Lewis Mumford

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Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities by Witold Rybczynski

benefit corporation, big-box store, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, City Beautiful movement, classic study, company town, cross-subsidies, David Brooks, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, edge city, Edward Glaeser, fixed income, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, global village, Guggenheim Bilbao, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, megaproject, megastructure, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, Seaside, Florida, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Timothy Beatley, Green Urbanism: Learning from European Cities (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2000), 4–5. 8. Ibid., 3–4. 9. Moshe Safdie, For Everyone a Garden (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1974), 4. 10. Lewis Mumford, “The Disappearing City,” in The Lewis Mumford Reader, ed. Donald L. Miller (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 112. Orig. pub. as “The Future of the City: Part I—the Disappearing City,” Architectural Record 132, no. 4 (October 1962). 11. Lewis Mumford, “The Choices Ahead,” in Miller, Lewis Mumford Reader, 239. Orig. pub. in The Urban Prospect: Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1968). List of Illustrations Photographic acknowledgments are given in parentheses.

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Chapter 3: Home Remedies 1. For example, Jane Jacobs, “Washington,” Architectural Forum, January 1956, 93–115; “Typical Downtown Transformed,” Architectural Forum, May 1956, 145–55. 2. Jane Jacobs, “The Missing Link in City Redevelopment,” Architectural Forum, June 1956, 133. 3. Lewis Mumford, “Home Remedies for Urban Cancer,” in The Lewis Mumford Reader, ed. Donald L. Miller (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 186. Orig. pub. as “Mother Jacobs’ Home Remedies,” New Yorker, December 1, 1962. 4. Alice Sparberg Alexiou, Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 61–62. 5.

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Duffus, review of The Disappearing City, New York Times Book Review, December 11, 1932, 3. 14. Frank Lloyd Wright, The Living City (New York: New American Library, 1970; orig. pub. 1958), 230. 15. George Fred Keck, review of The Disappearing City, Journal of Land & Public Utility Economics 9, no. 2 (May 1933): 16. 16. Lewis Mumford, “The Ideal Form of the Modern City” in The Lewis Mumford Reader, ed. Donald L. Miller (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 163. Orig. pub. as “The Modern City,” in Forms and Functions of Twentieth-Century Architecture, vol. 4, Building Types, ed. Talbot Hamlin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952). 17. David G. De Long, “Frank Lloyd Wright and the Evolution of the Living City,” in Frank Lloyd Wright and the Living City, ed.

The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways by Earl Swift

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, big-box store, blue-collar work, congestion pricing, Donner party, edge city, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, Ralph Nader, side project, smart transportation, Southern State Parkway, streetcar suburb, traveling salesman, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen

Turner, "The Detroit Super-Highway Project," TAC, April 1925; "Experts Advocate Super Highways," NYT, August 21, 1926; "Wider Roads for Traffic Relief," NYT, August 22, 1926; "Super-Highways Are Criticized," NYT, October 10, 1926; "Super-Highways," NYT, October 17, 1926; Roger L. Morrison, "Practical Means of Building Safety into Streets and Highways," TAC, November 1928; and Wyatt B. Brummitt, "The Superhighway," TAC, January 1929. [>] He belonged to a circle ...: Lewis Mumford, Sketches from Life: The Autobiography of Lewis Mumford (New York: Beacon Books, 1983); Donald L. Miller, Lewis Mumford: A Life (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1989); and Robert Wojtowicz, Lewis Mumford and American Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). [>] The modern metropolis ...: Flink, The Automobile Age; Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); Sam Bass Warner Jr., Streetcar Suburbs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962) and The Urban Wilderness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972). [>] What was needed ...: Mumford, Sketches from Life; Miller, Lewis Mumford: A Life. [>] In 1924, MacKaye and company ...: Ibid. [>] A small, one-family ...: Display advertisement, NYT of May 2, 1926. [>] With the success of Sunnyside Gardens ...: Mumford, Sketches from Life; Miller, Lewis Mumford; Wojtowicz, Lewis Mumford and American Modernism. [>] As the American City observed ...: Henry M.

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., Streetcar Suburbs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962) and The Urban Wilderness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972). [>] What was needed ...: Mumford, Sketches from Life; Miller, Lewis Mumford: A Life. [>] In 1924, MacKaye and company ...: Ibid. [>] A small, one-family ...: Display advertisement, NYT of May 2, 1926. [>] With the success of Sunnyside Gardens ...: Mumford, Sketches from Life; Miller, Lewis Mumford; Wojtowicz, Lewis Mumford and American Modernism. [>] As the American City observed ...: Henry M. Propper, "Construction Work Now Under Way on the 'Town for the Motor Age,'" TAC, October 1928. [>] MacKaye's New Republic piece ...: MacKaye, "The Townless Highway," The New Republic, March 12, 1930; "Townless Highways," TAC, May 1930. [>] When journalist Walter Prichard Eaton ...: Eaton, "Saving New England," Atlantic Monthly, May 1930.

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Dondero, chair of the House Committee on Public Works, observed that buggies would be faster in a speech at AASHO's annual meeting, Seattle, November 1954 (FCT). [>] Born out of wedlock ...: Lewis Mumford's childhood, discovery of Patrick Geddes, widening explorations of New York, and early writings are detailed in his autobiography, Sketches from Life; Miller, Lewis Mumford: A Life; and Wojtowicz, Lewis Mumford and American Modernism. [>] The turning point ...: "Where the Great City Spread," The New Yorker, March 3, 1956. MacDonald noted Olmsted's grade-separation scheme years earlier—in a January 24, 1947, speech to the North Carolina Society of Engineers (THM). [>] The same year ...: 2007–2009 conversations with Robert Wojtowicz. [>] An architectural detail ...: Mumford, "Bauhaus—Two Restaurants and a Theatre," The New Yorker, December 31, 1938. [>] A proposed bridge ...: Mumford, "Growing Pains: The New Museum," The New Yorker, June 3, 1939. [>] A Manhattan milk bar ...: Mumford, "The Dead Past and the Dead Present," The New Yorker, March 23, 1940. [>] His "Sky Lines" ...: "Form of Forms," Time, April 18, 1938. [>] He'd been taken, too ...: Mumford, "Westward, Ho!"

Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City by Richard Sennett

Anthropocene, Big Tech, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, housing crisis, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, open borders, place-making, plutocrats, post-truth, Richard Florida, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, Yochai Benkler

The cellular grid has often served powerless inhabitants as a secretive space, difficult for the authorities to penetrate – as it did for Christians in ancient Jerusalem, or for Shanghai residents in Mao’s early reign. The additive grid has in the modern era served as a tool of capitalist power. Lewis Mumford asserted, in plans like that for New York in 1811, which envisioned endless, regular blocks above Greenwich Village, that it ‘treated the individual lot and the block, the street and the avenue, as abstract units for buying and selling, without respect for historic uses, for topographic conditions or for social needs’.17 Two of these forms are hospitable to social life in the cité, courtyard fabric obviously so by conducting so many activities out in the open in a shared space.

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Blessed by Harvard, the mediation and combination of technical disciplines which became official urbanism focused on making the ville work as a self-contained problem.15, 16 Two voices were raised against the prevailing mood. Jane Jacobs, then a youngish writer for architectural magazines, attended the event, and found the assembled dignitaries depressing in their self-confidence. Lewis Mumford was the event’s humanist, a great historian of cities and a committed progressive. He ringingly declared the ‘absolute folly of creating a physical structure at the price of destroying the intimate social structure of a community’s life’, which was in fact just what the developers Gruen, Bacon and Lawrence were in the midst of doing, big-time.17 Mumford and Jacobs sought an alternative to official urbanism, one which incorporated a city’s lived complexities into its built form.

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He ringingly declared the ‘absolute folly of creating a physical structure at the price of destroying the intimate social structure of a community’s life’, which was in fact just what the developers Gruen, Bacon and Lawrence were in the midst of doing, big-time.17 Mumford and Jacobs sought an alternative to official urbanism, one which incorporated a city’s lived complexities into its built form. Yet only a few years after the Harvard meeting, Mumford and Jacobs parted ways, bitterly, over how to achieve this goal. III. HOW THEN TO OPEN THE CITY? – LEWIS MUMFORD DEBATES JANE JACOBS Jane Jacobs became famous as an activist for the campaign she waged against Robert Moses, the dictatorial planner of much of twentieth-century New York who wanted to turn Fifth Avenue into a highway running through one of the city’s most loved parks, Washington Square. She persuaded the public to see this proposal as criminal, and eventually New York’s politicians relented.

City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age by P. D. Smith

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, Anthropocene, augmented reality, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, congestion charging, congestion pricing, cosmological principle, crack epidemic, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, en.wikipedia.org, Enrique Peñalosa, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kowloon Walled City, Lewis Mumford, Masdar, megacity, megastructure, multicultural london english, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, peak oil, pneumatic tube, RFID, smart cities, starchitect, telepresence, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, the High Line, Thomas Malthus, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

Remarkable though the Sumerian civilisation undoubtedly was, cities – with or without the help of the gods – did not rise out of the Mesopotamian landscape in a single generation. In Sumer, cities developed over two millennia, from c. 5500–3500 bc.4 But the city’s roots go deeper still. Archaeology is now revealing tantalising glimpses of the Neolithic origins of modern urbanism. Lewis Mumford, whose monumental work The City in History remains a classic study of urbanism, notes that ‘the embryonic structure of the city already existed in the village. House, shrine, cistern, public way, agora – not yet a specialised market – all first took form in the village.’5 As Neolithic people increasingly gained control over food production, creating surpluses that could support specialist craftsmen, their villages gradually grew into a new kind of community.

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Such affordable housing coupled with low-interest loans, cheap cars and even cheaper fuel brought the American Dream within reach of even ordinary working-class people. However, many architects and cultural commentators condemned this flight from the cities, describing suburbia as a ‘subtopia’ and predicting landscapes consumed by ‘slurbs’ (slum-suburbs). Lewis Mumford attacked the suburbs as an ‘anti-city’: ‘a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly at uniform distances on uniform roads in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless pre-fabricated foods.’122 Similarly, Richard Sennett criticised the desire of people to leave ‘dense, disorderly, overwhelming cities’ for more homogeneous but less stimulating communities in the suburbs.

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A mere 10 per cent of the city’s surface was used for movement.34 Vehicles changed that – first carts, then carriages, coaches and sedans, followed by streetcars – all had an impact on the urban streetscape. People’s freedom to walk in the city has been increasingly restricted to pavements and sidewalks. But in the twentieth century, cities began to be designed with the car, not pedestrians, in mind. ‘Instead of planning motor cars and motorways to fit our life,’ complained Lewis Mumford in 1957, ‘we are rapidly planning our life to fit the motor car.’35 Traffic flows became the urban planner’s priority, resulting in cities dominated by monotonous linear structures. In the ideal cities of the Modernists, streets were replaced by multi-lane expressways and pedestrians were herded on to skywalks or down into underpasses.

The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving by Leigh Gallagher

Airbnb, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, call centre, car-free, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collaborative consumption, Columbine, commoditize, crack epidemic, demographic winter, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, microapartment, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, New Urbanism, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Quicken Loans, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional, Zipcar

a massive region where two-thirds of residents: Scott Gold and Massie Ritsch, “Swallowed by Urban Sprawl,” Los Angeles Times, October 18, 2002. In 2002 a report: Reid Ewing, Rolf Pendall, and Don Chen, Measuring Sprawl and Its Impact, Smart Growth America, 2002. “There is no ‘there’ there”: Gold and Ritsch, “Swallowed by Urban Sprawl.” The historian Lewis Mumford: Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, pp. 237, 244; Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (Mariner Books, 1970). Her influential 1961 book: Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Random House, 1961). The definitive critique of twentieth-century urban planning. It’s hard to overstate Jacobs’s role in urban planning, and her own artful explanation of the “sidewalk ballet” is worth citing in full here.

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They will be located closer to where we work and closer to the things we need, which will give us more time with our families and friends and more time to pursue all of the things we like to do. These changes won’t happen overnight, but they will ultimately lead to more choice, more freedom, and richer lives. And that will be a happy ending for everyone. 1 THE GREAT URBAN EXODUS The building of houses constitutes the major architectural work of any civilization. —LEWIS MUMFORD People have always wanted to get out of the city. At least they have since the days of ancient Egypt, which is where scholars have traced one of the earliest known references to the suburbs. In the fourteenth century BC, wealthy suburban villas with spacious gardens south of the ancient Egyptian capital of Amarna housed estates of the city’s powerful nobles.

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The widespread adoption of the car by the middle class, providing individual mobility to everyone anywhere, anytime, forever transformed the arrangement of our landscape, as developers were finally untethered from the constraints of public transportation. As the influential urban historian and sociologist Lewis Mumford would later write in his 1961 book, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects, “As long as the railroad stop and walking distances controlled suburban growth, the suburb had form.” The automobile suddenly unhooked us from the need to keep communities compact, the freeways soon gave us unfettered access, and there was land as far as the eye could see.

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities by Howard P. Segal

1960s counterculture, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, complexity theory, David Brooks, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, deskilling, energy security, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, Future Shock, G4S, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, intentional community, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nikolai Kondratiev, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, pneumatic tube, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog

The exhibit included approximately 220 models, videos, photographs, and works on paper. See Allan Temko, “Which Guide to the Promised Land? Fuller or Mumford?” Horizon, 10 (Summer 1968), 25–30. Mumford’s life and work have received serious posthumous treatment—see, for example, Donald Miller, Lewis Mumford: A Life (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1989) and Agatha and Thomas Hughes, eds., Lewis Mumford: Public Intellectual (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), but Fuller’s have not. Partial reconsideration have now been remedied by Hsiao-Yun Chu and Roberto G. Trujillo, eds., New Views on R. Buckminster Fuller (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).

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There have been several classical accounts of utopias to which generations of students and scholars are indebted. But it is surely time to update The Story of Utopias (1922), to invoke the title of one of those pioneering studies, which was the first book by the great historian and social critic Lewis Mumford.1 We are by now past the hostility that greeted most utopian proposals throughout much of the twentieth century, when utopias were commonly equated with the nightmarish and pseudo-utopian totalitarian regimes that shaped most of that century, whether right-wing or left-wing, fascist or communist.

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Rostow was alone in wanting to bomb them ahead to the Age of High Mass-Consumption.”22 Alas, the line of false prophets of technocracy, of arrogant “number-crunchers” from Howard Scott through McNamara, Bundy, and Rostow has obscured the largely forgotten intellectual tradition that viewed technocracy not as an opponent of progress and democracy but as a friend. This tradition includes any number of Progressive and New Deal intellectuals and reformers as well as science fiction writers. As Lewis Mumford, perhaps the leading figure in that tradition, put it so well in a 1921 review of economist and social critic Veblen’s The Engineers and the Price System, “What matters it if industrial society is run efficiently, if it is run only further into the same blind alley in which humanity finds itself today.”23 Ironically, the first chapter of Life in a Technocracy is entitled “Blind Alley.”

One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility by Zack Furness, Zachary Mooradian Furness

active transport: walking or cycling, affirmative action, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, bike sharing, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, conceptual framework, critique of consumerism, DIY culture, dumpster diving, Enrique Peñalosa, European colonialism, feminist movement, fixed-gear, food desert, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, ghettoisation, Golden Gate Park, independent contractor, interchangeable parts, intermodal, Internet Archive, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, means of production, messenger bag, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, peak oil, place-making, post scarcity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Silicon Valley, sustainable-tourism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, urban planning, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , working poor, Yom Kippur War

For more on the 1939 World’s Fair, see David E. nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, Ma: MiT press, 1994), 199–224. ibid. The close timing of these events was brought to my attention in Cliff Ellis, “lewis Mumford and norman Bel Geddes: The Highway, the City and the Future,” Planning Perspectives 20 (2005): 60. also see “Toll roads and Free roads” (U.S. Bureau of public roads, 1939); “interregional Highways” (U.S. interregional Highway Committee, 1944). norman Bel Geddes, Magic Motorways (new york: random House, 1940), 237. also see Ellis, “lewis Mumford and norman Bel Geddes,” 58. as Kenneth T. Jackson points out in Crabgrass Frontier, the panel that Eisenhower assembled to take stock of the country’s highway requirements was chaired by lucius D.

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pucher and Buehler note that bicycling accounted for 15 percent of all trips made in the United Kingdom in 1950. See “Making Cycling irresistible,” 496. also see McGurn, On Your Bicycle and rosen, Framing Production. lewis Mumford’s sentiments on urban planning and transportation are best put in the following texts: The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects, 1st ed. (new york: Harcourt, 1961); The Urban Prospect (london: Secker and Warburg, 1968); The Highway and the City (Westport, CT: Greenwood press, 1981). lewis Mumford, quoted in the segment “The City: Cars or people?” from The City—Heaven and Hell (national Film Board of Canada, 1963), Film. Emphasis is my own.

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Sheldon Brown also sees the interest in single-speed mountain bikes as a “rebellion against the excessive complication, fragility and weight of current mountain bikes,” in “Single Speed Conversions,” Sheldon Brown’s Bicycle Technical Information, July 3, 1999, available at http://www.sheldonbrown.com/singlespeed.html. rosen, “Up the vélorution,” 374. ibid., 368–370. rosen specifically refers to the work of lewis Mumford, langdon Winner, and richard Sclove in his discussion of “democratic technics.” For the seminal piece by lewis Mumford, see “authoritarian and Democratic Technics,” Technology and Culture 5, no. 1 (1964): 1–8. Chris Carlsson, “‘Outlaw’ Bicycling,” Affinities: A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture, and Action 1, no. 1 (2007): 90. ross Evans, interview with the author, august 7, 2007; aaron Weiler, Namibian Bicycle Ambulance Project, available at http://bikecart.pedalpeople.com/namibia.

The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape by James Howard Kunstler

A Pattern Language, blue-collar work, California gold rush, car-free, City Beautiful movement, corporate governance, Donald Trump, financial independence, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, gentrification, germ theory of disease, indoor plumbing, It's morning again in America, jitney, junk bonds, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, means of production, megastructure, Menlo Park, new economy, oil shock, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Skinner box, Southern State Parkway, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Review, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

Yet the movie's central T H E G E O G R A P H Y O F N O W H E R E metaphor-that our civilization has been undone by an evil cartoon ethos--could not be more pertinent, for more and more we appear to be a nation of overfed clowns living in a hostile cartoon environment. Thirty years ago, Lewis Mumford said of post-World II develop­ ment, "the end product is an encapsulat�d.JiJe, spent more and more either in a motor car or within cllecabht of darkness before a television set. " The whole wicked, sprawling, megalopolitan mess, he gloomily predicted, would completely demoralize mankind and lead to nuclear holocaust.

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For instance, L'Enfant sited the Capitol building on a hill, affording it visual grandeur appro­ priate to the idealism of a young democracy. But as Robert A. M. Stern points out, the arrangement as a whole resulted in too many oddly shaped and awkward building sites that hindered property development, and tended to disorient the pedestrian. 5 Lewis Mumford said that the huge proportion of area given over to boulevards compared to the area reserved for public buildings was "absurd," and on a par with the later efforts of freeway engineers. Finally, for all its shortcomings, much of L'Enfant's plan actually got built. Washington grew into a major city very slowly and painfully.

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Church steeples and the masts of ships along the waterfront made up th-e��-nenizens of the cities moved about mainly on foot. I; the second half of the nineteenth century, city life changed more dramatically than any time since the Renaissance. The American city had embarked on a pattern of growth that would ultimately consume it. "Industrialism, the main creative force of the 19th century," wrote Lewis Mumford, "produced the most degraded human environment the world had yet seen. , , 9 Extraordinary changes of scale took place in the masses of buildings and the areas they covered. Huge new factories employing thousands of workers congregated in clusters along rivers and the rail lines that followed rivers.

