Eclectic Behemoth

...The history of the past century has made nothing more clear than this...

...His enduring achievement is in the best sense synthetic, a vision of an organic society drawn from his close study of men and cities from pre-history to the present...

...the 14-hour day has been reduced to seven hours, with the resulting irony that leisure has become the problem that crippling labor was a century ago...

...If we want to improve the regional environment," he writes, "we must also improve ourselves, that is, we must change our minds and alter our objectives, advancing from a money economy to a life economy...

...For those forces, too, are human...

...We have learned much about sanitation since then, much about the barbarism of unregulated laissez-faire, much about technology...

...But it strikes me as willfully naive not to see the obverse: These are the environments we choose, the forms we...

...His plea that we overcome "the irrational forces that are now undermining human culture everywhere" is immensely moving and probably in vain...

...who in Unto This Last epitomized his own attack upon a "money economy" in the phrase, "There is no wealth but Life...

...The preservation of the human community in an increasingly machine-dominated, depersonalized world is Mumford's overriding concern throughout The Urban Prospect...

...is the twofold tragedy of urban regimentation and suburban disintegration...

...The two terms form the poles of his critical thought: "There is a deep-seated antagonism between a mechanistic, power-centered economy and the far older organic, life-centered economy...

...Man's great mission," he writes, "is not to conquer Nature by main force but to cooperate with her intelligently and lovingly for his own purposes...

...author, "The Darkening Glass: A Portrait of Ruskin's Genius" The Urban Prospect begins with vistas of hope and ends in a gloom lightened only by the author's bitter satisfaction in seeing his worst fears confirmed...

...The result, as Mumford sees it...

...Like the great Victorian moralists from whom he directly descends, he is all of a piece, and precisely because his first principles are so sound and so few, he can touch upon a thousand disparate subjects and be at home in all...

...The early Victorian Coketowns, shrouded in coiling clouds of smoke, populated by a half-starved proletariat housed in hovels along the banks of rivers so polluted they at times took fire—those cities looked like the palpable hells they in fact were...

...His more than 20 books, from The Story of Utopias in 1922 to The Mytli of the Machine in 1967, are the scholarly scaffolding on which those ideas are displayed with an astonishing energy and almost compulsive repetitiveness...

...The one he characterizes as "the City in a Parking Lot, a collection of high-rise slabs and towers linked by multi-laned expressways...

...I hope I do Mumford no disservice—I respect him profoundly?in suggesting that one will find little that is "original" in The Urban Prospect...

...The slum comes down, the sterile slab goes up, and along with it rise crimes of violence committed for irrational motives against unknown neighbors...

...he urged, and rethink "the reasons for our past failures," lest we produce on a still greater scale "those nightmares of urban anonymity and human desolation that dominate the skyline today...

...Such an environment, of course, breeds such crimes...

...Mum-ford constantly makes connections which expose the limited goals of the specialists—one-way traffic, for example, that has turned pedestrian avenues into conduits for cars—as inimical to the community as a whole...

...If he had his will, he would educate a whole generation of planners to look beyond their own often conflicting specialties to the larger problem of creating a humane environment for human beings...

...Why appropriate billions for Urban Renewal while spending other billions for expressways that gut the heart of cities and result in "wholesale urban destruction...

...The Preface was written over 40 years ago, when the automobile and mass communication held out the prospect of a rationally dispersed population, clustered in regional centers, surrounded by open belts of green, and linked to the larger cities...

...Man, for Mumford, is prelap-sarian and Nature is pre-Darwinian...

...Yet it is not the author who has changed in the long course of writing the 16 essays that comprise this volume...

...Mumford's own word for himself is "generalist...

...Go slow...

...It is the very quality of our life that has changed, and hence of the cities in which we give that life collective and increasingly violent expression...

...To see as clearly as Mumford does the bleakness of the urban prospect, yet to retain a belief in the future of the city, requires the kind of heroic humanism he must be one of the last to possess...

...At the heart of this eclectic behemoth's thought lies what I would call an unshakeable biological optimism, a faith that the life of man will evolve harmoniously within the life of nature, whose purposes are both rational and beneficent...

...Our capacity to eradicate the natural environment has outpaced our capacity to adjust to the synthetic one we are creating...

...Why empower one municipal agency to control air pollution while empowering another to move still more cars to the centers of pollution...

...It is no accident, therefore, that his favorite adjective is organic and his harshest epithet mechanistic...

...the enemy is within us as well as without...

...the problem has merely become harder to diagnose, more elusive, for our infernos have become aseptic...

...Such an economy is cut to the human scale...

...His locus, as it were, is the entire human arena, and he is far more a social critic than a city planner...

...for a life economy seeks continuity, variety, orderly and purposeful growth...

...The Urban Prospect diagnoses contemporary America as a mechanistic, power-oriented economy, purposelessly producing the wrong things and blindly befouling the environment...

...The other he names "the Anti-City," a by-product of "urban decomposition, which in the pursuit of Nature denatures the countryside and mechanically scatters fragments of the city over the whole landscape...

...Monotony has replaced brutality, and we feel not the impotence of exhaustion, but the despair of having at last achieved the power to gratify our collective needs, only to discover that we lack the will to do so...

...Although Watts looks like Utopia if set beside the slums of Victorian Manchester, it still blights the spirit...

...and his specialty, as he informed the Senators of the Ribicoff Committee, "is that of bringing the scattered specialisms together...

...Again, as so often, one hears in the cadences of Mumford's prose the echo of his spiritual father, John Ruskin...

...There is no sadder comment on the urban prospect than Mumford's recent testimony (reprinted in the penultimate chapter) before the Ribicoff Committee's hearings on Federal aid for housing...

...That is why this architectural critic so rarely focuses upon an individual building or on the particular problems associated with a particular site...

...The closing chapters convey a sense of apocalyptic urgency, as Mumford recoils from the cultureless "green ghetto" of the suburbs on the one hand, and the impoverished black ghetto of the inner cities on the other...

...Lewis Mumford is himself something of a monolith, a large man with a certain few large ideas...

...The mark of a life economy is its observance of organic limits: it seeks not the greatest possible quantity of any particular good, but the right quantity, of the right quality, and the right place and the right time for the right purpose...