern society, as well as about literature.
Influenced strongly by the work of Sir Patrick Geddes, Mumford became a founding member of the Regional Planning Association of America, which promoted Geddesian design principles of limited scale development and a town and city planning approach that surveys and integrates into the natural and social conditions of the local region. Mark Luccarelli describes Mumford’s ecological regional vision as follows:
“Mumford advanced a conception of regional development that accounted for the mutual importance of the social world and the natural ecosystem. In his unique interpretation of the role of ‘technics’ in ‘civilization’, Mumford linked the planning of towns and cities to an empathic understanding of the complex natural region. The natural region, with its characteristic local variations, could be saved only through a new (actually very old) kind of urban and regional planning conceived as an instrument of a civic-minded social order. Planning for ecological regionalism required cultural and political renewal” (Luccarelli, 1995, p.1).
Mumford saw himself as a ‘public intellectual’, a mediator and transmitter of ideas. “But in the process of transmission, Mumford created his own particular synthesis: an interdisciplinary approach that drew from developments in social science and cultural criticism.” The wide range of his interests “reflects Mumford’s holistic approach to the study of society and culture” (Luccarelli, 1995, p.17). The catalytic role of wide-spread ecoliteracy and an ecologically conscious citizenry in the transformation towards a sustainable human civilization calls for many more such public intellectuals to bridge the gap between academia and the rest of civil society. Public intellectuals like Mumford are active meta-designers of a sustainable society.
“For Mumford, any adequate response to a crisis of civilization, marked by the attainment of the power to annihilate, required a fundamental change in thinking, a change that must begin in the psyche.” Luccarelli suggests that Mumford saw to the core of our civilizational crisis believing that it emerged from a “limited notion of self” and “a definition of subjectivity rooted in opposition to nature” (Luccarelli, 1995, p.20). Luccarelli concludes:
“Mumford saw that changing the boundaries of self implies changes in culture, values and worldview. …
… community became essential to Mumford’s work; he sensed that a revived democratic society was necessary to make regionalism an operative ideal, one capable of redefining economy and technology along ecological lines. These two projects — the investigation of the conception of self in American culture and the inquiry into the origins and prospects of regionalism — formed the basis for Mumford’s work. The former led him to investigate the social and aesthetic implications of contrasting conceptions of subjectivity; the latter required the investigation of geography and the uses of new technologies and planning to effect a different kind of geographic order: the re-creation of a regional geography.
… The cultivation of the experience of place shaped Mumford’s interest in regionalism as a cultural vision. And he connected this cultural project to a civic politics necessary to support regional planning” (Luccarelli, 1995, pp.20–21).
According to Mumford, the role of aesthetics was to inform appropriate participation in community and in natural process — an aesthetic ideal of culture-nature symbiosis. He understood humanity’s participatory role in natural process and the necessary co-evolution of communities and their environment. Mumford realized that such co-evolution needed a holistic, and multi-disciplinary perspective to guide appropriate participation in natural process, and called for increased participation of responsible citizens in the regional planning process and the creation of a culturally guiding vision.
“His central point was that a complete community does involve aesthetic questions, specifically the design of place.” Mumford believed that “without concern for the form and design of cities, there is little prospect for cultivated urban life.” He emphasized the difference between the ‘container’ and the ‘contents’ of any city. “The ‘container’ designates the form and structure; the ‘contents’ include the people, their way of life, social organization, human memory and cultural disposition” (Luccarelli, 1995, p.210). Luccarelli writes:
Mumford continued to stress the need to design viable urban forms that can channel human activities in a way compatible with the re-discovery of a functional and creative relation between culture and the natural world. For Mumford, the ‘container’ must stand in creative relation to its ‘contents’ — the human society that inhabits it — in a way that permits “organic complexity” …. The most important lesson to be drawn from the garden city pertains to its vision of “place.” … the larger issue is the importance of an aesthetic- moral perspective that informs the creation of real communities. When made part of a planner’s vision, a sense of “place” fosters interaction between residence and work and between the built environment and the natural region (Luccarelli, 1995, p.210).
In Mumford’s book The Myth of the Machine, published in 1967, he delivers a strong critique of the design of nuclear weapons and warns that the development of inappropriate machines could threaten humanity itself. Mumford coined the term ‘ecotechnics’ to describe “technologies that rely on local sources of energy and indigenous materials in which variety and craftsmanship add ecological consciousness, as well as beauty and aesthetics” (Kibert, 2005, p.115). For Mumford such ecotechnics would create healthy environments in which nature as well as the human body and mind can flourish. He understood the aesthetics of appropriate participation in natural process and recognized the intimate reciprocity between humanity and the rest of nature.
If man had originally inhabited a world as blankly uniform as a ‘highrise’ housing development, as featureless as a parking lot, as destitute of life as an automated factory, it is doubtful that he would have had a sufficiently varied experience to retain images, mould language, or acquire ideas Lewis Mumford (in Goldsmith, 1996, p.348).
Lewis Mumford recognized humanity as an expression of natural process. Nature brings forth and sustains our humanness. He was fully aware of the fact that responsible and appropriate participation in natural process requires a change in the dominant metaphor of scientific and design thinking away from mechanistic thinking to organismic metaphors. In order to create a responsible and appropriate technology, humanity has to learn from rather than attempt to dominate nature. Lewis Mumford was a powerful voice of the emerging natural design movement. In The Pentagon of Power, Mumford argues:
“If we are to prevent megatechnics from further controlling and deforming every aspect of human culture, we shall be able to do so only with the aid of a radically different model derived directly, not from machines, but from living organisms and organic complexes (ecosystems). What can be known about life only through the process of living — and so is part of even the humblest of organisms — must be added to all the other aspects that can be observed, abstracted, and measured” (Mumford, 1964, p.395).
[To continue reading other parts of this doctoral thesis, take a look at the chapter on ‘The Natural Design Movement’, from ‘Design for Human and Planetary Health’ by Daniel Christian Wahl 2006. … For my more recent writing see Designing Regenerative Cultures, 2016]