The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us by Joel Kotkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, birth tourism , blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, citizen journalism, colonial rule, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic winter, Deng Xiaoping, Downton Abbey, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, financial independence, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, labor-force participation, land reform, Lewis Mumford, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, microapartment, new economy, New Urbanism, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, pensions crisis, Peter Calthorpe, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seaside, Florida, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, starchitect, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, Ted Nelson, the built environment, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, young professional

In this respect, the urban experience is simply not only confined to the inner city or old neighborhoods but also to the “sprawl” that now surrounds them in virtually every vibrant urban area in the world. As Gregg Easterbrook, contributing editor of the Atlantic and the Washington Monthly, asks, “Sprawl is caused by affluence and population growth, and which of these, exactly, do we propose to inhibit?”3 Many voices influenced this book. These include the writings of Fernand Braudel, Lewis Mumford, Frank Lloyd Wright, Peter Hall, H. G. Wells, Herbert Gans, and, although I differed from her on many ideas, Jane Jacobs. These figures from the past informed my reporting on the present; their focus on how people actually live, and what they desire, gave me necessary inspiration. No field of study—technical or in the humanities—thrives when only one side or perspective is allowed free reign and granted a dispensation from criticism.

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THE CITY OF GOD Early cities rested largely on urban studies scholar Robert Park’s notion of cities as “a state of mind [and] a body of customs and traditions.”5 The earliest urban residents built their cities with the idea that they were part of something larger than themselves, connected not only to their own traditions but to divinity itself. Great ancient cities were almost always spiritual centers, and as the great urban historian Lewis Mumford noted, religion provided a critical unifying principle for the city and its civic identity: Behind the wall of the city life rested on a common foundation, set as deep as the universe itself: the city was nothing less than the home of a powerful god. The architectural and sculptural symbols that made this fact visible lifted the city far above the village or country town. . . .

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One of the earliest and most innovative examples emerged in 1929 with the development of Radburn, New Jersey. Visualized as “a town for the motor age,” the community offered a wide range of residential units, with interior parklands and access to walkways. Car and pedestrian traffic was to be strictly separated, with houses grouped around cul-de-sacs with a small access road. To Lewis Mumford, Radburn represented “the first departure in city planning since Venice.”53 Radburn focused on creating a secure and healthful environment for the residents. There were extensive recreation opportunities for the community, and the town emphasized providing an ideal environment for raising children.

The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 by David Edgerton

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, British Empire, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, creative destruction, deglobalization, dematerialisation, desegregation, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, endogenous growth, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, global village, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, interchangeable parts, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, means of production, megacity, microcredit, Neil Armstrong, new economy, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the long tail, Upton Sinclair, urban planning

The implication was that Asiatic and despotic traditions, quite different from those which led to feudalism and capitalism, were crucial in shaping both the Soviet Union and Communist China.3 Yet similar analogies were also applied to the capitalist West. A famous American student of technology, Lewis Mumford, writing in the early 1960s, regarded the ancient ‘pyramid age’ as one characterised by ‘authoritarian technics’, which he saw as a historical alternative to ‘democratic technics’. Yet, in the post-Second World War years, particularly in the United States, Mumford saw a new authoritarian technics appearing, a kind of ‘occidental despotism’.

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Each successive war of modern times has revealed the lag due to the slow pace of mental adaptation’.10 Another soldier, in a pioneering book called Armament and History, published in 1946, warned that ‘civil progress is so intense that there is not only a danger but a certainty that no army in peacetime can in the full sense be kept up to date.’11 Lewis Mumford put the point graphically: ‘Fortunately for mankind, the army has usually been the refuge of third-rate minds … Hence the paradox in modern technics: war stimulates invention, but the army resists it!’12 The histories amplify these stories. Before the First World War, it is claimed, admirals thought submarines ungentlemanly, and generals irrationally defended cold steel and horses against machine guns.

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Maintenance 1. Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977), p. 183. 2. Ibid., p. 173. 3. Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957). 4. Lewis Mumford, ‘Authoritarian and Democratic Technics’, Technology and Culture, Vol. 5 (1964), pp. 1–8. 5. Ivor H. Seeley, Building Maintenance, second edition (London: Macmillan, 1987). 6. United Nations, Maintenance and Repair in Developing Countries: Report of a Symposium … (New York: United Nations, 1971). 7.

Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines by Richard Heinberg, James Howard (frw) Kunstler

Adam Curtis, addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, carbon tax, classic study, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demographic transition, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Fractional reserve banking, greed is good, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, land reform, Lewis Mumford, means of production, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, the built environment, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, urban planning

Values of the Wise Press, 2006. 17 Richard Heinberg. Fifty Million Farmers. schumachersociety.org/publications/heinberg_06.html Chapter 1 1 Lewis Mumford. “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics.” Originally published in Technology and Culture, Vol. 5 No. 1, reprinted in John Zerzan and Carnes, eds. Questioning Technology: Tool, Toy or Tyrant? New Society, Publishers, 1991, p. 17. 2 John Zerzan. Elements of Refusal. Left Bank Books, 1988. 3 Lewis Mumford. Technics and Human Development. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1966; The Pentagon of Power. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1970, p. 146. 4 Richard Heinberg.

…

— against the dehumanizing side effects of mechanization. As industrialization proceeded decade-by-decade — from powered looms to steam shovels, jet planes, and electric toothbrushes — objections to the accelerating, mindless adoption of new technologies waxed erudite. During the past century, books by Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich, Kirkpatrick Sale, Stephanie Mills, Chellis Glendinning, Jerry Mander, John Zerzan, and Derrick Jensen, among others, have helped generations of readers understand how and why our tools have come to enslave us, colonizing our minds as well as our daily routines. These authors reminded us that tools, far from being morally neutral, are amplifiers of human purposes; therefore each tool carries its inventor’s original intent inherent within it.

…

Thus, as clashes over human purposes form the core of ethical and political disputes, technology itself, as it proliferates, must inevitably become the subject of an increasing array of social controversies. Battles over technology concern nothing less than the shape and future of society. In principle, those battles, if not the scholarly discussions about them, reach all the way back to the Neolithic era, and perhaps to our harnessing of fire tens of thousands of years ago. Lewis Mumford drew a through-line emphasizing how modern megatechnologies are externalizations of a social machine that originated in the pristine states of the Bronze Age:The inventors of nuclear bombs, space rockets, and computers are the pyramid builders of our own age: psychologically inflated by a similar myth of unqualified power, boasting through their science of their increasing omnipotence, if not omniscience, moved by obsessions and compulsions no less irrational than those of earlier absolute systems: particularly the notion that the system itself must be expanded, at whatever the eventual cost.1 John Zerzan goes further, asserting that it is the human tendencies to abstract and manipulate, which are at the heart of our tool-making ability, that cut us off from our innate connections with the natural world, and therefore obscure our own inherent nature.2 This effort to show how our current technological crisis is rooted in ancient patterns is certainly helpful.

The death and life of great American cities by Jane Jacobs

book value, company town, Golden Gate Park, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, work culture

Under regional planning, garden cities would be rationally distributed throughout large territories, dovetailing into natural resources, balanced against agriculture and woodland, forming one far-flung logical whole. Howard’s and Geddes’ ideas were enthusiastically adopted in America during the 1920’s, and developed further by a group of extraordinarily effective and dedicated people—among them Lewis Mumford, Clarence Stein, the late Henry Wright, and Catherine Bauer. While they thought of themselves as regional planners, Catherine Bauer has more recently called this group the “Decentrists,” and this name is more apt, for the primary result of regional planning, as they saw it, would be to decentralize great cities, thin them out, and disperse their enterprises and populations into smaller, separated cities or, better yet, towns.

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* * * *1 Please remember the North End. I shall refer to it frequently in this book. *2 Readers who would like a fuller account, and a sympathetic account which mine is not, should go to the sources, which are very interesting, especially: Garden Cities of Tomorrow, by Ebenezer Howard; The Culture of Cities, by Lewis Mumford; Cities in Evolution, by Sir Patrick Geddes; Modern Housing, by Catherine Bauer; Toward New Towns for America, by Clarence Stein; Nothing Gained by Overcrowding, by Sir Raymond Unwin; and The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning, by Le Corbusier. The best short survey I know of is the group of excerpts under the title “Assumptions and Goals of City Planning,” contained in Land-Use Planning, A Casebook on the Use, Misuse and Re-use of Urban Land, by Charles M.

…

It is typical of this confusion between high densities and overcrowding that one of the great Garden City planners, Sir Raymond Unwin, titled a tract which had nothing to do with overcrowding, but instead with super-block arrangements of low-density dwellings, Nothing Gained by Overcrowding. By the 1930’s, overcrowding of dwellings with people and supposed “overcrowding” of land with buildings (i.e., city dwelling densities and land coverage) were taken to be practically identical in meaning and results, insofar as the distinction was thought about at all. When observers like Lewis Mumford and Catherine Bauer could not avoid noticing that some very successful areas of cities had high densities of dwellings and high ground coverages, but not too many persons in a dwelling or a room, they took the tack (Mumford still takes it) that the fortunate people living in comfort in these popular places are living in slums, but are too insensitive to know it or resent it.

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, congestion pricing, corporate governance, Crossrail, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, digital divide, digital Maoism, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global pandemic, global village, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, informal economy, information retrieval, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Lewis Mumford, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, megacity, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Tony Hsieh, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, unpaid internship, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

Much of what I do here is merely to hold up a megaphone before them so that their measured and persistent voices on behalf of the redemptive potential of the urban can be widely heard. Tom Bender, Manuel Castells, Eric Corijn, Mike Davis, Richard Florida, Edward Glaeser, David Harvey, Peter Marcuse, Saskia Sassen, Richard Sennett, and Ronald van Kempen—and before them Lewis Mumford, Max Weber, Jane Jacobs, and the many others who are cited below—have built a scholarly edifice I feel lucky to have been able to inhabit and explore. My task has been to apply the results of their work to the challenge of establishing a form of constructive interdependence—global democratic governance—in which cities are prime actors.

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That was the ideal lurking in the background of “Middletown,” that average town in 1929 (based on Muncie, Indiana) that the sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd sought to portray as a transitional American archetype that aspired to conserve the virtue of country with the attractions of city as the nation morphed in the automobile age from a rural republic of towns into an urban republic of cities.19 Howard’s followers like Lewis Mumford, less dialectical than their muse, fought a losing battle on behalf of human-scale cities, even as they libeled the gargantuan dimensions of the new metropolis with epithets like “Tyrannopolis” and “Nekropolis.”20 Fritz Lang took this nightmarish caricature of the city to the limit in his 1927 silent film classic Metropolis, where the city becomes a surrogate for capitalism’s netherworld, epitomizing a fierce class struggle between owners living in towers and workers living underground.21 This radical moral geometry of the city has been a reciprocal affair.

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These realities give the urban its seemingly ineluctable character and allow us to treat cities as potential global democratic building blocks. There is no need to retrace here the remarkable history of towns and cities that has been narrated by eminent sociologists and historians from Max Weber, Lewis Mumford, and Jane Jacobs to Peter Marcuse, Ronald van Kempen, Saskia Sassen, and Eric Corijn.7 Yet we do need to recall that this history, for all its variety, has been marked by a relentlessly progressive development, not just change but seemingly purposeful and “progressive” change: a growth in population density, in diversity, and in specialization of function; and hence in complexity.

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

We are far from the first to recognize the fundamental importance of cities to the modern world. Ed Glaeser’s Triumph of the City, Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class, Enrico Moretti’s The New Geography of Jobs and many other excellent books over recent years have laid a trail before us, as have canonical works such as Lewis Mumford’s The City in History, Peter Hall’s Cities in Civilization, Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities and Paul Bairoch’s Cities and Economic Development. We have also been inspired by recent works that explore the importance of place more broadly, such as Tim Marshall’s Prisoners of Geography, and provide a fresh historical perspective on why our world is the way it is today, including Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads.

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The rapidly growing Pearl River Delta area in China, for example, encompasses nine increasingly interconnected cities with a total population of 65 million, equivalent to that of the UK or France, and a total output of $1.2 trillion, nearly equivalent to that of Spain.17 In his 1961 magnum opus The City in History, renowned historian Lewis Mumford described the city as both a container and a magnet.18 As cities have continued to bleed outwards, it is the magnet that has become the most apt metaphor for understanding our urban world. It may be difficult to draw a neat boundary around the city today, but its gravitational pull is more powerful than ever.

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What may feel unfamiliar and threatening when encountered the first time gradually begins to feel normal with each new exposure, and with time can even come to be seen as a valuable contribution to the rich tapestry of a varied life. Not all urban environments are equally effective at achieving this ideal. Suburban sprawl in particular poses a challenge to the connecting power of the city. Lewis Mumford once described suburbanization as ‘a collective attempt to live a private life’.34 In trading proximity for space, the suburbanite also trades serendipitous connection for privacy. And time spent commuting limits our ability to engage with our community – ten minutes extra daily commuting time reduces involvement in community affairs by an average of 10 per cent.35 That is why expanding mixed-use development throughout the city, as argued in Chapter 5, will be essential in restoring community bonds.

Ellul, Jacques-The Technological Society-Vintage Books (1964) by Unknown

Bretton Woods, conceptual framework, do-ocracy, double entry bookkeeping, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Mars Society, means of production, Norbert Wiener, price mechanism, profit motive, rising living standards, road to serfdom, spinning jenny, technological determinism, Thorstein Veblen, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto

I do not wish at this point to enter the realm of prognosis, but predictions of the more or less rapid extinction of technical progress seem to me to be contradicted by the facts. Whether it be Lewis Mumford, say, declaring that the era of mechanical progress is almost at an end, or Colin Clark announc­ ing the transition of secondary mechanical activities to tertiary ac­ tivities, they are exhibiting what can only be termed a dangerous confidence. Lewis Mumford shows that certain of our inventions cannot be improved, that the possible domain of mechanical activity cannot be extended, and that mechanical progress is limited by the nature o f the physical world.

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Less penetrating than Thorstein Veblen’s The Engineers and the Price System, it nevertheless widens the scope of inquiry into the consequences of having a society pervaded by technicians. Ellul’s book is more colorful and incisive than Oswald Spengler’s Man and Technics— which by contrast seems faded and unperceptive— and it is more analytical than Lewis Mumford’s trilogy— although Ellul handles the historical evidence much more sparingly and with less assurance than Mumford. And it is more far-ranging and system­ atic than Siegfried Giedion’s Mechanization Takes Command, which, of all the books overlapping Ellul’s subject, comes close to giving the reader a sense of what the dominance of technique might mean for the present and the future of man.

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It is useless to rail against capitalism. Capitalism did not create our world; the machine did. Painstaking studies designed to prove the contrary have buried the obvious beneath tons of print. And, if we do not wish to play the demagogue, we must point out the guilty party. “The machine is antisocial,” says Lewis Mumford. "It tends, by reason of its progressive character, to the most acute forms of human exploitation.” The machine took its place in a social milieu that was not made for it, and for that reason created the in­ human society in which we live. Capitalism was therefore only one aspect of the deep disorder of the nineteenth century.

The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics by Christopher Lasch

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, company town, complexity theory, delayed gratification, desegregation, disinformation, equal pay for equal work, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Future Shock, gentrification, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, mass immigration, means of production, military-industrial complex, Norman Mailer, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, scientific management, scientific worldview, sexual politics, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, urban renewal, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, War on Poverty, work culture , young professional

Almost everyone now agrees that progress—in its utopian form at least—is a "superstition" that is "nearly worn out," as Dean William Ralph Inge put it in 1920; that we can now appreciate its religious roots largely because "the idea has begun to lose its hold on the mind of society," as Christopher Dawson pointed out a few years later; and that the hope of some final state of earthly perfection, in short, is the "deadest of dead ideas," as Lewis Mumford wrote in 1932—"the one notion that has been thoroughly blasted by the facts of twentieth-century experience." Utopian visions of the future were definitively discredited by their association with the totalitarian movements that came to power in the thirties. Belief in a secular millennium, rooted in the Christian tradition, seemed to have furnished modern barbarism with much of its spiritual energy.

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Hitler knew that men and women wanted more than "comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth control." "Whereas socialism, and even capitalism ... have said to people, 'I offer you a good time,' Hitler has said to them, 'I offer you struggle, danger, and death,' and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet." In the same year, Lewis Mumford offered an analysis of the "sleek progressive mind" that could easily have been written by Orwell himself. Progressives, according to Mumford, believed that human nature is deflected from its natural goodness only by external conditions beyond the individual's control. Having no sense of sin, they discounted inherent obstacles to moral development and therefore could not grasp the need for a "form-giving discipline of the personality."

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This instantaneous idealization of the jazz age suggests a shortening of historical attention, an inability to recall events beyond a single lifetime, which may help to explain another curious feature of the twentieth-century historical imagination: the growing inclination, among journalists, commentators on cultural trends, and even professional historians, to think of ten-year periods as the standard unit of historical time. In the twenties and thirties, works of popular history began to focus on particular decades. Examples of this new genre included Meade Minnigerode's Fabulous Forties, Thomas Beer's Mauve Decade, Lewis Mumford's Brown Decades, and Frederick Lewis Allen's Only Yesterday, a history of the postwar decade that appeared in 1931 and contributed to the romance of the twenties. Mumford's study of the post-Civil War era, the best of these books, sheds light on the close connection between the new preoccupation with decades and the concept of generations.

Emergence by Steven Johnson

A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, AOL-Time Warner, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, Danny Hillis, Douglas Hofstadter, edge city, epigenetics, game design, garden city movement, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Mitch Kapor, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, pez dispenser, phenotype, Potemkin village, power law, price mechanism, profit motive, Ray Kurzweil, SimCity, slashdot, social intelligence, Socratic dialogue, stakhanovite, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush

It is indeed too huge and too complex a state of organized affairs ever to have been thought up in advance, to have preexisted as an idea.” Those broad, glittering avenues, in other words, suggest a Potemkin village without a Potemkin. That mix of order and anarchy is what we now call emergent behavior. Urban critics since Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs have known that cities have lives of their own, with neighborhoods clustering into place without any Robert Moses figure dictating the plan from above. But that understanding has entered the intellectual mainstream only in recent years—when Engels paced those Manchester streets in the 1840s, he was left groping blindly, trying to find a culprit for the city’s fiendish organization, even as he acknowledged that the city was notoriously unplanned.

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The jewelry merchants on West Forty-seventh don’t have quite the pedigree of their colleagues on the Ponte Vecchio, but then New York is a young city by Italian standards. Look at those Manhattan streets from the thousand-year view, the scale of the superorganism, and what comes to mind is an embryo self-organizing into recognizable shapes, forming patterns that will last a lifetime. * * * “From its origins onward,” Lewis Mumford writes in his classic work The City in History, “the city may be described as a structure specially equipped to store and transmit the goods of civilization.” Preeminent among the “goods” stored and transmitted by the city is the invaluable material of information: current prices in the marketplace; laborsaving devices dreamed up by craftsmen; new remedies for disease.

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Still, the top-heavy structure of mass media may keep those loops relatively muted for the foreseeable future, at least where the tube is concerned. Feedback, after all, is usually not a television thing. You need the Web to hear it wail. * * * In June of 1962, a full year after the appearance of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Lewis Mumford published a scathing critique of Jane Jacobs’s manifesto in his legendary New Yorker column, “The Sky Line.” In her prescriptions for a sidewalk-centric urban renewal, “Mother Jacobs”—as Mumford derisively called her—offered a “homemade poultice for the cure of cancer.” The New Yorker critic had been an early advocate of Jacobs’s work, encouraging her to translate her thoughts into a book while she was a junior editor at Architecture Forum in the midfifties.

Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It by Daniel Knowles

active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, bank run, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, congestion charging, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyperloop, Induced demand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Lyft, megacity, megastructure, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, parking minimums, Piers Corbyn, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, safety bicycle, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, Yom Kippur War, young professional

And inevitably, for this car-centric city, the automobile would be at the forefront of it. Coventry would become a symbol for how cities would be transformed by the car. The architect behind this was a man called Donald Gibson. Appointed to be the city’s architect at the age of just twenty-nine, in 1939, Gibson was inspired by Lewis Mumford, an American sociologist who wrote a book arguing for radical changes to cities. Gibson handed out copies of Mumford’s book, The Culture of Cities, to councilors to impress upon them the importance of its ideas. Mumford believed that the industrial revolution had wrecked cities by making them too dense.

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“High land values, the delays involved by town planning legislation, together with a lack of plan for the central area made it seem impossible. Now, in a night, all this is changed.” Under Gibson’s tutelage, the industrial slums could be cleared and replaced with new, more spacious council homes. New roads would facilitate traffic. Despite his love of Lewis Mumford, who was always critical of the takeover of public space by automobiles, Gibson embraced it. Much more traffic had to be accommodated, he argued. And “it would be fitting for the center of the motor car industry to give a lead” to the rest of the country. Under the postwar governments, bombed Coventry thus became a place to experiment with new ideas.

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Where Jacobs had Eleanor Roosevelt, Moses had David Rockefeller, the tycoon in charge of Chase Manhattan Bank, who argued that the neighborhood was clearly in decline. This, rebutted Jacobs, was entirely predictable. Why would anyone invest in a neighborhood where an expressway was planned to knock through? Not everyone loved Jacobs’s views. Despite agreeing with her about the need to keep cars out of Washington Square Park, Lewis Mumford—who inspired Donald Gibson in Coventry—called her a “confident but sloppy youngster.” Jacobs, he thought, was a naive woman who could not understand cities in the scientific way that he did. Others noted acidly that it was easy for rich women like Jacobs to sing the praises of “slums,” because they were not the ones actually crowded into aging houses—they had the money to occupy whole buildings that poorer people had to share with other families.

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman, Jeff Riggenbach Ph.

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, classic study, disinformation, global village, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of the printing press, Lewis Mumford, Louis Daguerre, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, the medium is the message

A person who reads a book or who watches television or who glances at his watch is not usually interested in how his mind is organized and controlled by these events, still less in what idea of the world is suggested by a book, television, or a watch. But there are men and women who have noticed these things, especially in our own times. Lewis Mumford, for example, has been one of our great noticers. He is not the sort of a man who looks at a clock merely to see what time it is. Not that he lacks interest in the content of clocks, which is of concern to everyone from moment to moment, but he is far more interested in how a clock creates the idea of “moment to moment.”

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But there were other reasons why education was required, as suggested by the following ditty, popular in the seventeenth century:From public schools shall general knowledge flow, For ‘tis the people’s sacred right to know. 8 These people, in other words, had more than the subjection of Satan on their minds. Beginning in the sixteenth century, a great epistemological shift had taken place in which knowledge of every kind was transferred to, and made manifest through, the printed page. “More than any other device,” Lewis Mumford wrote of this shift, “the printed book released people from the domination of the immediate and the local; ... print made a greater impression than actual events.... To exist was to exist in print: the rest of the world tended gradually to become more shadowy. Learning became book-leaming.” 9 In light of this, we may assume that the schooling of the young was understood by the colonists not only as a moral duty but as an intellectual imperative.

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For the first time, we were sent information which answered no question we had asked, and which, in any case, did not permit the right of reply. We may say then that the contribution of the telegraph to public discourse was to dignify irrelevance and amplify impotence. But this was not all: Telegraphy also made public discourse essentially incoherent. It brought into being a world of broken time and broken attention, to use Lewis Mumford’s phrase. The principal strength of the telegraph was its capacity to move information, not collect it, explain it or analyze it. In this respect, telegraphy was the exact opposite of typography. Books, for example, are an excellent container for the accumulation, quiet scrutiny and organized analysis of information and ideas.

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond

affirmative action, Cass Sunstein, crack epidemic, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, desegregation, dumpster diving, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, food desert, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, housing justice, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jobless men, Kickstarter, late fees, Lewis Mumford, mass incarceration, New Urbanism, payday loans, price discrimination, profit motive, rent control, statistical model, superstar cities, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, thinkpad, upwardly mobile, working poor, young professional

Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Camille Zubrinsky Charles, “The Dynamics of Racial Residential Segregation,” Annual Review of Sociology 29 (2003): 167–207. 12. Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: MJF Books, 1961), 417. See also Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1938). 13. Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 1785–1850 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 199. 14. Mumford, City in History, 462–63; Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent; Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (New York: Penguin Books, 1997 [1890]). 15.

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Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, vol. 1, The Growth of Ties of Dependence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 147; Beryl Satter, Family Properties: How the Struggle over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009), 135–45. 2. One’s sovereignty over the land is expressed most powerfully in the act of banishment. Perhaps the first eviction recorded in human history was Adam and Eve’s. See Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: MJF Books, 1961), 107–10. On the link between sovereignty and expulsion, see Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Orlando: Harcourt, 1968). 3. The distinctly American desire to own a home is just as pronounced among the poor as it is among the middle class.

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This may be why Bob Helfgott, a landlord of twenty years who owned dozens of properties in poor neighborhoods, believed lesbians to be difficult tenants. “The gay women,” he said with a sigh. “That angry dyke thing, it drives me crazy. They’re just terrible. Always complaining.” See Cecilia Ridgeway, “Interaction and the Conservation of Gender Inequality: Considering Employment,” American Sociological Review 62 (1997): 218–35. 12. Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: MJF Books, 1961), 107, 110. 13. Tobin and Lenny had had enough. But it is important to recognize that Larraine had nearly avoided eviction, as she had in the past, by borrowing money from a family member. Petitioning acquaintances, friends, or family members for help sometimes worked.

To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction by Phillip Lopate

Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, David Sedaris, desegregation, fear of failure, index card, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lewis Mumford, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight

Luria: The Mind of a Mnemonist, The Man with a Shattered World Richard Selzer: Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery Gretel Ehrlich: The Solace of Open Spaces John McPhee: Coming into the Country Peter Matthiessen: The Snow Leopard Wendell Berry: The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture Edward Hoagland: Hoagland on Nature Barry Lopez: Arctic Dreams Michael Pollan: Second Nature, The Botany of Desire Psychology Sigmund Freud: The Wolf Man, Dora, Civilization and Its Discontents D. W. Winnicott: Winnicott on the Child, Playing and Reality Karen Horney: Feminine Psychology Leslie H. Farber: The Ways of the Will Adam Phillips: On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored Jules Henry: Pathways to Madness Architecture and Landscape Lewis Mumford: Sidewalk Critic, The Lewis Mumford Reader Ada Louise Huxtable: On Architecture Jane Jacobs: The Death and Life of Great American Cities J. B. Jackson: Landscape in Sight William H. Whyte: The Essential William H. Whyte Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour: Learning from Las Vegas Dance Edwin Denby: Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets Arlene Croce: Croce on Dance, The Fred and Ginger Book Elizabeth Kendall: Where She Danced Art Denis Diderot: Diderot on Art John Ruskin: The Stones of Venice Harold Rosenberg: Discovering the Present Clement Greenberg: Collected Essays and Criticism Meyer Schapiro: Impressionism, Modern Art Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings John Berger: Ways of Seeing, Selected Essays Robert Hughes: Nothing If Not Critical Sports Red Smith: The Red Smith Reader, To Absent Friends A.

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Ackerley: My Father and Myself and My Dog Tulip Jean-Paul Sartre: The Words Nadezhda Mandelstam: Hope against Hope Primo Levi: Survival in Auschwitz, The Reawakening Carlos Levi: Christ Stopped at Eboli Ernst Junger: The Storm of Steel Natalia Ginzburg: Family Sayings Storm Jameson: Journey from the North Malcolm X: The Autobiography Frederick Exley: A Fan’s Notes Christopher Isherwood: Christopher and His Kind, My Guru and His Disciple Czeslaw Milosz: Native Realm Victor Shklovsky: A Sentimental Journey, Third Factory Thomas Bernhard: The Cause, The Cellar, The Breath (3 vol. autobiography) V. S. Pritchett: A Cab at the Door Elias Canetti: The Tongue Set Free, The Torch in My Ear, The Play of the Eyes Konstantin Paustovsky: The Story of a Life Boris Pasternak: Safe Conduct, I Remember C. G. Jung: Memories, Dreams and Reflections Kate Simon: Bronx Primitive Lewis Mumford: Sketches from Life Loren Eiseley: All the Strange Hours Thomas Merton: The Seven-Storey Mountain Colette: My Mother’s House Michel Leiris: Manhood, Rules of the Game Geoffrey Wolff: The Duke of Deception Hilary Masters: Last Stands Frank Conroy: Stop-Time Peter Handke: A Sorrow beyond Dreams John Updike: Self-Consciousness Anatole Broyard: Kafka Was the Rage, Intoxicated by My Illness V.

The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection by Michael Harris

4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Burning Man, Carrington event, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Google Glasses, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, low earth orbit, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, moral panic, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, pre–internet, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social web, Steve Jobs, technological solutionism, TED Talk, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, traumatic brain injury, Turing test

Brenda Milner,” CBC News, accessed January 16, 2014, http://www.cbc.ca/player/News/Health/ID/2323340807/. “The Internet allows us to know”: John Brockman, ed., Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net’s Impact on Our Minds and Future (New York: Harper Perennial, 2011), 239. Perhaps we should side with philosopher Lewis Mumford: Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 182. Author Clive Thompson wondered: Clive Thompson, “Your Outboard Brain Knows All,” Wired, September 25, 2007, http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/15-10/st_thompson. A team of psychologists has reported in Science: Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu, and Daniel M.

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Others argue that future generations will learn to make new connections with facts that aren’t held in their heads, that dematerialized knowledge can still lead to innovation. As we inevitably off-load media content to the cloud—storing our books, our television programs, our videos of the trip to Taiwan, and photos of Grandma’s ninetieth birthday, all on a nameless server—can we happily dematerialize our mind’s stores, too? Perhaps we should side with philosopher Lewis Mumford, who insisted in The Myth of the Machine that “information retrieving,” however expedient, is simply no substitute for the possession of knowledge accrued through personal and direct labor. Author Clive Thompson wondered about this when he came across recent research suggesting that we remember fewer and fewer facts these days—of three thousand people polled by neuroscientist Ian Robertson, the young were less able to recall basic personal information (a full one-third, for example, didn’t know their own phone numbers).

Hacking Capitalism by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

Abraham Maslow, air gap, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Debian, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, Donald Davies, Eben Moglen, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, invention of the telephone, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mitch Kapor, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, patent troll, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, profit motive, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, safety bicycle, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Whole Earth Catalog, Yochai Benkler

By extension, regulation over a plant’s inputs and outputs translates into control over the farmer tending the plant. Men themselves are grouped into allopoietic ‘social machines’. The first example coming to mind is the factory. Subsumed under capital, living labour has outputs (surplus value) and inputs (commodified needs). Historian of technology Lewis Mumford dated this wretchedness back to Pharaohs’ Egypt. The orchestration of slaves and free men on a grand scale, crowned by the erection of the pyramids, exemplified to him a gigantic, allopoietic system. He labelled it the mega machine. Here the concept of the machine is extended beyond a narrow focus on any single device, giving due credit to the social machine which organises and confines the operation and scope of the technical machine.

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Language can only exist in a commons. This is true whether the language in question consists of words, software code, or brands. Signs acquire their use value when they are diffused to the point of becoming a standard, in which case the product is pushed to the edge where the commodity form dissolves. Historian of technology, Lewis Mumford, grasped this as a potentiality many years ago: “[…] the production of words introduced the first real economy of abundance […]”19 For as long as words were little more than the building blocks of prose, Mumford’s observation was of limited relevance. When signs become components in software machines, and start to intervene directly in economic reality, his remark carries a lot more weight.

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New attempts are made in contemporary society when a community faces the depletion of resources on which it depends. For a collection of such examples, see David Fenny, Fikret Berkes, Bonnie McCay, and James Acheson “The Tragedy of the Commons: Twenty-two Years Later.” in ed. John Baden and Douglas Noonan, Managing the Commons (London: Indiana University Press, 1998). 19. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Human Development, (New York: HBJ Book, 1967), 96. 20. Jean-Joseph Goux argues that with the post-modern turn of capitalism, Georges Bataille’s thinking has become attractive to capital’s apologetics. Jean-Joseph Goux, “General Economics and Postmodern Capitalism” Yale French Studies 78 (1990).

Supertall: How the World's Tallest Buildings Are Reshaping Our Cities and Our Lives by Stefan Al

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, colonial rule, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, digital twin, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Trump, Easter island, Elisha Otis, energy transition, food miles, Ford Model T, gentrification, high net worth, Hyperloop, invention of air conditioning, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Marchetti’s constant, megaproject, megastructure, Mercator projection, New Urbanism, plutocrats, plyscraper, pneumatic tube, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, SimCity, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social distancing, Steve Jobs, streetcar suburb, synthetic biology, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the built environment, the High Line, transit-oriented development, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, tulip mania, urban planning, urban sprawl, value engineering, Victor Gruen, VTOL, white flight, zoonotic diseases

With building codes regulating the elevators and egress stairs on the inside of towers, architects spent most of their creative energy designing the curtain wall exterior. In 1973, these regulations spawned the imposing Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, briefly the tallest buildings in the world. For their plain extrusions, urban critic Lewis Mumford called them “just glass-and-metal filing cabinets.”19 In addition to the modernist towers, the city’s planners had been captivated with a few new private plazas. The minimalist plaza lined with reflecting pools adjacent to the Seagram Building, a burnished copper building designed by Mies van der Rohe, buzzed with life.

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Even drive-in movie theaters had a comeback. Could this mean the end of the New York City skyscraper? “NYC must develop an immediate plan to reduce density,”45 tweeted New York governor Andrew Cuomo, on the cusp of the crisis. This is tragic, since cities like New York are also our greatest achievements, the root of civilization. Lewis Mumford, the noted writer on cities, described cities as “containers” that help speed up civilization. “As with a gas, the very pressure of the molecules within that limited space produced more social collisions and interactions within a generation than would have occurred in many centuries if still isolated in their native habitats, without boundaries,” he wrote.46 From their very beginnings, cities accelerated innovation and social experiments.

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Building,” Associated Press, November 12, 2013. 42.Stefanos Chen, “The Downside to Life in a Supertall Tower: Leaks, Creaks, Breaks,” New York Times, February 3, 2021. 43.Henry Petroski, “Super-Tall and Super-Slender Structures: Skyscrapers with Smaller Footprints Require Countermeasures to Wind and Sway,” American Scientist 107 (2019): 342–45. 44.Andrew Lawrence, “The Skyscraper Index: Faulty Towers,” Property Report, Dresdner Kleinwort Benson Research (January 15, 1999). 45.Emily Badger, “Density Is Normally Good for Us. That Will Be True after Coronavirus, Too,” New York Times, March 24, 2020. 46.Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1961), 34. 47.Alan Berube, MetroNation: How US Metropolitan Areas Fuel American Prosperity, Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings, 2007. 48.Enrico Berkes and Ruben Gaetani, “The Geography of Unconventional Innovation,” Rotman School of Management Working Paper 3423143 (2019). 49.Luís Bettencourt, José Lobo, Dirk Helbing, Christian Kühnert, and Geoffrey West, “Growth, Innovation, Scaling, and the Pace of Life in Cities,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104, no. 17 (2007): 7301–6.

The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community by Marc J. Dunkelman

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, Broken windows theory, business cycle, call centre, clean water, company town, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Brooks, delayed gratification, different worldview, double helix, Downton Abbey, Dunbar number, Edward Jenner, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, helicopter parent, if you build it, they will come, impulse control, income inequality, invention of movable type, Jane Jacobs, Khyber Pass, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Richard Florida, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, the strength of weak ties, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban decay, urban planning, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

As anyone who has been to an ocean beach knows, waves, the central metaphor of the Tofflers’ grand theory, rarely emerge in any sort of neat progression.73 And true to form, even after the Second Wave crested in the 1950s, First Wave society remained in much of rural America. The same sorts of overlap occurred decades later as the Third Wave began to crest over the Second—a process that continues today. Lewis Mumford, an early twentieth-century scholar who used waves to describe changing patterns of American life decades before the Tofflers, wrote in the 1920s that “the movement of population is not from farm-village to industrial town, to financial metropolis; the migrations rather come as successive waves, and while one wave recedes as the next comes foaming in, the first nevertheless persists and mingles with the second as an undertow.”74 The enduring truth of Mumford’s statement is plain again today.

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And in 1807, an Englishman trying to explain the differences between the old and new worlds noted that while Englishmen thought in terms of “church and nation,” Americans tended to sort the world by “village and congregation.”9 That distinction isn’t simply a difference in perspective; “townships,” properly understood as the rudimentary building blocks of American society, were a crucial force in driving the birth of a new nation. Writing in 1925—a year shy of the nation’s 150th birthday—the philosopher, historian, and sociologist Lewis Mumford published an essay arguing that American history had been defined by four major migrations.10 The first was westward expansion of the frontier, and the second our economic transition from farm to factory. The third migration saw the arrival of millions of European immigrants in the nation’s metropolises.

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Through the early twentieth century, community organizations played a more central role in caring for those unable to take care of themselves. As Theda Skocpol has documented, the turn of the twentieth century marked the peak of voluntary associations, a phenomenon fueled by the fact that no public institutions were available to handle the challenges facing a nation streaming from farm to factory.11 Lewis Mumford, in an effort to explain how community was structured in the teeming cities of the Gilded Age, noted that private nonprofits were at the center of each neighborhood’s capacity to care: “In every industrial center remedial agencies from soup kitchens to building and loan associations, from social settlements to employment bureaus, have been endeavoring to supply, partly from private means, the necessary facilities for living and enjoyment that were left out in the growth and expansion of the industrial town.”12 Absent the sort of care provided by family members, neighbors, and charities, there was, for most Americans, no safety net.

Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace by Ronald J. Deibert

4chan, air gap, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Brian Krebs, call centre, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, connected car, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, digital divide, disinformation, end-to-end encryption, escalation ladder, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Hacker Ethic, Herman Kahn, informal economy, information security, invention of writing, Iridium satellite, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planetary scale, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, South China Sea, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, Stuxnet, Ted Kaczynski, the medium is the message, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, unit 8200, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

Anonymous: Expect Us But at this terminal point, where the automatic process is on the verge of creating a whole race of acquiescent and obedient human automatons, the forces of life have begun, sometimes stealthily, sometimes ostentatiously, to re-assert themselves in the only form that is left them: an explosive affirmation of the primal energies of the organism. —Lewis Mumford, The Pentagon of Power June 3, 2011. A video is posted on YouTube from those outlaws of the Net: Anonymous. It is a still image of a now-classic Anonymous poster: blue and black shading, a frightening looking lineup of men in suits topped with question marks where their heads should be. Hovering above is the overlord Guy Fawkes, brim down, covering his gaze in menacing fashion.

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Oriented around a specific set of values that would inform our research, as I saw it (and still do) hacktivism has a lot in common with a philosophical tradition stretching back to the ecological holism of Harold Innis, the pragmatism and experimentalism of William James and John Dewey, and the yearning for a return to a polytechnic culture of the early Renaissance articulated by Lewis Mumford. These thinkers all shared a particular view of technology as something that should be seen not as a thing or product, but as a technic, a craft, that was inherently political and essential to a healthy, democratic, and public life. Just as Mumford saw Leonardo da Vinci as the paradigmatic proto-citizen of a polytechnic society, I saw him as a prototypical hacktivist: interdisciplinary and experimentalist.

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In November 2012, the United States Department of State issued a guidance document that attempted to clarify under what conditions companies might violate restrictions on the export of “sensitive technologies” to countries like Iran and Syria, which can be found at: http​s://ww​w.feder​alregis​ter.go​v/arti​cles/2​012/1​1/13​/20​12–27​642​/depar​tment-of-st​ate-sta​te-dep​artme​nt-sanct​ions-inform​ation-an​d-guida​nce#h-10. See also Ben Wagner, Exporting Censorship and Surveillance Technology (The Hague: Hivos, 2012). 14: ANONYMOUS : EXPECT US 1 Epigraph: Lewis Mumford, The Pentagon of Power: The Myth of the Machine, Vol. II (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974). Mumford’s Pentagon of Power is a major influence on my thinking about political resistance and technology. I assigned it as the standard text to my graduate seminar on the Politics of Planetary Surveillance, taught at the University of Toronto from 1997 to 2004. 2 Ryan Cleary, a nineteen-year-old member: Details of Cleary’s arrest appear in Graham Cluley, “Ryan Cleary has Asperger’s Syndrome, Court Hears,” Sophos Naked Security, June 26, 2011, http:​//nake​dsecuri​ty.soph​os.com/​2011​/06​/26/​ryan-cl​eary-aspe​rgers-synd​rome. 3 Anonymous’s breaches are typically followed by the exfiltration of data: For details on the Stratfor breach, see Richard Norton-Taylor and Ed Pilkington, “Hackers Expose Defence and Intelligence Officials in US and UK,” Guardian, January 8, 2010, http​://ww​w.guard​ian.co.u​k/techn​ology/2​012/j​an/0​8/hacke​rs-expose-def​ence-int​ellige​nce-offic​ials. 4 Neustar … surveyed IT professionals: Neustar reports on the impacts of DDOS attacks in Neustar Insights, “DDOS Survey: Q1 2012 When Businesses Go Dark,” http​://hel​lo.neust​ar.bi​z/rs/​neustar​inc/im​ages/neu​star-ins​ights-dd​os-att​ack-sur​vey-q1​–20​12.pdf 5 The New York-based hacker and artist collective: Details of Electronic Disturbance Theatre’s use of DDOS attacks in support of the Zapatista movement are available in Coco Fusoco, “Performance Art in a Digital Age: A Conversation with Ricardo Dominguez,” The Hacktivist Magazine (2001), http​://www.iw​ar.or​g.uk/hac​kers/resou​rces/the-hack​tivist/iss​ue-1/vo​l1.html. 6 has likened them to picket lines: Evgeny Morozov argues that “under certain conditions … DDOS attacks can be seen as a legitimate expression of dissent, very much similar to civil disobedience” in “In Defense of DDOS,” Slate, December 13, 2010, htt​p://www.s​late.co​m/art​icles/t​echnolo​gy/te​chnology​/2010​/12/​in_de​fens​e​_​of_​ddo​s.html.

Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America by Giles Slade

Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, American ideology, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, creative destruction, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, global village, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, invention of radio, Jeff Hawkins, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, PalmPilot, planned obsolescence, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, white picket fence, women in the workforce

George, as he was known, is now generally recognized as the man who invented progressive obsolescence.1 This puts him at the head of a group of writers who by the early 1930s were devoting considerable attention to products that were made to break—a group that would include the distinguished company of Archibald MacLeish, Aldous Huxley, and Lewis Mumford. Justus George firs introduced the concept of progressive obsolescence in a lead article for Advertising and Selling in the fall of 1928. With characteristic energy, he wrote: “We must induce people . . . to buy a greater variety of goods on the same principle that they now buy automobiles, radios and clothes, namely: buying goods not to wear out, but to trade in or discard after a short time . . . the progressive obsolescence principle . . . means buying for up-to-dateness, effici ncy, and style, buying for . . . the sense of modernness rather than simply for the last ounce of use.”2 Progressive obsolescence was J.

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But monopolies and cartels were illegal by the 1930s, owing to a series of antitrust laws that were increasingly enforced. Moreover, the meaning of “planned obsolescence”had not yet crossed over from its external technocratic use to become an internal industrial substitute for adulteration; and the alternative phrase, “death dating,” would not be invented until 1953 (see Chapter 6). In 1934 Lewis Mumford described practices that would later be called “death dating,” but he did not use that term nor the phrase “planned obsolescence.” So, despite Bernard London’s pamphlets, planned obsolescence probably did not achieve currency among industrial designers until after the 1936 publication of an article on “product durability” in Printers’ Ink.48 Still, Mumford recognized death dating and psychological obsolescence for what they were, and wrote books criticizing both practices.

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A.Hobson,Work and Wealth: A Human Valuation (New York:Kelley, 1968), p. 90. 47. Stuart Chase, The Tragedy of Waste (New York: Macmillan, 1925), pp. 70, 74. 48. Leon Kelley, “Outmoded Durability: If Merchandise Does Not Wear Out Faster, Factories Will Be Idle, People Unemployed,” Printers’ Ink, January 9, 1936. 49. Lewis Mumford,Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1934), p. 394. 50. George Wise, Willis R. Whitney, General Electric and the Origins of U.S. Industrial Research (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 117. 51. Ibid., p. 41. 52. Letter from L. C. Porter to M. I. Sloan, November 1, 1932.

Clock of the Long Now by Stewart Brand

Albert Einstein, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, Danny Hillis, Eratosthenes, Extropian, fault tolerance, George Santayana, Herman Kahn, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, life extension, longitudinal study, low earth orbit, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, nuclear winter, pensions crisis, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Metcalfe, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog

Park it in academic disciplines. (“Writing history is a way of getting rid of the past”—Goethe again.) Park it in august buildings. (“Layer upon layer, past times preserve themselves in the city until life itself is finally threatened with suffocation; then, in sheer defense, modern man invents the museum”—Lewis Mumford.) Park the past in literature and in theater. Park it in religion. (Yet why are Europe’s beautiful cathedrals empty while America’s storefront churches are full?) A new version of the problem is coming. As Hawthorne predicted, the amount of accumulated past is accelerating. Each new U.S. president leaves behind more papers to be preserved than all the previous presidents combined.

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Nathaniel Hawthorne, quoted in Jeannette Greenfield, The Return of Cultural Treasures (Cambridge Univ., 1989), p. 310. :79 “America, you have it better than our old continent . . .” Johann Wolfgang Goethe, quoted in Irresistible Decay (Los Angeles: Getty, 1997), p. 55. :79 “Layer upon layer, past times preserve themselves in the city . . .” Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938) :79 Each new U.S. president leaves behind more papers to be preserved than all the previous presidents combined. Personal communication from David Lowenthal, author of Possessed by the Past and The Past Is a Foreign Country. CHAPTER 14, ENDING THE DIGITAL DARK AGE :82 “Digital information is forever.”

City: Urbanism and Its End by Douglas W. Rae

agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, business climate, City Beautiful movement, classic study, complexity theory, creative destruction, desegregation, edge city, Ford Model T, gentrification, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, income per capita, informal economy, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, open immigration, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, public intellectual, Saturday Night Live, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, white flight, Works Progress Administration

The heavy lines indicate highways completed during the Lee years: I-95 was planned as the Connecticut Turnpike before Lee’s time, and opened in 1958, while the Oak Street Connector (1959) and I-91 (1966) were plotted and built on Lee’s watch. Highway building was in this period wildly popular with people living away from the cities they traversed. Intellectuals were harshly critical, as, for instance, Lewis Mumford’s jeremiad: “This is pyramid building with a vengeance: a tomb of concrete roads and ramps covering the dead corpse of a city.”26 Mumford was thinking of New York; his rhetoric would have fit New Haven with equal force. Highways removed everything in their paths, while urban renewal was in most cases somewhat more selective.

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Atwater (New York: Munsell, 1887), 500. 23. The Quinnipiac is by far the largest of the three with a drainage basin of 169 square miles. See Marianne McElroy, “Natural Drainage Basins of Connecticut” (Hartford: Connecticut Geological and Natural History Survey, 1981). 24. This tidy bit of shorthand comes from Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1934). I understand it to indicate a complex of interdependent technologies working together in a particular period. Mumford’s further elaboration of such things as “otechnic” and “paleotechnic” seems unnecessary for present purposes. 25. As counterpoint, very inefficient steam engines were used much earlier to drive mining pumps at sites where fuel was abundant and cheap (e.g., at a coal mine). 26.

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Arnold, “Playgrounds of New Haven,” Saturday Chronicle, January 2, 1915. 30. Seymour, New Haven, 593–94. 31. New Haven Evening Register, August 23, 1916, p. 1. 32. Ibid., January 18, 1917. 33. Ibid., August 25, 1916. 34. Ibid., September 3, 1916. 35. Stilgoe, Borderland, 1820–1939, 9. CHAPTER 7. BUSINESS AND CIVIC EROSION 1. Lewis Mumford, The City in History (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1961), 413. 2. When I say that urbanizing technologies built cities and dimmed their hinterlands in this passage, I of course mean that they played a dominant enabling role in the trains of human decisions, embedded in capitalist institutions, to bring about these changes. 3.

City Squares: Eighteen Writers on the Spirit and Significance of Squares Around the World by Catie Marron

Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, Day of the Dead, deindustrialization, do-ocracy, fixed-gear, gentrification, Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, plutocrats, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, urban planning

The city’s urban planning czar Robert Moses had wanted to drive a highway straight through the middle of Washington Square. That the Village has become one of the most desirable and expensive places in the world is in no small measure due to Moses’s failure and the park’s survival. The good life, wrote the other great New York urban writer of Jacobs’s era, Lewis Mumford, involves more than shared prosperity; it entails what Mumford described as an almost religious refashioning of values based on an ecological view of the city. Seen whole, in all its variety and interconnectedness, urban health is expressed physically in a natural configuration of built forms across the city.

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., Book XVIII] The Ancient Greek word for “assembly” in the first line is “agora”—perhaps the first mention of a city square in recorded history. In this scene from Achilles’ shield, the agora is simply a public place where a dispute can be hashed out: the rudimentary origin of self-government. As Lewis Mumford observed in his 1961 classic The City in History, “Such a place for gathering, possibly under a sacred tree or by a spring, must have long existed in the village: an area large enough so that village dances or games might be held there, too. All these functions of the agora would pass into the city, to assume more differentiated forms in the complex urban pattern.”

A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams by Michael Pollan

A Pattern Language, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, dematerialisation, Frank Gehry, interchangeable parts, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, Mercator projection, off-the-grid, Peter Eisenman, place-making, Stewart Brand, telemarketer, The Great Good Place, urban renewal, zero-sum game

Yet I felt that by choosing its site—a single place out of all possible places in which to build—I was setting this great big contingency in motion, rolling it down the steep, one-way hill of personal and local history. Faced with any such large decision, my first instinct (if you can call it that) is to look for a book to tell me what to do. But I was surprised to find that the literature of architecture and building contains remarkably little on the subject. Lewis Mumford had complained back in the fifties that the proper siting of houses was a lost art, and I turned up little to suggest it has since been found. Mumford pointed me all the way back to Vitruvius, whose famous treatise on architecture, written in the first century B.C., offers some sensible advice on the siting of cities, dwelling houses, and tombs, all of which, he maintained, should be located according to the same principles.

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And told we were, over and over again—in the captions, in the quotations from the architects’ statements of purpose, and in the jurors’ comments, which were informative and often highly entertaining. A good thing, too, because without the words, these buildings were incomprehensible indeed—sort of like Charlie’s booklet, but without any of the sensual rewards. Lewis Mumford once wrote that sometime in the nineteenth century it became necessary to know how to read before one could truly see a building. Architecture had become referential, so a person needed a key in order to fully understand it. A Greek Revival house, for example, embodied a message about republican virtue that it helped to have at least some small knowledge of the classics to appreciate.

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Thoreau, Henry David. Walden (New York: Penguin Classics, 1986). Walker, Lester. Tiny Houses (Woodstock, N.Y.: The Overlook Press, 1987). Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harvest, 1989). Wright, Frank Lloyd. The Natural House (New York: Meridian Books, 1954). Chapter 2: The Site For Lewis Mumford’s discussion of the siting of houses in America, see Roots of Contemporary American Architecture (New York: Dover, 1972). There’s an excellent summary of picturesque landscape theory in The Villa: Form and Ideology of Country Houses, by James Ackerman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

Higher: A Historic Race to the Sky and the Making of a City by Neal Bascomb

buttonwood tree, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Ford Model T, hiring and firing, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, pneumatic tube, Ralph Waldo Emerson, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, W. E. B. Du Bois, Works Progress Administration

They celebrated function over form and were devoted to designing a “machine for living.” Ornamentation and extravagance had no place in the clean, precise world they imagined. The lean Depression years helped foster this “International Style,” and for many, the Chrysler Building was a lightning rod for what had gone wrong in American architecture. Lewis Mumford wrote in a 1931 article entitled “Notes on Modern Architecture”: “The ornamental treatment of the [Chrysler Building] facade is a series of restless mistakes [which] could easily have been corrected by a plain, factual statement of the materials . . . Such buildings show one the real dangers of a plutocracy; it gives the masters of our civilization an unusual opportunity to exhibit their barbarous egos, with no sense of restraint or shame.

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Stolen height titles, ruined careers, vicious reviews, miserly neglect, lost fortunes, and terrible accidents—these may seem to be the legacy of the skyscraper race, but they aren’t. Fitzgerald was too soaked in regret to understand that the Empire State was far from the “crowning error” of the city. Lewis Mumford was too enthralled by functionalism to see that the Chrysler Building reflected not plutocracy, but democracy. George Ohrstrom was too sullen after investing so much in the Manhattan Company Building to understand its value far outweighed that of its forty-three high-speed elevators. If they had taken a step back, had looked at who designed and drove these buildings to such great height, perhaps they would have come to a different conclusion.

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“Dear Faith”: Letter from Bill Gowen to Faith Griswold Hackl, September 4, 1941, courtesy of George Hackl. “unloved and unmourned”: Letter from Chesley Bonestell to Bill Estler, no date, courtesy of Ron Miller. Desperate for someone to accept: William Edwin Squire Jr., personal interview. “The ornamental treatment”: Lewis Mumford, “Notes on Modern Architecture,” New Republic (March 18, 1931). On May 20, 1946, an army transport: Jay Shockley, Manhattan Company Building (Landmarks Preservation Commission, 1995). Decades after the raising of the Chrysler: David Michaelis, “77 Stories—The Secret Life of a Skyscraper,” Manhattan, Inc.

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All by Adrian Hon

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 4chan, Adam Curtis, Adrian Hon, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Astronomia nova, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, bread and circuses, British Empire, buy and hold, call centre, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Sedaris, deep learning, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Galaxy Zoo, game design, gamification, George Floyd, gig economy, GitHub removed activity streaks, Google Glasses, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobs below the API, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, meme stock, meta-analysis, Minecraft, moral panic, multilevel marketing, non-fungible token, Ocado, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Parler "social media", passive income, payment for order flow, prisoner's dilemma, QAnon, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, r/findbostonbombers, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, spinning jenny, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, workplace surveillance

Managers decided to ignore the previous conditions and pay the bonus anyway.77 CD Projekt Red’s attempt to bribe their workers was well and truly dead. We can only hope its lesson is learned by the only kind of organisation bigger than massive entertainment conglomerates: the government. CHAPTER SIX THE MAGNIFICENT BRIBE IN 1963, AMERICAN HISTORIAN AND PHILOSOPHER OF TECHNOLOGY LEWIS Mumford spoke at the Fund for the Republic in New York as part of a convocation on “Challenges to Democracy in the Next Decade.”1 Mumford warned of the threat that “authoritarian technics” could pose to democracy: From late neolithic times in the Near East, right down to our own day, two technologies have recurrently existed side by side: one authoritarian, the other democratic, the first system-centered, immensely powerful, but inherently unstable, the other man-centered, relatively weak, but resourceful and durable.

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Don’t collect it if it’s not necessary. And try to collect as little as possible if we have to.” Our fascination around reprehensible Chinese surveillance practices all too often only distracts from our own governments’ doings. Summing up his speech on the dangers of authoritarian technics, Lewis Mumford asked, “Is it really humanly profitable to give up the possibility of living a few years at Walden Pond, so to say, for the privilege of spending a lifetime in Walden Two?” Walden Pond is familiar to many as the site of Henry David Thoreau’s reflection on spiritual discovery and self-reliance in his book Walden.

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Charlie Hall, “Cyberpunk 2077 Has Involved Months of Crunch, Despite Past Promises,” Polygon, December 4, 2020, www.polygon.com/2020/12/4/21575914/cyberpunk-2077-release-crunch-labor-delays-cd-projekt-red; Patricia Hernandez, “Cyberpunk 2077’s Digital Store Removal: Your Questions, Answered,” Polygon, December 18, 2020, www.polygon.com/2020/12/18/22189082/cyberpunk-2077-delist-where-how-to-get-refund-update-patch-will-my-game-still-work-cd-projekt-red. 77. Jay Peters, “Cyberpunk 2077’s Long-Struggling Developers Will See Their Bonuses After All,” The Verge, Vox Media, December 11, 2020, www.theverge.com/2020/12/11/22170655/cyberpunk-2077-cd-projekt-red-developers-staff-bonuses-review-score. CHAPTER SIX: THE MAGNIFICENT BRIBE 1. Lewis Mumford, “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics,” Technology and Culture 5, no. 1 (Winter 1964): 1–8, https://doi.org/10.2307/3101118. 2. Richard Wike and Shannon Schumacher, “3. Satisfaction with Democracy,” Pew Research Center, February 27, 2020, www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/02/27/satisfaction-with-democracy. 3.

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller by Alec Nevala-Lee

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, American energy revolution, Apple II, basic income, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Columbine, complexity theory, Computer Lib, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, declining real wages, digital nomad, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Golden Gate Park, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hydraulic fracturing, index card, information retrieval, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kitchen Debate, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megastructure, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Paul Graham, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, remote working, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas Malthus, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

In an unpublished essay of the same title, he framed his sales pitch around a sweeping argument: “The living abodes of humans will become more and more decentralized, and industry more and more centralized and mechanicalized.” At a time when shifts in transportation, communications, and power transmission encouraged urban theorists such as Lewis Mumford to explore the notion of decentralization, Fuller wisely positioned his original objective—houses distributed from a factory—as part of the inevitable expansion of the geographical freedom of all mankind. A truly decentralized dwelling had to be light and autonomous. Using a term that he claimed inaccurately to have coined himself, Fuller spoke of “debunking” excess weight using materials and methods that were economical only in mass production.

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Afterward, he felt badly, and he began to emulate Le Corbusier in wearing a plain black suit, or “bank clerk’s clothing,” in order to highlight his ideas, not his eccentricities. He rarely achieved this goal, but his efforts were paying off. Henry Saylor, the editor of Architecture magazine, was interested in a book on his work, potentially to be written by Lewis Mumford for Scribner, for which Fuller recorded a lecture at the Architectural League of New York. After an introduction by Corbett, who confirmed that he wanted the house for the World’s Fair, Fuller explained its features, including photoelectric sensors to eliminate germs from doorknobs. It was a far-fetched notion at the time, and Wolcott worried that it made his brother “a liar.”

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Fuller’s proposed city was a tetrahedron two miles high, providing the maximum surface area on the outside for apartments, which could be added or removed as necessary. It could be built on land or anchored in water, and Sadao worked dutifully on versions for both the mainland and Tokyo Bay. Fuller received an annual fee of $25,000 to develop Tetrahedron City, which replaced the tower altogether. Renderings were later published in Playboy of what the critic Lewis Mumford called a monstrosity “big enough to entomb the population of a whole town.” While the most famous structure with which he would ever be associated was under way in Montreal, Fuller spent most of his time on ideas that were unlikely to be realized. Another was the Minnesota Experimental City, which the geophysicist Athelstan Spilhaus conceived as a futuristic community with zones for jet packs.

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech by Jamie Susskind

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, Andrew Keen, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, continuation of politics by other means, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, Google bus, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine translation, Metcalfe’s law, mittelstand, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, night-watchman state, Oculus Rift, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philippa Foot, post-truth, power law, price discrimination, price mechanism, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selection bias, self-driving car, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, tech bro, technological determinism, technological singularity, technological solutionism, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, universal basic income, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture , working-age population, Yochai Benkler

Jamie Susskind London May 2018 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS COPY RIGHT NOTIFIC ATIONS Chapter 2 epigraph: From Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford (1934). Copyright © 1934 by Elizabeth M. Morss and James G. Morss. Used by permission. Courtesy of the estate of Lewis and Sophia Mumford. Chapter 4 epigraph: From Wind, Sand, & Stars, Antoine de SaintExupery (1939). Reproduced with permission by the Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Estate. Chapter 7 epigraph: From Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell (1949). Copyright © George Orwell, 1949. Reprinted by permission of Bill Hamilton as the Literary Executor of the Estate of the Late Sonia Brownell Orwell. Chapter 9 epigraph: From Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford (1934). Copyright © 1934 by Elizabeth M.

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Whatever the next computing paradigm turns out to be, it’s certainly not unreasonable to assume that computing power will continue to grow at the same rate as it has since Pascal’s invention of the calculator 400 years ago. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS T WO Increasingly Integrated Technology ‘a new world has come into existence; but it exists only in fragments.’ Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (1934) In the digital lifeworld, technology will permeate our world, inseparable from our daily experience and embedded in physical structures and objects that we never regarded previously as ‘technology’. Our lives will play out in a teeming network of connected people and ‘smart’ things, with little meaningful distinction between human and machine, online and offline, virtual and physical, or, as the author William Gibson puts it, between ‘cyberspace’ and ‘meatspace’.1 This is what I call increasingly integrated technology.

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Filters cloud the very perspective needed to keep an eye on the powerful. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS NINE Public and Private Power ‘One does not make a child powerful by placing a stick of dynamite in his hands: one only adds to the dangers of his irresponsibility.’ Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (1934) Who? Whom? Lenin is said to have distilled politics into two words: ‘Who? Whom?’1 If the previous four chapters are close to the mark, then we’ll need to think hard about the who and whom of power in the future.That’s the purpose of this short chapter. Turning first to whom, it seems clear that most of us will become subject to technology’s power in two main ways.

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis by Leo Hollis

Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Shoup, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Enrique Peñalosa, export processing zone, Firefox, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, place-making, power law, Quicken Loans, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

It is said by some that if the government had listened more to Geddes, and his understanding of ‘the harmonisation of social customs and religious ideas with the work of modern reconstruction’,4 the subsequent history of Palestine would have been very different. His notions were inspired by the science of life, moulded by empirical observation and deductive intuition. Nevertheless, Geddes was a poor communicator of his own ideas, and was no architect who could give shape and form to his philosophy. Instead he found the perfect disciple in Lewis Mumford, an American writer who later became the most influential architecture critic of his generation. Mumford would turn Geddes’s looping, mental peregrinations into coherent and urgent theory, ensuring that regional planning was one of the dominant ideas of how a city should be. As a leading member of the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA), Mumford transformed and popularised Geddes’s theories: allowing cities to grow unchecked was intolerable; people, industry and land were an integrated network that needed to be planned.

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Moving away from this were rings of housing, based around a 420-foot grand avenue, which also enclosed schools; and after that, centrifugal zones of factories, dairies and services. There was to be no smoke and every machine was to be driven by electricity. Needless to say, however, there was little discussion of life on the streets within the new Garden City; as Lewis Mumford would later write in his 1946 introduction to Garden Cities of Tomorrow, Howard was more interested in physical shapes than social processes. Howard’s dream was turned into reality at Letchworth, Hertfordshire, 34 miles to the north of London, and has been recreated around the world ever since.

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They will have all the attributes of a well-kept dignified cemetery.’14 From then on, the clash between Jacobs and Moses seemed inevitable. There was an early skirmish in the 1950s when Moses proposed driving a highway through Washington Square Park in order to ease congestion. Jacobs joined in with the campaign of energetic letter-writing, using her contacts to get high-profile support, including Whyte, the urban historian Lewis Mumford, who then wrote an influential column for the New Yorker, and even Eleanor Roosevelt. She brought her own children to the weekend protests on the square, providing perfect photo opportunities. On 25 June 1958 the New York Daily Mirror published a picture of Jacobs holding one end of a tied ribbon, symbol of a ‘reverse ribbon cutting’, signifying that Moses’s scheme had been delayed into oblivion in the face of determined opposition.

What’s Your Type? by Merve Emre

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, behavioural economics, card file, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, emotional labour, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gabriella Coleman, God and Mammon, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, index card, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, p-value, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planned obsolescence, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, Socratic dialogue, Stanford prison experiment, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce

“As I shall spend three weeks”: Carl Jung to Katharine Briggs, August 2, 1936, Hs 1056:4319, ETH. She would note in her diary: “Pleasure vs. Enterprise.” A handsome: Forrest G. Robinson, Love’s Story Told: A Life of Henry A. Murray (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 27. “Because Fascism”: Lewis Mumford and Henry Alexander Murray, “In Old Friendship”: The Correspondence of Lewis Mumford and Henry Murray, ed. Frank G. Novak Jr. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007), 190. Psychological Types seemed to him: Robinson, Love’s Story Told, 94. Murray had to learn: Ibid., 125. “One could characterize”: Claire Douglas, Translate This Darkness: Christiana Morgan, the Veiled Woman in Jung’s Circles (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 134.

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But he was plagued by certain doubts about Jung and the future practice of analytic psychology now that the ruling parties of Europe were girding themselves for yet another great war. This war, Murray suspected, would require a different appraisal of the human psyche than what Jung and his disciples had practiced since World War I. “Because Fascism has reared its Brutal head we can attack it, & in attacking it gain strength,” he wrote to his friend Lewis Mumford. But he worried about the “forward march of advertisitis,” a term he coined to describe the narcissism that bedeviled psychoanalysts, encouraging them and their patients to retreat from the social and political world into the solipsism of the self. It was a quietly evil force that Murray believed was corrupting, or had corrupted, “the Emotional Integration of the whole Nation.”

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, ASML, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, ChatGPT, choice architecture, circular economy, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, drone strike, drop ship, dual-use technology, Easter island, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, energy transition, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, facts on the ground, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, GPT-3, GPT-4, hallucination problem, hive mind, hype cycle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lab leak, large language model, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, license plate recognition, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, Mustafa Suleyman, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Nikolai Kondratiev, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, profit motive, prompt engineering, QAnon, quantum entanglement, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, SpaceX Starlink, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steven Levy, strong AI, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, techlash, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, TSMC, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, warehouse robotics, William MacAskill, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, zero day

For the futurist Alvin Toffler, the information technology revolution was a “third wave” in human society following the Agricultural and Industrial revolutions. Joseph Schumpeter saw waves as explosions of innovation igniting new businesses in bursts of “creative destruction.” The great philosopher of technology Lewis Mumford believed the “machine age” was actually more like a thousand-year unfolding of three major successive waves. More recently the economist Carlota Perez has talked about “techno-economic paradigms” rapidly shifting amid technological revolutions. Moments of booming disruption and wild speculation regear economies.

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If zombielike states will sleepwalk into catastrophe, their openness and growing chaos a petri dish for uncontained technology, authoritarian states are already gladly charging into just this techno-dystopia, setting the stage, technologically if not morally, for massive invasions of privacy and curtailments of liberty. And on the continuum between the two there is also a chance of the worst of all worlds: scattered but repressive surveillance and control apparatuses that still don’t add up to a watertight system. Catastrophe and dystopia. The philosopher of technology Lewis Mumford talked about the “megamachine,” where social systems combine with technologies to form “a uniform, all-enveloping structure” that is “controlled for the benefit of depersonalized collective organizations.” In the name of security, humanity could unleash the megamachine to, literally, stop other megamachines from coming into being.

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT And in the last hundred The remainder coming between 1000 BCE and 1700 CE. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT For the futurist Alvin Toffler Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: Bantam, 1984). See also the work of Nikolai Kondratiev on long-cycle waves. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The great philosopher of technology Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934). GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT More recently the economist Carlota Perez, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages (Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 2002).

The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream by Christopher B. Leinberger

addicted to oil, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset allocation, big-box store, centre right, commoditize, credit crunch, David Brooks, desegregation, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, edge city, Ford Model T, full employment, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, McMansion, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, RAND corporation, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Savings and loan crisis, Seaside, Florida, the built environment, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, value engineering, walkable city, white flight

I liked 1960 in purple lights, going a hundred miles an hour around impossible turns ever onwards toward the certified cities of the flawless future.”11 There was little debate about whether the future should be car-driven. The excitement for this vision drowned out the few critics such as great urbanist Lewis Mumford, who wrote in the July 1939 New Yorker that these roads would “cancel out the motorist’s freedom of speed and movement . . . [reducing] driving to a chore.”12 The company responsible for Futurama had good reason to promote a car-based future riding on a superhighway system, presumably paid for F U T U R A M A A N D T H E 2 0 T H - C E N T U R Y A M E R I CA N D R E A M | 1 9 FIGURE 1.5.

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Norman Bel Geddes, Magic Motorways (New York: Random House, 1940). My copy of Magic Motorways is inscribed “To Jack in recollection of a tough job we did together, Norman, 14 March 1940.” Jack is John Dineen, the General Motors manager of the Futurama exhibit. E. B. White, “One Man’s Meat,” Harper’s Magazine, July 1939. Lewis Mumford, “The Skyline in Flushing,” The New Yorker, July 29, 1939. Bel Geddes, Magic Motorways. American Studies at the University of Virginia, “America in the 1930s: 1939 NY World’s Fair,” University of Virginia, http://xroads.virginia.edu/ ~1930s/DISPLAY/39wf/taketour.htm. Brendan Nee, “Fair and Square: The Planning Legacy of World’s Fairs,” http://www.bnee.com/research/fair-and-square-the-planning-legacy-ofworlds-fairs/.

Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell

airport security, Bob Geldof, City Beautiful movement, company town, David Sedaris, desegregation, Frank Gehry, gun show loophole, Ida Tarbell, Lewis Mumford, Oklahoma City bombing, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh, Upton Sinclair, Wayback Machine, white picket fence

Who lives in that shrine, I wonder — Lincoln, or the men who conceived it: the leader who beheld the mournful victory of the Civil War, or the generation that took pleasure in the mean triumph of the Spanish-American exploit, and placed the imperial standard in the Philippines and the Caribbean? LEWIS MUMFORD Sticks and Stones: A Study of American Architecture and Civilization, 1924 In 1904, Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of war, William Howard Taft, sent his fellow Republican, architect Daniel Burnham, to the Philippines (where Taft had recently served as the new U.S. territory’s governor). Burnham’s assignment was to draw a new plan for the city of Manila.

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I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had linked arms with a woman in a burka and a Masai warrior, to belt out “It’s a Small World After All” flanked by a chorus line of nuns and field-tripping, rainbow-skinned schoolchildren. Yes, the memorial is lousy with coldhearted columns, a white Greek temple for a man associated with browns and blacks — the log cabin, the prairie, the top hat, the skin of slaves. Yes, Lewis Mumford called it a memorial to the Spanish-American War and he’s not all wrong. But loving this memorial is a lot like loving this country: I might not have built the place this way; it’s a little too pompous, and if you look underneath the marble, the structure’s a fake and ye olde Parthenon is actually supported by skyscraper steel.

Grand Central: How a Train Station Transformed America by Sam Roberts

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Bear Stearns, City Beautiful movement, clean water, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Donald Trump, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, New Urbanism, the High Line, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, Y2K

“Without much pretension to architectural elegance,” a professional critic wrote of the new depot, “it is commodious and well adapted to the purposes for which it was designed, and perhaps we ought not to ask much more from a railroad depot.” The Times carped, though, that the depot “can only by a stretch of courtesy be called either central or grand”—particularly because 42nd Street was by no means the center of New York City yet. The remote depot was derided by another journal as “End of the World Station.” The critic Lewis Mumford would later denigrate its “imperial façade.” More than a century later, Christopher Gray would write in the Times that the station was “awkwardly up-to-the-minute, more cowtown than continental.” For reasons that were never made clear, Vanderbilt gave his tenant the New Haven the prime location, fronting East 42nd Street.

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Men came and went, they passed and vanished, and all were moving through the moments of their lives to death, and all made small tickings in the sounds of time—but the voice of time remained aloof and unperturbed, a drowsy and eternal murmur below the immense and distant roof. Wolfe’s evocation of Penn Station reverberates in the imaginary “silent bubble of space” that propelled Tony Hiss through Grand Central and in David Marshall’s “accidental music” of the Main Concourse. Referring to Penn Station and Grand Central, Lewis Mumford wrote that “the major quality of each station, one that too few buildings in the city today possess, is space—space generously even nobly handled.” As for the Penn Station that Mumford rhapsodized, though, you can’t go there again. And, for all its glory, for all the nostalgia that Penn Station still generates and richly deserves, of the two mega-stations, arguably Grand Central transformed the nation’s norms and Manhattan’s cultural geography to a much greater extent.

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

airport security, Albert Einstein, Cal Newport, coronavirus, COVID-19, digital nomad, Douglas Hofstadter, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Floyd, gig economy, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, Inbox Zero, income inequality, invention of the steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kanban, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, New Journalism, Parkinson's law, profit motive, scientific management, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs

If that sounds confusing, it’s because our modern way of thinking about time is so deeply entrenched that we forget it even is a way of thinking; we’re like the proverbial fish who have no idea what water is, because it surrounds them completely. Get a little mental distance on it, though, and our perspective starts to look rather peculiar. We imagine time to be something separate from us and from the world around us, “an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences,” in the words of the American cultural critic Lewis Mumford. To see what he means, consider some time-related question—how you plan to spend tomorrow afternoon, say, or what you’ve accomplished over the last year—and without being fully conscious of it at first, you’ll probably find yourself visualizing a calendar, a yardstick, a tape measure, the numbers on a clock face, or some hazier kind of abstract timeline.

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Anthony’s fire: See Ángel Sánchez-Crespo, “Killer in the Rye: St. Anthony’s Fire,” National Geographic, November 27, 2018, available at www.nationalgeographic.com/history/magazine/2018/11–12/ergotism-infections-medieval-europe/ [inactive]. “an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences”: Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 15. Medieval people might speak of a task lasting a “Miserere whyle”: E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present 38 (1967): 81. Richard Rohr, a contemporary Franciscan priest and author: Richard Rohr, “Living in Deep Time,” On Being podcast, available at https://www.wnyc.org/story/richard-rohr–living-in-deep-time/ [inactive].

The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge by David McCullough

company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, death of newspapers, Isaac Newton, Lewis Mumford, Menlo Park, pneumatic tube, Suez canal 1869, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, three-masted sailing ship, transcontinental railway

It is the “Tall Vision-of-the Voyage,” spare, “silver-paced,” and all-redeeming. The finest thing written at the time the bridge was opened appeared in Harper’s Weekly. The author was a newspaperman named Montgomery Schuyler and his article, “The Bridge as a Monument,” was not only the first critical review of the great work, but a bugle call, as Lewis Mumford would say, for serious architectural criticism in America. Schuyler did not think much of the bridge as a work of art. Still, everything considered, he judged it “one of the greatest and most characteristic” structures of his century. “It so happens,” he wrote, “that the work which is likely to be our most durable monument, and to convey some knowledge of us to the most remote posterity, is a work of bare utility; not a shrine, not a fortress, not a palace, but a bridge.”

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New York for him had become a “steel-souled machine room,” the end product of which was “merciless multiplications” and the bridge was a “monstrous organism,” marking the beginning of a new age. For James the prospect was chilling. By the 1920’s, however, the bridge was a unique source of “joy and inspiration” for the critic Lewis Mumford. The stone plays against the steel; the heavy granite in compression, the spidery steel in tension. In this structure, the architecture of the past, massive and protective, meets the architecture of the future, light, aerial, open to sunlight, an architecture of voids rather than solids. The bridge proved, he said, that industrialism need not be synonymous with ugliness.

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It is the “Tall Vision-of-the Voyage,” spare, “silver-paced,” and all-redeeming. The finest thing written at the time the bridge was opened appeared in Harper’s Weekly. The author was a newspaperman named Montgomery Schuyler and his article, “The Bridge as a Monument,” was not only the first critical review of the great work, but a bugle call, as Lewis Mumford would say, for serious architectural criticism in America. Schuyler did not think much of the bridge as a work of art. Still, everything considered, he judged it “one of the greatest and most characteristic” structures of his century. “It so happens,” he wrote, “that the work which is likely to be our most durable monument, and to convey some knowledge of us to the most remote posterity, is a work of bare utility; not a shrine, not a fortress, not a palace, but a bridge.”

The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis by Jeremy Rifkin

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, back-to-the-land, British Empire, carbon footprint, classic study, collaborative economy, death of newspapers, delayed gratification, distributed generation, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, feminist movement, Ford Model T, global village, Great Leap Forward, hedonic treadmill, hydrogen economy, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, Recombinant DNA, scientific management, scientific worldview, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social intelligence, supply-chain management, surplus humans, systems thinking, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, working poor, World Values Survey

It wasn’t long before the lessons of how to transform animals into capital and a source of health and power were applied to human beings. In the Middle East, around the fourth millennium BC, we see the beginnings of societies based on the herding of thousands of human beings into giant work groups to build canals, erect dikes, and create the first large-scale hydraulic agricultural civilizations. The creation of what Lewis Mumford called the human “mega-machine” ushered in a radical restructuring of human society. Matriarchal forms of familial relations gave way to new patriarchal forms of power. Governance, which traditionally had been structured around cohort groups, marking the passage of life from infancy to old age, made way for abstract rule in the hands of a single ruler who exercised absolute power.

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From what we know from studying the few Paleolithic tribes still left on Earth, early human beings had to be adept at exploring their surroundings and maintaining an intimate memory of edible and inedible plants, insects and small animals, and the seasonal changes that conditioned their own hand-to-mouth survival. Darwin was taken aback by primitive people’s keen senses of mimicking. They were constantly observing the behavior of other animals and mimicking their behavior as if to incorporate it into the making of their own. Lewis Mumford points out that mimicking was perhaps the most important invention of early man, allowing him to better expropriate his surroundings and secure his survival. Being imitative as well as curious, he may have learned trapping from the spider, basketry from the birds’ nests, dam-building from beavers, burrowing from rabbits, and the art of using poisons from snakes.

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With stored surplus, human beings created the possibility, for the first time, of planning ahead, establishing a bulwark against the vagaries of nature and gaining control over their environment. With surplus came economics, and the gnawing question that has plagued the human family ever since—who produces the surplus, who stores it, to whom is it distributed, and in what proportions. Stored grain, as Lewis Mumford points out, is potential energy and, along with cattle, the oldest form of capital. He reminds us that pre-monetary commercial transactions were almost always in measures of grain.12 The analogy of containers with the human womb—both store potential energy—could not have been lost on our Neolithic ancestors.

The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work by Richard Florida

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, big-box store, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, creative destruction, deskilling, edge city, Edward Glaeser, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford paid five dollars a day, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of the telephone, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, McMansion, megaproject, Menlo Park, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, young professional, Zipcar

If your job was in a factory or in some retail concern in the city, “work” was now a place to go to, a separate world outside the home. Cities became more differentiated into areas for working, living, and shopping. Driving this evolution was the rise of the factory as the center of economic life. “The main elements in this new urban complex,” wrote the fabled urbanist Lewis Mumford, “were the factory, the railroad and the slum…. The factory became the nucleus of this new organism. Everything else was subordinate to it.”10 Early factories were concentrated in and around the core of the city. But as the scale of production grew larger, some moved to the outskirts of towns where larger plots of land could be assembled.

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See the broader discussion of the role of foreign-born entrepreneurs in U.S. industrialization in my The Flight of the Creative Class: The Global Competition for Talent (New York: Harper Business, 2005). 8. Immigrants made up 42 percent of the population in New York, 41 percent in Chicago, and 40 percent in Detroit. 9. Data on average travel speeds are from Randal O’Toole as cited in Neil Reynolds, “America’s Fast Track to Wealth,” Globe and Mail, October 9, 2009. 10. Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964), 458, as cited in Patrick Ashton, “Urbanization and the Dynamics of Suburban Development under Capitalism,” in Marxism and the Metropolis: New Perspectives in Urban Political Economy, William K. Tabb and Larry Sawers, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 55. 11.

Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution by David Harvey

Alan Greenspan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, creative destruction, David Graeber, deindustrialization, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Murray Bookchin, New Urbanism, Ponzi scheme, precariat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, special economic zone, the built environment, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, urban planning, We are the 99%, William Langewiesche, Works Progress Administration

B ut, for obvious reasons, it is a complicated right partly by virtue of the contemporary con ditions of capitalist urbanization, as well as because of the nature of the populations that might actively pursue such a right. Murray B ookchin, for example, took the plausible view (also 1 38 REBEL CITIES attributable to Lewis Mumford and many others influenced by the social anarchist tradition of thinking) that capitalist processes of urbanization have destroyed the city as a functioning body politic upon which a civi­ lized anti- capitalist alternative might be b uilt:10 In a way, Lefebvre agrees, though in h is case far more emphasis is placed on the rationalizations of urban space by state bureaucrats and technocrats to facilitate the repro ­ duction of capital accum ulation and of dominant class relations.

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Peter Marcuse, "Two World Forums, Two Worlds Apart;' at www. plannersnetwork.org. Murray Bookchin, The Limits of the City, Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1 986. The history of this trend begins with Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolu tio n, Oxford: Oxford University Press (first published in 1 9 1 5) , and passes mai nly through the influential figure of Lewis Mumford, in his The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects, Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1 968. Ray Pahl, Divisions of L abo ur, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, I 984. Anatole Kopp, Ville et Revolution, Paris: Editions Anthropos, 1 967. Gerald Frug, City Making: Building Com mun ities without Building Walls, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, I 999; Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore, Spaces of Neoliberalism : Urban Restructuring in North A merica and Western Europe, Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2003.

The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester

Albert Einstein, ASML, British Empire, business climate, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, discovery of the americas, Easter island, Etonian, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, GPS: selective availability, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, John Harrison: Longitude, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, means of production, military-industrial complex, planetary scale, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, trade route, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Dedication For Setsuko And in loving memory of my father, Bernard Austin William Winchester, 1921–2011, a most meticulous man Epigraph These brief passages from works by the writer Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) might usefully be borne in mind while reading the pages that follow. The cycle of the machine is now coming to an end. Man has learned much in the hard discipline and the shrewd, unflinching grasp of practical possibilities that the machine has provided in the last three centuries: but we can no more continue to live in the world of the machine than we could live successfully on the barren surface of the moon.

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“The dark side” is the American military, and in terms of new weaponry or research into the unimaginably precise, that tends to mean the U.S. Air Force. Area 51 is the dark side. DARPA is the dark side. The NSA is the dark side. The role of the dark side in this story is immense, but in today’s world, it is mainly to be only alluded to. Lewis Mumford, the historian and philosopher of technology, was one of the earliest to recognize the major role played by the military in the advancement of technology, in the dissemination of precision-based standardization, in the making of innumerable copies of the same and usually deadly thing, all iterations of which must be identical to the tiniest measure, in nanometers or better.

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It used the products of Blanchard’s gunstock machine; it also used John Hall’s milling machine, his fixtures, and his drop-forges; and its locks were made by the process invented by Honoré Blanc and perfected by Simeon North. From iron smelted in Connecticut to finished guns smelling of linseed oil (for the ashwood stock) and machine oil (for the barrel and lock), these were the first truly mechanically produced production-line objects made anywhere—they were also American and, just as Lewis Mumford had predicted, they were guns. Also, they were machine-made in their entirety, “lock, stock, and barrel.” THE NEWBORN MANUFACTURING community had other irons in the fire besides, and most of them of a decidedly nonbelligerent nature. One Oliver Evans was making flour-milling machinery; Isaac Singer introduced precision into the manufacturing of sewing machines; Cyrus McCormick was creating reapers, mowers, and, later, combine harvesters; and Albert Pope was making bicycles for the masses.

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend

1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Pattern Language, Adam Curtis, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Burning Man, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, chief data officer, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, company town, computer age, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Donald Davies, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Evgeny Morozov, food desert, game design, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, Haight Ashbury, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, jitney, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, load shedding, lolcat, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), openstreetmap, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, place-making, planetary scale, popular electronics, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social software, social web, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, working poor, working-age population, X Prize, Y2K, zero day, Zipcar

If it succeeded, Cisco would reap a nice fee for its hard work and cement itself deep within the basic operations of the city. “The popular technology of our time devotes itself to contriving means to displace autonomous organic forms with ingenious mechanical (controllable! profitable!) substitutes,” wrote urban scholar Lewis Mumford in 1961.20 Cisco seemed poised to write the next chapter in that story. But for all its promise, it was clear during a visit in the fall of 2009 that pali pali urgency was in short supply at Songdo’s technology department. From the observation deck of the soon-to-be-completed Northeast Asia Trade Tower—at 1,000 feet above the coast, it is Korea’s tallest building—Songdo looks like any of dozens of new towns that have mushroomed on the outskirts of Seoul since the 1980s.

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Jane Jacobs excoriated Howard in Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, arguing that “He conceived of good planning as a series of static acts; in each case the plan must anticipate all that is needed. . . . He was uninterested in the aspects of the city which could not be abstracted to serve his Utopia.”6 She showed little love for Geddes’s legacy, the regional planning movement, either, heaping scorn on urban historian Lewis Mumford, Geddes’s most influential and loyal disciple in America. But ignorant of Geddes’s insistence on full citizen participation in city building, Jacobs’s own work reinvented the ambitions of the Outlook Tower. Her book was itself a regional survey of sorts—a carefully studied and holistic dissection of the social ecology of urban life, delivered in plain prose to a huge public audience.

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Success of any top-down effort to shape the cities of the future will depend on bottom-up participation as well. Geddes lights the way for us. As biographer Helen Meller writes, “His objective in establishing ‘civics’ was to dispel fear of cities and mass urbanisation, and to release the creative responses of individuals towards solving modern urban problems.”46 Lewis Mumford, who after decades of correspondence (though they only met in person twice) knew him best, said: “What Geddes’s outlook and method contribute to the planning of today are precisely the elements that the administrator and bureaucrat, in the interests of economy or efficiency, are tempted to leave out: time, patience, loving care of detail, a watchful inter-relation of past and future, an insistence upon the human scale and the human purpose, above all merely mechanical requirements: finally a willingness to leave an essential part of the process to those who are most intimately connected with it: the ultimate consumers or citizens.”47 We would do well to follow Geddes’s example.

Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing Before Cybernetics by David A. Mindell

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computer Numeric Control, discrete time, Dr. Strangelove, Frederick Winslow Taylor, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, Lewis Mumford, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, Paul Samuelson, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, tacit knowledge, telerobotics, Turing machine

My father nurtured my love of machines (historical, contemporary, and imagined). What I hope is the clarity of writing in this work owes more to my mother, Dr. Phyllis Mindell, than to anyone else. Between Human and Machine 1 Introduction A History of Control Systems In 1934, at the height of the machine age, Lewis Mumford laid out his vision for technology and human development. In his landmark study, Technics and Civilization , Mumford proposed a theory of phases to characterize historical periods according to their core technologies. The “eotechnic” phase of water, wood, and handcrafts served as cultural preparation for the industrial era, which arrived as the “paleotechnic” world of steam, iron, and factories.

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This translation required, among other things, ever closer couplings of human and mechanical elements through the medium of sound, couplings that left a discernible mark on feedback theory. For telephone engineers, the network listened, and it spoke. Black published his amplifier design in 1934, the same year that Lewis Mumford, in Technics and Civilization , noted technology’s ability to abstract the world. Indeed, retelling Black’s story has greater significance than simply correcting the origin myth, for it concerns the historical emergence of electrical signals as representations of the world, the technologies developed to manipulate and transmit them, and the economic and organizational conditions that made those technologies possible.

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Indeed, what is Moore’s Law—the idea that the power of computers doubles every 18 months—but a statement that progress in computing depends on progress in manufacturing? A history that includes materials, techniques, and industries reveals modern computing as part of a larger story of technology and culture, rather than the product of a discontinuous break between old and new . Analog and Digital With his idea of “technics” Lewis Mumford captured the idea that machines create and manipulate representations of the world. Indeed, the very term analog implies that a physical quantity stands for something else. Similarly, digital alludes to counting the world on our fingers. These two methods of representation reappear throughout the history of control systems, countering the view of the transition from analog to digital computing as a simple succession of superior technology.

The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future by Naomi Oreskes, Erik M. Conway

Anthropocene, anti-communist, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Great Leap Forward, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Kim Stanley Robinson, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, military-industrial complex, oil shale / tar sands, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, stochastic process, the built environment, the market place

The Collapse of WesTern CivilizaTion a vieW from The fuTure naomi oreskes and erik m. ConWay The Collapse of WesTern CivilizaTion the Collapse of Choice manifests itself in society in small increments and moment-to-moment Western decisions as well as in loud dramatic struggles. Civilization —lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (1934) A View from the Future Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway the Collapse of Western Civilization A View from the Future Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway C o l u M b i a u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s n e W y o r k Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2014 Naomi Oreskes and Erik M.

Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents by Lisa Gitelman

Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, Charles Babbage, computer age, corporate governance, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, national security letter, Neal Stephenson, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, optical character recognition, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Turing test, WikiLeaks, Works Progress Administration

The social documentary form and the interests of the Joint Committee were hardly identical, but they ran parallel: part of the same culture of the 1930s characterized by the concept of culture as such, as well as by “the idea of commitment,” illuminated in Warren Susman’s fruitful analysis.29 Underlying both documentary reproduction and the production of social documentary is a general interest in documents, with documents frequently doing national—if not nationalist—work at the same time they pointed toward tensions surrounding what Mark Goble terms “the mediated life of history itself.”30 The past slips away, while modern media ironically make the present seem more historic. A “new permanent record” was accumulating on shellac disk and celluloid film, as Lewis Mumford observed, while perishable paper and the lack of both system and commitment were threatening the archival record and additional diverse items in the historical fabric—arts, artifacts, architecture—that might offer Americans access to their own past.31 In Documents of American History, one of the earliest and most influential readers or editions of primary sources designed as college textbooks, Henry Steele Commager regretted the scarcity of documents beyond those “of an official or quasi-­official character.”

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Kahana, Intelligence Work, 26; see also 23. 29. Warren I. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 166. 30. Mark Goble, Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 232. Goble discusses Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization (1934) and the form and content of history in this period, chapter 4. 31. Quoted in ibid., 225. 32. Henry Steele Commager, preface to Documents of American History, ed. Henry Steele Commager (New York: F. S. Crofts, 1935), 1:vii–viii. 33. On Lange, see Library of Congress, “Destitute pea pickers in California.

Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World by David Kerrigan

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, call centre, car-free, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, commoditize, computer vision, congestion charging, connected car, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Ford Model T, future of work, General Motors Futurama, hype cycle, invention of the wheel, Just-in-time delivery, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Marchetti’s constant, Mars Rover, megacity, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nash equilibrium, New Urbanism, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Sam Peltzman, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban sprawl, warehouse robotics, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

The alliance aims to get a fully automated vehicle ready for use in urban markets in the early 2020s.[197] The New Urban Environment “The current American way of life is founded not just on motor transportation but on the religion of the motorcar, and the sacrifices that people are prepared to make for this religion stand outside the realm of rational criticism. Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.” Lewis Mumford Chapter 2 set the scene by recalling the dramatic urban changes brought about by the advent and dominance of the private car over the last 100 years. Now, it’s time to start thinking about the implications of any move away from individual car ownership and/or the ability to separate car storage from your immediate location and the next time you’ll need the car.

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In a world where you can send your car to run errands without you, or summon almost immediate delivery via robots and drones from online retailers, what will become of the out of town malls created and fed by decades of car ownership? Liberating Space “The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is the right to destroy the city.” Lewis Mumford, The Highway and the City, 1957 As a result of prevalent personal car ownership, the average single-family home in the US includes a two-car garage. These two-car garages are space inefficient, often claiming around 500 square feet of what could otherwise be prime living space. Nationally across the US, that equates to about 40 billion square feet of space, or the equivalent of over 20 years’ worth of new domestic residential space construction.

Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time by Jeff Speck

A Pattern Language, active transport: walking or cycling, benefit corporation, bike sharing, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, congestion charging, congestion pricing, David Brooks, Donald Shoup, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Enrique Peñalosa, food miles, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, intermodal, invisible hand, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, meta-analysis, New Urbanism, parking minimums, peak oil, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, skinny streets, smart cities, starchitect, Stewart Brand, tech worker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transit-oriented development, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

The one characteristic that all of us share is that we come from somewhere else. Imagine two brothers eating lunch alongside a dock in Dublin, Palermo, Bombay, or Formosa and looking wistfully out to sea. One of them had the balls to get on a boat and the other one didn’t. Guess whose kids are the Americans? American mobility far precedes the automobile. Before Lewis Mumford declared that “our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf,”1 Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that “everything good is on the highway.” Soon after him, Walt Whitman waxed: “O public road, I say back I am not afraid to leave you—yet I love you. You express me better than I can express myself.”2 But it is an easy out to say that wayfaring is an inescapable part of our DNA, and ignore the other factors that make cities in the United States different from those in Canada or Australia—two other countries that at least started the way ours did.

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But it was clearly very bad for the central cities and it got even worse when the big-city mayors, desperate for jobs, amended the act to include an additional six thousand miles of inner-city expressways.7 These highways, most of which gutted minority neighborhoods, were never imagined in the original measure, which was created by people who knew better.● Even Lewis Mumford, a fan of decentralization, admitted that “the right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar, in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle, is actually the right to destroy the city.”8 Ironically, the city that resisted the greatest amount of federal highway spending was probably the nation’s capital.

Bureaucracy by David Graeber

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, barriers to entry, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, David Graeber, Future Shock, George Gilder, High speed trading, hiring and firing, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, means of production, music of the spheres, Neal Stephenson, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, Parkinson's law, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-work, price mechanism, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, technological determinism, transcontinental railway, union organizing, urban planning, zero-sum game

I would put it this way: in this final, stultifying stage of capitalism, we are moving from poetic technologies to bureaucratic technologies. By poetic technologies, I refer to the use of rational, technical, bureaucratic means to bring wild, impossible fantasies to life. Poetic technologies in this sense are as old as civilization. They could even be said to predate complex machinery. Lewis Mumford used to argue that the first complex machines were actually made of people. Egyptian pharaohs were only able to build the pyramids because of their mastery of administrative procedures, which then allowed them to develop production line techniques, dividing up complex tasks into dozens of simple operations and assigning each to one team of workmen—even though they lacked mechanical technology more complex than the lever and inclined plane.

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Though possibly, this had at least as much to with his libertarian communist political affinities than his devotion to the occult. His wife’s sister, who seems to have been the ringleader in the magical society, eventually left him for L. Ron Hubbard; on leaving NASA, Parsons went on to apply his magic to creating pyrotechnic effects for Hollywood until he finally blew himself up in 1962. 113. Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966). 114. I note that Peter Thiel, who agreed with much of the original argument of this essay, has recently come out as an antimarket promonopoly capitalist for precisely the reason that he feels this is the best way to further rapid technological change. 115.

About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks by David Rooney

Albert Einstein, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Charles Babbage, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, COVID-19, Danny Hillis, Doomsday Clock, European colonialism, Ford Model T, friendly fire, High speed trading, interchangeable parts, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, smart grid, Stewart Brand, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, éminence grise

The first watch ever to be acquired by the British Museum, in 1786, was a Puritan watch, made in about 1635 and alleged to have belonged to Oliver Cromwell, who considered himself a Puritan Moses. These everyday items provided a form of disembodied discipline for the Protestant work ethic, as Lewis Mumford, the twentieth-century chronicler of modernity, pointed out: “Time-keeping passed into time-serving and time-accounting and time-rationing.”11 It was clocks and watches, as much as sermonizing pastors, that disciplined the masses with a message of pious servitude. Personal, domestic and workplace clocks and watches, which we invited into our lives in ever-greater numbers, became our overseers and landlords, our managers and supervisors.

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., Robert Boyle: A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996 [1686]), 13. 7.Quoted in John Castle, Remarkable Clocks (unpublished manuscript, in Arthur Mitchell archive, Antiquarian Horological Society, London, 1951), 10.5. 8.Ibid., 10.16. 9.Quoted in Jaroslav Folta, “Clockmaking in Medieval Prague,” Antiquarian Horology 23, no. 5 (Autumn 1997): 408. 10. Both quotations in Charles George, “A Social Interpretation of English Puritanism,” Journal of Modern History 25, no. 4 (December 1953): 338–39. 11. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934), 14. 12. Benjamin Franklin, “Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One,” in George Fisher, The American Instructor; or, Young Man’s Best Companion, 9th edn. (Philadelphia, 1748), 375. 13. Quoted in Lauren Frayer, “Saudis Want ‘Mecca Time’ to Replace GMT,” AOL News, 11 August 2010. 14.

A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next by Tom Standage

accelerated depreciation, active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-city movement, bike sharing, car-free, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, City Beautiful movement, Clapham omnibus, congestion charging, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, Ida Tarbell, Induced demand, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Joan Didion, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, minimum wage unemployment, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, prompt engineering, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, safety bicycle, self-driving car, social distancing, Steve Jobs, streetcar suburb, tech bro, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbiased observer, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, W. E. B. Du Bois, walkable city, white flight, wikimedia commons, Yom Kippur War, Zipcar

While Charlie Chaplin satirized the relentless, dehumanizing experience of working on a production line in his film Modern Times, other observers hailed the Fordist approach as a great boon to social justice and equality. By democratizing ownership, mass production would erase social distinctions based on status goods such as cars, suggested Lewis Mumford, an American historian and philosopher: “the machine has achieved potentially a new collective economy, in which the possession of goods is a meaningless distinction, since the machine can produce all our essential goods in unparalleled quantities, falling on the just and unjust, the foolish and wise, like the rain itself.”

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Radio and television sitcoms such as Father Knows Best (1949) and Leave It to Beaver (1957) reinforced the ideal of the white, middle-class suburban idyll. Suburbia embodied prosperity and patriotism. “No man who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist,” declared William Levitt. Critics of suburbia, by contrast, worried that its dull uniformity would do corrosive damage to the American psyche. In the words of the American urbanist Lewis Mumford, writing in 1961, suburbia was “a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold.”

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Bill Atkinson, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, book value, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Californian Ideology, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Dynabook, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, new economy, Norbert Wiener, peer-to-peer, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Yom Kippur War

After World War II, rationalization had begun to give rise to “the man who is ‘with’ rationality but without reason, who is increasingly self-rationalized and also increasingly uneasy.” This man, continued Mills, was a “Cheerful Robot.”59 Mills’s critique could be heard echoing throughout the 1960s in works as varied as Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society (1964), John Kenneth Galbraith’s The New Industrial State (1967), Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964), Lewis Mumford’s The Myth of the Machine (1967), Theodore Roszak’s The Making of a Counterculture (1969), and Charles Reich’s The Greening of America (1970). Like Mills, these authors suggested that society was undergoing a rapid process of centralization and rationalization, a process both supported by new technologies and designed to help build them.

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The resulting social order went by a variety of names—the “technostructure” (Galbraith), the “technological society” (Ellul), and “technocracy” (Roszak). In each case, critics pointed to computers and automation as forces driving the rise of this new way of life. Though little read today, for instance, Lewis Mumford was among the most eloquent and popular of the antiautomationists. In The Myth of the Machine, he turned a cold eye on post– World War II technological research. While noting that the era had given rise to a new “experimental mode” and to such varied technologies as nuclear energy and supersonic transportation, Mumford argued that it had also brought into being a new generation of technocrats and a new generation of technologies through which they might rule: “With this new ‘megatechnics’ the dominant minority will create a uniform, all-enveloping, superplanetary structure, designed for automatic operation.

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In 1950 Innis had published an epic study of the role communication had played in various empires since the time of ancient Egypt, entitled Empire and Communications; in 1951 he published a collection of essays, The Bias of Communication. Together, these works argued that the modes of communication constituted key forces shaping a society’s structure and culture. But in fact, alongside Innis, McLuhan drew on an eclectic mix of thinkers, including Lewis Mumford, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and McLuhan’s good friends Wyndham Lewis and the anthropologist Edmund Carpenter. For insights into McLuhan’s intellectual biography, see Marchand, Marshall McLuhan; Gordon, Marshall McLuhan; Theall, Virtual Marshall McLuhan; Stamps, Unthinking Modernity; Horrocks, Marshall McLuhan and Virtuality. 22.

Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars by Samuel I. Schwartz

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, car-free, City Beautiful movement, collaborative consumption, congestion charging, congestion pricing, crowdsourcing, desegregation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Enrique Peñalosa, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, intermodal, invention of the wheel, lake wobegon effect, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, longitudinal study, Lyft, Masdar, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nate Silver, oil shock, parking minimums, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, scientific management, self-driving car, skinny streets, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, TED Talk, the built environment, the map is not the territory, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, Wall-E, white flight, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

In September 1957 (the same month that Walter O’Malley announced that the Dodgers would be leaving Brooklyn) the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company sponsored a symposium it called “The New Highways: Challenge to the Metropolitan Region.” In attendance was Bertrand Tallamy, Thomas MacDonald’s successor as head of the Bureau of Public Roads, now renamed the Federal Highway Administration. So was Lewis Mumford. Mumford, a sociologist, historian, and the author of The Culture of Cities and The City in History, wasn’t exactly full of admiration for the planners and builders of the Interstate Highway System. “If they had any notion of what they were doing, they would not appear as blithe and cocky over the way they were doing it.”

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They formally opposed seven out of the ten freeways described in the 1955 Trafficways Plan they had approved four years earlier, calling for an end to “the demolition of homes, the destruction of residential areas, the forced uprooting and relocation of individuals, families, and business enterprises.” In doing so, they planted the seed for what is today one of America’s most vibrant and prosperous cities. By then, Lewis Mumford wasn’t the only voice raised against building transportation systems that gave priority to the automobile. After the Embarcadero Revolt, the movement against limited-access highways really started to get traction everywhere from Australia to the Netherlands. In April of 1960, an article entitled “New Roads and Urban Chaos,” by a Harvard professor named Daniel Patrick Moynihan, argued that the Interstate Highway System was “bringing about changes for the worse in the efficiency of our transportation system and the character of our cities. . . .

The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World by John Michael Greer

back-to-the-land, Black Swan, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, David Strachan, deindustrialization, Easter island, European colonialism, Extropian, failed state, feminist movement, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, hydrogen economy, hygiene hypothesis, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Jevons paradox, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, McMansion, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, post-industrial society, Project for a New American Century, Ray Kurzweil, Stewart Brand, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

Lovelock’s dream of scientific Holy Writ simply reflects current reality: science as product has eclipsed science as process, so that people outside the scientific professions are taught to accept scientific doctrines on faith, rather than being encouraged to practice science themselves. If professional science faces extinction, there’s a real chance that it could take the scientific method with it to its grave. Some eloquent voices have argued that this might not be a bad thing. Writers such as Theodore Roszak and Lewis Mumford have pointed out that the practical benefits of science must be weighed in the balance against the dehumanizing effects of scientific reductionism and the horrific results of technology run amok in the service of ambition and greed.3 Others have argued that scientific thinking, with its cult of objectivity and its rejection of human values, is fundamentally antihuman and antilife, and the gifts it has given us are thus analogous to the gewgaws Mephistopheles offers to Faust at the price of the latter’s soul.4 These arguments make a strong case against scientism, the intellectual idolatry that treats science as a surrogate religion.

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One of the few discussions of this massive problem is Adrian Atkinson, “Collapse and the fate of cities,” City 12:1 (April 2008), pp. 79–106. 6. See, in particular, John Lukacs Historical Consciousness: The Remembered Past, Harper & Row, 1968. Chapter Twelve: Science 1. James Lovelock “A book for all seasons,”Science 280 (1998), pp. 832–833. 2. Greer, The Long Descent pp. 182–187. 3. See Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine Volume One: Technics and Human Development, 1967 and The Myth of the Machine Volume Two: The Pentagon of Power, 1972, Harcourt, Brace and World; and Theodore ­Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Post-Industrial ­Society, Doubleday, 1972. 253 254 T he E cotechnic F u t u re 4.

Foolproof: Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe by Greg Ip

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Air France Flight 447, air freight, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Boeing 747, book value, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, double helix, endowment effect, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, global supply chain, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, savings glut, scientific management, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technology bubble, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transaction costs, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, value at risk, William Langewiesche, zero-sum game

Because, ironically, the density that makes disasters so deadly in cities also makes them, most of the time, quite safe. When so many people are clustered in one place, they can be protected far more efficiently. That was one of the founding purposes of cities. “Five centuries of violence, paralysis, and uncertainty had created in the European heart a profound desire for security,” historian Lewis Mumford wrote of the origins of European cities. “Sheer necessity led to the rediscovery of an important fact… the strength and security of a fortified stronghold, perched on some impregnable rock, could be secured even for the relatively helpless people of the lowlands provided they built a wooden palisade or a stone wall around their village.”

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Nichols, Blue Mind: The Surprising Science That Shows How Being Near, In, On, or Under Water Can Make You Happier, Healthier, More Connected, and Better at What You Do (New York: Little, Brown & Company, 2014). 34 The World Bank estimates: Natural Hazards, Unnatural Disasters, 171–172. 35 In 2005, all ten: OECD, RMS, and University of Southampton, “Ranking of the World’s Cities Most Exposed to Coastal Flooding Today and in the Future,” OECD, 2007, available at http://www.oecd.org/environment/cc/39729575.pdf. 36 “Five centuries of violence”: Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1981): 14–15. 37 In India, far more: Robin Burgess, Olivier Deschenes, Dave Donaldson, and Michael Greenstone, “The Unequal Effects of Weather and Climate Change: Evidence from Mortality in India,” working paper, May 2014. 38 “There were still jobs”: Abhijit V.

Bricks & Mortals: Ten Great Buildings and the People They Made by Tom Wilkinson

Berlin Wall, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, double helix, experimental subject, false memory syndrome, financial independence, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Google Glasses, housing crisis, Kitchen Debate, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, megacity, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, nudge theory, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, scientific management, starchitect, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration

The surrealist Georges Bataille, for example, complained that ‘great monuments rise up like dams, opposing a logic of majesty and authority to all unquiet elements; it is in the form of cathedrals and palaces that church and state speak to and impose silence upon the crowds’,6 and American polymath Lewis Mumford decried the dead weight of monuments: ‘The very permanence of stone and brick, which enable them to defy time, cause them also ultimately to defy life.’7 Since the Second World War there has even been a rash of ‘counter-monuments’ intended to undermine the petrifying, didactic tone of such structures, a movement pioneered unsurprisingly in Germany, a nation still coming to terms with bad memories.

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luceneQuery=%2B%28authorId%3Apersee_79744+authorId%3A%22auteur+jafr_787%22%29&words=persee_79744&words=auteur%20jafr_787 5 Walter Benjamin, trans. Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings Vol. 4: 1938–1940, eds Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA, 2003), 391–2. 6 Georges Bataille, ‘Architecture’, trans. Dominic Faccini, October vol. 60, spring 1992, 25–6, 25. 7 Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (London, 1938), 435. 8 Bevan, 91. 9 http://wais.stanford.edu/Spain/spain_1thevalledeloscaidos73103.html 10 James Young, ‘The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today’, Critical Inquiry, 18, 2, winter 1992, 267–96, 279 11 Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans.

No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea by James Livingston

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bear Stearns, business cycle, collective bargaining, delayed gratification, do what you love, emotional labour, full employment, future of work, Herbert Marcuse, Internet of things, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, obamacare, post-work, Project for a New American Century, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, surplus humans, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, warehouse automation, working poor

I’m not suggesting that everybody has read their books—of course we haven’t, I’m claiming instead that we take their ideas for granted, treating them as self-evident truths, just common sense. I’m also claiming that we need to free ourselves from their grip. Some of these writers are almost household names—Hannah Arendt, Richard Sennett, Christopher Lasch, Jackson Lears. Some of them have been fugitives from academic respectability—Lewis Mumford comes to mind—and some of them, like Alain de Botton and Matthew B. Crawford, still are. All of them are brilliant defenders of the ancient ideal of poiesis (although, to be fair, de Botton is more ambiguous than the others about the meanings of work). Arendt is the key figure. When she wrote The Human Condition (1958), a book originally funded by the Rockefeller Foundation as a critique of Marx, she spanned all the continents that mattered in western philosophy—she had been Martin Heidegger’s student in the late 1920s, but, unlike most other refugees in flight from Hitler’s Germany, she admired the intellectual energies of her new home in the United States.

Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism by Peter Marshall

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, David Graeber, different worldview, do-ocracy, feminist movement, garden city movement, gentleman farmer, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, Howard Zinn, intentional community, invisible hand, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, open borders, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rewilding, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, the market place, union organizing, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery

He did not want a Jewish State and sought co-operation with the Arabs and as a result his idea of binationalism made him ostracized by orthodox Zionists as an ‘enemy of the people’.35 The subsequent history of Israel has shown the danger of Buber’s view of the State as the ‘mother’ of communities. He should have heeded more carefully Proudhon’s insight that order is the daughter and not the mother of liberty. Lewis Mumford Lewis Mumford’s concern with the relationship between society and technology led him to adopt a strongly libertarian position. From his first work The Story of Utopia in 1922, he tried to set out the conditions for the rational use of technology for human liberation. His fundamental thesis is that from late neolithic times in the Near East two technologies have recurrently existed side by side: ‘one authoritarian, the other democratic, the first system-centred, immensely powerful but inherently unstable, the other man-centred, relatively weak, but resourceful and durable’.36 The former has become so dominant that Mumford believes we are rapidly approaching a time when our surviving democratic technics will be completely suppressed or supplanted unless we radically alter course and begin to reassert control over our runaway technology.

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It may well be that in a future federation of independent republics Kropotkin, and not Lenin, will have the last word. Influence Kropotkin undoubtedly appears as one of the most attractive of anarchist thinkers and his influence has been acknowledged by people as diverse as Kōtoku in Japan, Pa Chin in China, Gandhi in India, and Lewis Mumford and Paul Goodman in the United States. He was a major inspiration of anarchist movements in Russia and Britain, and helped shape those in France, Belgium and Switzerland. He remains the greatest exponent of a decentralized society based on a harmonious balance between agriculture and industry.

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He went on to portray vividly the alienation of the One-Dimensional Man (1964) of Western society whose creativity and ability to dissent had been undermined. He concluded that only a non-repressive civilization would be able to give natural expression to unfettered human nature although he did not go so far as to reject the need for government. At the same time, social critics like Lewis Mumford were denouncing the ‘megamachine’ of the new military-industrial complex in the United States, while Paul Goodman was reminding people of the advantages of decentralized communities. During the early part of the 1960s the ideology of the New Left remained ambiguous. The reigning orthodoxies of Liberalism and Marxism seemed exhausted and irrelevant, but there was no clear alternative.

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey West

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, British Empire, butterfly effect, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean water, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, driverless car, Dunbar number, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, housing crisis, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of agriculture, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Benioff, Marchetti’s constant, Masdar, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Murray Gell-Mann, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, publish or perish, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Suez canal 1869, systematic bias, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, time dilation, too big to fail, transaction costs, urban planning, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, working poor

The movement advocated a return to diverse, mixed-use neighborhoods architecturally as well as socially and commercially, with an emphasis on community structure through designs that enhanced pedestrian use and public transportation. Much of the thinking was inspired by the critical writings of the great urbanists Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs, who had reminded us that cities are people and not just infrastructure in the service of the automobile and corporate concrete-and-steel high-rises. Jane Jacobs gained her fame and notoriety during the 1950s and ’60s battling plans to run a four-lane limited-access highway through Greenwich Village in New York City, where she then lived.

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Jane Jacobs led the fight to stop this extraordinary encroachment, claiming that it would destroy an essential feature of the city. After a long and bitter struggle she eventually won the battle. She was much vilified during the process, and not just by politicians and developers, but by many urban planners and practitioners, including Lewis Mumford, who saw her as a flaky sentimental reactionary blocking progress and the future commercial success of New York City. In keeping with the spirit of Le Corbusier, Moses’s plans also called for multiple city blocks to be razed and replaced with upscale high-rises. Although this was carried out in many areas of the city, it went by the wayside in Greenwich Village though it did result in the development of Washington Square Village, a project owned by New York University, which was ultimately used for faculty housing.

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On the other hand, the more concrete characteristics of life such as income, health, and cultural activities clearly do. Much of what has been written about the success of cities is not much more sophisticated than elaborations on the sort of anecdotes I’ve already quoted and is, at best, intuitive analysis based on narratives much in the style of Jane Jacobs or Lewis Mumford.7 There are many academic sociological studies based on interviews and surveys that try to develop a more objective, “scientific” perspective. Urban sociology as a discipline has a long and illustrious but somewhat controversial and often surprisingly parochial history—it was even used by Robert Moses to justify blasting highways through traditional neighborhoods.

A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century by Witold Rybczynski

California gold rush, City Beautiful movement, clean water, cotton gin, David Brooks, fail fast, gentleman farmer, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, joint-stock company, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, New Urbanism, place-making, scientific management, three-masted sailing ship, transcontinental railway, urban planning, urban renewal

That the Hall was really a large farmhouse appealed to him “quite as much as to have found the arms of some murdering Baron over a dungeon door.” JOSTLING AND BEING JOSTLED Frederick Law Olmsted, c. 1860. No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world . . . —THOMAS CARLYLE CHAPTER ELEVEN Mr. Downing’s Magazine LEWIS MUMFORD CALLED Olmsted’s combination of travel, shrewd observation, and intelligent reading “American education at its best.” He suggested that Olmsted could be considered representative of a mid-nineteenth-century American type: the self-invented man. Mumford compared Olmsted to Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and the economist Henry George, whose Progress and Poverty was one of the best-selling economic books of that time.

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Putnam’s Son’s, 1922), was followed by a companion volume, Central Park as a Work of Art and as a Great Municipal Enterprise, 1853–1895 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Son’s, 1928). For many years this collection of correspondence, reports, biographical fragments, and chronological highlights remained the chief source of firsthand information about Olmsted’s life. In 1931 the writer and architectural critic Lewis Mumford published The Brown Decades (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1931) in which he devoted much of a chapter to Olmsted. Mumford’s perceptive appreciation of Olmsted’s position in nineteenth-century America was not widely shared. In fact, by then the man whom Mumford described as having “almost single-handed laid the foundations for a better order in city building” had slipped into almost total obscurity.

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“There we were . . . ”: Frederick Law Olmsted, Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1967), 59. “A gentle undulating . . . ”: Ibid., 97. JOSTLING AND BEING JOSTLED Chapter Eleven: Mr. Downing’s magazine “American education . . . ”: Lewis Mumford, “The Renewal of the Landscape,” The Brown Decades (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931), 85. “I began life as a . . . ”: Frederick Law Olmsted, Landscape Architect, 1822–1903, ed. Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and Theodora Kimball (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1928), 83. “Everybody at home . . . ”: Frederick Law Olmsted to Charles Loring Brace, November 12, 1850, FLOP.

The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update by Donella H. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, Dennis L. Meadows

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, Climatic Research Unit, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, demographic transition, digital divide, financial independence, game design, Garrett Hardin, geopolitical risk, Herman Kahn, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, means of production, new economy, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, systems thinking, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Review

The generations that live around the turn of the twenty-first century are called upon not only to bring their ecological footprint below the earth's limits, but to do so while restructuring their inner and outer worlds. That process will touch every arena of life, require every kind of human talent. It will need technical and entrepreneurial innovation, as well as communal, social, political, artistic, and spiritual invention. Fifty years ago Lewis Mumford recognized the magnitude of the task and its uniquely human character; it is one that will challenge and develop the humanity of everyone. An age of expansion is giving place to an age of equilibrium. The achievement of this equilibrium is the task of the next few centuries.... The theme for the new period will be neither arms and the man nor machines and the man: its theme will be the resurgence of life, the displacement of the mechanical by the organic, and the re-establishment of the person as the ultimate term of all human effort.

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A good example is the biannual WWF Living Planet Report published by World Wide Fund for Nature International, Gland, Switzerland, which provides data on trends in global biodiversity and the ecological footprint of nations. 7. See Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2000). 8. Lewis Mumford, The Condition of Man (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1944), 398-399. Chapter 8. Tools for the Transition to Sustainability 1. Donald Worster, editor, The Ends of the Earth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 11-12. 2. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lecture on "War," delivered in Boston, March 1838.

Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age by Alex Wright

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, barriers to entry, British Empire, business climate, business intelligence, Cape to Cairo, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Babbage, Computer Lib, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, folksonomy, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, linked data, Livingstone, I presume, lone genius, machine readable, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Norman Mailer, out of africa, packet switching, pneumatic tube, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog

His museum would orient people to the external forces and, over time, improve their collective lot. Geddes also explored the possibilities of what he called Thinking Machines—diagrams of complex ideas that relied on visual logic rather than linear narrative forms. The American historian and New Yorker a­ rchitectural writer Lewis Mumford called it the “art of ideological cartography.”12 In 1910, Geddes traveled to Brussels at the invitation of his friend Paul Otlet. The two had met years earlier at the 1900 Paris Expo and afterward had exchanged occasional letters. They bonded over their shared interest in Comte’s positivist philosophy, which had inspired both men in pursuit of their utopian schemes.

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A faint echo of Geddes’s spirit seems to live on, however, in an exhibit titled “Edinburgh Vision,” which provides a historical perspective on the city’s evolution over the past 150 years through a combination of stereoscopic lenses, mirrors, and 3-D glasses. Elsewhere, Geddes’s legacy as an influential sociologist and town planner seems secure. His ideas about urban planning, rooted in firsthand observational research, went on to influence generations of important thinkers, including Lewis Mumford, who once praised him as a “global thinker in practice, a whole generation or more before the Western democracies fought a global war.”4 Geddes’s work continues to suggest intriguing possibilities for rethinking the architecture of information: creating physical spaces that complement and extend our ability to access large bodies of networked information.

The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do by Erik J. Larson

AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, Boeing 737 MAX, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, Georg Cantor, Higgs boson, hive mind, ImageNet competition, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, retrograde motion, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yochai Benkler

Peirce: A Life, called him “perhaps the most impor­tant mind the United States has ever produced.” The phi­ los­o­pher Paul Weiss, writing in The Dictionary of American Biography in 1934, described Peirce as “the most original and versatile of American phi­los­o­phers and Amer­i­ca’s greatest logician.” The cultural historian and critic Lewis Mumford placed him in the com­pany of iconoclastic geniuses like Roger Bacon and Leonardo Da Vinci. And when Noam Chomsky, the pioneering linguistics scientist at MIT, was asked in a 1976 interview about his influences, he said, “In relation to the questions we have been discussing [concerning the philosophy of language], the phi­los­o­pher to whom I feel closest and whom I’m almost paraphrasing is Charles Sanders Peirce.”1 BR I LLI A N T BU T A LON E Like Albert Einstein, Peirce was left-­handed and thought in pictures.

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He was constitutionally incapable of playing by the rules.5 Peirce’s personal scandals and idiosyncrasies help explain why, for instance, rec­ords of his personal life—­volumes of documents—­ remained sealed in Harvard’s Houghton Library ­until 1956, forty-­t wo years a­ fter his death. His scientific and philosophical papers—­including many of im­mense interest to computer science and especially AI—­lay relatively untouched, and unpublished, in Harvard’s archives for want of a “few thousand dollars” to “guarantee the initial expense of publication,” as Lewis Mumford ­later put it.6 Not understanding his ideas and their significance, and unwilling to invite scandal, many of ­those who knew Peirce never saw his reputation restored or much of his life’s work published. Peirce himself died in obscurity, survived by his equally enigmatic second wife, Juliette, a French ­woman with her own somewhat checkered history.

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car by Anthony M. Townsend

A Pattern Language, active measures, AI winter, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, big-box store, bike sharing, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, company town, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, creative destruction, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data is the new oil, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, drive until you qualify, driverless car, drop ship, Edward Glaeser, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, food desert, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gig economy, Google bus, Greyball, haute couture, helicopter parent, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, megacity, microapartment, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Ocado, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, Peter Calthorpe, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ray Oldenburg, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, too big to fail, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

See, for example, Andrés Rodríguez-Pose and Michael Storper, “Housing, Urban Growth and Inequalities: The Limits to Deregulation and Upzoning in Reducing Economic and Spatial Inequality,” Urban Studies (September 2019), https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098019859458. 9Wrestling with Regulation The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is actually the right to destroy the city. —Lewis Mumford, 1964 Mayors may have the hardest job in the self-driving future. After the designers, developers, and engineers are long gone, they’ll have to pick up the pieces. Yet today, we focus mainly on the national reforms needed to kick-start AV innovation. The real challenge of regulating the impacts of AVs will fall on local governments—as it did in the motor age.

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(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991), 3–25. 206“bringing remote storage locations”: “Automated Trucking: A CBRE Research Perspective,” CBRE, November 17, 2017, http://www.cbre.us/real-estate-services/real-estate-industries/industrial-and-logistics/industrial-and-logistics-research/automated-trucking. 206“service firms should locate”: CBRE, “Automated Trucking.” 206“In order to feed, maintain, and entertain”: Rem Koolhaas, “The World in 2018,” The Economist, November 28, 2017, 153. 208“Rather than building AI”: Russell Brandom, “Self-Driving Cars Are Headed Toward an AI Roadblock,” The Verge, July 3, 2018, https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/3/17530232/self-driving-ai-winter-full-autonomy-waymo-tesla-uber. 209The term jaywalking: “Why Jaywalking Is Called Jaywalking,” Merriam-Webster, accessed May 23, 2019, https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/why-is-it-called-jaywalking. 209weaponized by automobile interests: Peter Norton, Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 210. 209another separate guideway: Kiger, “Designing for the Driverless Age.” 209“argued for dense multilevel traffic”: “New York Modern,” The Skyscraper Museum, October 24, 2007, https://www.skyscraper.org/EXHIBITIONS/FUTURE_CITY/new_york_modern.htm. 210“the first place in the world”: Sidewalk Labs, RFP Submission for Waterfront Toronto (New York: Sidewalk Labs, 2017), 144. 210“Carriage squares”: Renate van der Zee, “Story of Cities #30: How This Amsterdam Inventor Gave Bike-Sharing to the World,” The Guardian, April 26, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/26/story-cities-amsterdam-bike-share-scheme. 210“a small zone that will serve”: Sidewalk Labs, RFP Submission for Waterfront Toronto, 144. 211the “beeping monster”: Shirley Zhao, “Tech Worries Throw Future of Hong Kong’s First Driverless Electric Bus Route into Doubt,” South China Morning Post, March 31, 2019, https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/transport/article/3003944/driverless-electric-bus-fails-create-buzz-hong-kong. 211“Purchases are deposited at freight delivery centres”: Sustainable Urban Mobility Research Laboratory, “Shared World,” Singapore University of Technology and Design, accessed January 6, 2019, https://mobility. sutd.edu.sg/shared_world/. 211the unbuilt Minnesota Experimental City: David Grossman, “The Time Minnesota Almost Built a Doomed, Future City,” Popular Mechanics, March 31, 2018, https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a19642881/spilhaus-experimental-city-documentary/. 9. Wrestling with Regulation 213“The right to have access to every building”: Lewis Mumford, The Highway and the City (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963). 213One of the first to try: “Toronto among the Fastest Growing Tech Hubs in North America,” U of T News, July 21, 2017, https://www.utoronto.ca/news/toronto-among-fastest-growing-tech-hubs-north-america. 214potential safety, economic, and land use benefits: David Ticoll, “Driving Changes: Automated Vehicles in Toronto,” University of Toronto Transportation Research Institute Discussion Paper, October 15, 2015, https://munkschool.utoronto.ca/ipl/files/2016/03/Driving-Changes-Ticoll-2015.pdf. 214specific actions to align AV policy: “Automated Vehicles Tactical Plan,” Toronto, accessed September 10, 2019, https://www.toronto.ca/services-payments/streets-parking-transportation/automated-vehicles/draft-automated-vehicle-tactical-plan-2019-2021/. 214“Those who don’t have automobiles”: Lawrence D.

24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep by Jonathan Crary

augmented reality, Berlin Wall, dematerialisation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Fall of the Berlin Wall, invention of movable type, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, mass incarceration, megacity, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, vertical integration

Whether in the mid twentieth century or today, seriality is the numbing and ceaseless production of the same. It is the weight of all the counterfinalities that inexorably act against our own intentions, our loves and hopes. Not by accident, Sartre—along with many other European critics—relied on Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization, a historical survey of rationalized forms of social organization that were dependent on an automation of behavior, on the training of humans to function habitually and repetitively. Sartre describes not only individual isolation but the seriality that underlies situations with a manifestly collective or group character.

The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy by Bruce Katz, Jennifer Bradley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, benefit corporation, British Empire, business climate, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion pricing, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, Donald Shoup, double entry bookkeeping, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, global supply chain, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, transit-oriented development, urban planning, white flight, Yochai Benkler

Hamilton, “Federalist No. 1,” p. 1. 10-2151-2 notes.indd 241 5/20/13 7:00 PM 242 NOTES TO PAGES 193–204 CHAPTER 9 The Jack Dorsey quote at the beginning of the chapter is taken from Laurie Segall, “Square CEO Jack Dorsey: I Never Wanted to Be an Entrepreneur,” CNN Money, September 10, 2012 (www.money.cann.com/2012/09/10/technology/startups/jackdorsey-techcrunch-disrupt/index.html). 1. The historian Lewis Mumford writes, “The city, as one finds it in history, is the point of maximum concentration for the power and culture of a community. . . . The city is the form and symbol of an integrated social relationship: it is the seat of the temple, the market, the hall of justice, the academy of learning. Here in the city the goods of civilization are multiplied and manifolded; here is where human experience is transformed into viable signs, symbols, patterns of conduct, systems of order. Here is where the issues of civilization are focused.” Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1938), p. 3. 2.

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations by Nicholas Carr

Abraham Maslow, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Airbus A320, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, computer age, corporate governance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, failed state, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, game design, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, lolcat, low skilled workers, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, mental accounting, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Snapchat, social graph, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

If you assign a computer an overwhelmingly tedious task like spotting house numbers in video images, and then you come back a couple of hours later to find the computer checking its Facebook feed or surfing porn, you’ll know that artificial intelligence has truly arrived. REFLECTIONS November 26, 2012 MIRRORS ARE OFTEN PORTRAYED as tools of self-love. One gazes at the image in the glass as Narcissus gazed at the reflection in the water. But, as Lewis Mumford suggested in his 1934 book Technics and Civilization, mirrors would be better described as instruments of self-loathing. The looking glass isolates the physical self as an abstraction, divorcing it from “the influential presence of other men” and even from “the background of nature.” If the image one sees in the mirror is abstract, it is not ideal or mythical: the more accurate the physical instrument, the more sufficient the light on it, the more relentlessly does it show the effects of age, disease, disappointment, frustration, slyness, covetousness, weakness—these come out quite as clearly as health and joy and confidence.

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As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the fourteenth century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.” The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man.

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy) by Benjamin Peters

Albert Einstein, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Anthropocene, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commons-based peer production, computer age, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Davies, double helix, Drosophila, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, index card, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, power law, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, scientific mainstream, scientific management, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, transaction costs, Turing machine, work culture , Yochai Benkler

As it happened, however, Rokossovsky barely participated in the commission, leaving Kitov’s fate in the hands of his supervisors, who rejected the proposal and followed standard Soviet procedure in burning the unapproved (and irreproducible) proposal in what colleagues later referred to as Kitov’s show trial.20 “Hence the paradox in technics,” as Lewis Mumford put it: “war stimulates invention, but the army resists it!”21 Incensed by Kitov’s critique, the unchecked commission exacted further retribution by revoking his Communist Party membership for the following year and dismissing him from military leadership, his position as the director of Computational Center-1 of the Ministry of Defense, and effectively his once meteoric military career.

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—‘elektronnyi sotsializm’?” Ekonomicheskaya istoriya, 124–138 (Moscow: Trudi istoricheskogo faku’teta MGU 15, 2011), 109. 20. For a hagiographic biographical blurb (in Russian) on Konstantin Konostantinovich Rokossowski, see his memorial site, accessed July 25, 2012, http://www.rokossowski.com/bio.htm. 21. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harvest Book, 1934). 22. Kitov, “Chelovek, kotoryi vynes kibernetiku iz sekretnoi biblioteki.” 23. For more on Soviet military, see Roger R. Reese, The Soviet Military Experience (New York: NP, 2000), and William E. Odom, The Collapse of the Soviet Military (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 24.

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell

accelerated depreciation, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bread and circuses, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, deskilling, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, fear of failure, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Howard Zinn, income inequality, interchangeable parts, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, market design, means of production, mental accounting, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Pearl River Delta, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price discrimination, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, side project, Steve Jobs, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, washing machines reduced drudgery, working poor, yield management, zero-sum game

With his partner and second wife, Elsie Krummeck, he founded an architectural and design firm that developed a reputation for, among other things, fitting Fifth Avenue boutiques with lavish marble-covered entrance vestibules. This may seem a trivial matter to us today, but at the time it was a revelation. In the words of culture critic Lewis Mumford, Gruen’s lobbies lured customers like “a pitcher plant captures flies” and eliminated what he called the “phobia of entering a store.” Anyone who has paced nervously outside the entrance of a swanky boutique waiting to be “buzzed in” knows that this is not always true, but it was true enough at the time to make Gruen a star in the cloistered world of retail architecture.

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His firm and its subsidiar ies controlled every link in the supply chain, from forests to lumberyards to appliance wholesalers. Dissatisfied with the cost of nails, he built a factory to make his own. By shunning middlemen, he got great deals on appliances. By shunning craft workers, he freed himself from labor pressures. He placated the unions, cutting them out without pissing them off. Some critics complained. Lewis Mumford famously dubbed Levittown an “instant slum,” but most held their collective tongues. Levittown was the future, and in the wake of the deadliest conflict in human history, the future was where people wanted to be. As cultural critic Christopher Lasch wrote in his classic The Culture of Narcissism, Americans “trivialized the past by equating it with outmoded styles of consumption, discarded fashions and attitudes.”

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", A Pattern Language, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business climate, citizen journalism, computer vision, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Dennis Ritchie, digital divide, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, experimental economics, experimental subject, Extropian, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Ethic, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, history of Unix, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, more computing power than Apollo, move 37, Multics, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, pez dispenser, planetary scale, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, slashdot, social intelligence, spectrum auction, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, web of trust, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

The problem that would concern Ellul most acutely would not be technique itself but the historic human inability to protect valued qualities of life from technique’s relentless quantification, mechanization, and digitization of everything—including, but not limited to, the very codes of life and processes of biological evolution, the biochemistry of thought and emotion, and the creation of artificial life-forms totally divorced from the realm of flesh. Technique has enabled humans to attain powers we attributed only to the gods a few generations ago. The question is whether we have the wisdom to use our power-tools without amputating something vital. In 1967, Lewis Mumford, in The Myth of the Machine, proposed that the most powerful and dehumanizing invention was not a visible machine but a social machine in which humans were treated as components in a massive hierarchical system for building pyramids and skyscrapers, empires and civilizations.46 Mumford conjectured origins for what he sometimes called “the megamachine” in a prehistoric arrangement that maps perfectly onto Foucault.

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John Leyden, “NTT DoCoMo Pays $217m to Put Spam Back in the Can,” The Register, 7 April 2001, <http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/5/20182.html > (18 March 2002). 43. Harold Lasswell, in Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. J. Wilkinson (New York: Knopf, 1964), x. 44. Ibid., 8283. 45. Ibid. 46. Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1966). 47. Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1976). 48. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Martin Hei-degger: Basic Writings, ed. David Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). 49.

Reset by Ronald J. Deibert

23andMe, active measures, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Cal Newport, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, cashless society, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, confounding variable, contact tracing, contact tracing app, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, information retrieval, information security, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megastructure, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, New Journalism, NSO Group, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-truth, proprietary trading, QAnon, ransomware, Robert Mercer, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sorting algorithm, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, techlash, technological solutionism, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, TSMC, undersea cable, unit 8200, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

At the heart of these recommendations to retreat is a familiar kind of romanticism, a plea for going “back to nature” that has a long pedigree, stretching back at least to the eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and echoed in criticism of popular entertainment and mass consumer culture going back decades, as in Bill McKibben’s The Age of Missing Information, written largely in response to television, or Lewis Mumford’s The Pentagon of Power, which advocates for a return to a Da Vinci–inspired arts and crafts communitarianism.396 The concept of a digital retreat is appealing on many levels. There is a simplicity to it that makes it alluring. It is true that one thing we need to recover is our connection to the natural world.

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Retrieved from https://gizmodo.com/i-cut-the-big-five-tech-giants-from-my-life-it-was-hel-1831304194 These don’t go far enough for virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier: Lanier, J. (2018). Ten arguments for deleting your social media accounts right now. Henry Holt. Bill McKibben’s The Age of Missing Information … or Lewis Mumford’s The Pentagon of Power: McKibben, B. (2006). The age of missing information. Random House; Mumford, L. (1970). The pentagon of power: The myth of the machine. Vol. 2. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. We now live in a “global village” (to borrow McLuhan’s phrasing): McLuhan, M. (1962). The Gutenberg galaxy: The making of typographic man.

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott

agricultural Revolution, Boeing 747, business cycle, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, deskilling, facts on the ground, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, invention of writing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, post-Fordism, Potemkin village, price mechanism, profit maximization, Recombinant DNA, road to serfdom, scientific management, Silicon Valley, stochastic process, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, working poor

Descartes's vision conjures up the urban equivalent of the scientific forest: streets laid out in straight lines intersecting at right angles, buildings of uniform design and size, the whole built according to a single, overarching plan. The elective affinity between a strong state and a uniformly laid out city is obvious. Lewis Mumford, the historian of urban form, locates the modern European origin of this symbiosis in the open, legible baroque style of the Italian city-state. He claims, in terms that Descartes would have found congenial, "It was one of the triumphs of the baroque mind to organize space, to make it continuous, reduce it to measure and order."6 More to the point, the baroque redesigning of medieval citieswith its grand edifices, vistas, squares, and attention to uniformity, proportion, and perspective-was intended to reflect the grandeur and awesome power of the prince.

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It must be laid out at a stroke, fixed and frozen forever, as if done overnight by Arabian nights genii. Such a plan demands an architectural despot, working for an absolute ruler, who will live long enough to complete their own conceptions. To alter this type of plan, to introduce fresh elements of another style, is to break its esthetic backbone. -Lewis Mumford, The City in History In Mumford's epigraph to this chapter, his criticism is directed at Pierre-Charles L: Enfant's Washington in particular and at baroque urban planning in general.' Greatly amplified, Mumford's criticism could be applied to the work and thought of the Swiss-born French essayist, painter, architect, and planner Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, who is better known by his professional name, Le Corbusier.

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They note the streets or terrain that would be difficult to traverse, watercourses that might impede military movement, the attitude of the local population, the difficulty of their accents, the locations of markets, and so on. 5. Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), p. 6, quoted in Harrison, Forests, pp. 1 1 1-12. 6. Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1961), p. 364. 7. Ibid., p. 387. 8. Quoted in ibid., p. 369. 9. Thomas More's utopian cities, for example, were to be perfectly uniform, so that "he who knows one of the cities will know them all, so exactly alike are they, except where the nature of the ground prevents" (More's Utopia, quoted in ibid., p. 327). 10.

Austerity Britain: 1945-51 by David Kynaston

Alistair Cooke, anti-communist, Arthur Marwick, British Empire, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, continuous integration, deindustrialization, deskilling, Etonian, full employment, garden city movement, hiring and firing, industrial cluster, invisible hand, job satisfaction, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, light touch regulation, mass immigration, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, occupational segregation, price mechanism, public intellectual, rent control, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, stakhanovite, strikebreaker, the market place, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional

‘Another V.J. day spent quietly at home,’ wrote Haines on the 16th. ‘So glad of the rest.’30 The election, the atom bomb, the end of the world war: all within a matter of weeks. It was a moment, inevitably, for taking stock. Frederic Osborn, starting on the 14th a long letter to the great American urban prophet Lewis Mumford, pondered the political upheaval: What has happened is a very big step in the British revolution – a shift of power to meet new conditions and new ideas. Britain will not willingly go far towards Communism; it will remain at heart a free-enterprise nation . . . It does not accept the state-monopoly solution, despite Laski and Aneurin Bevan; and sooner or later it will revolt against the facile solution of state ownership and be driven to expedients of entirely new kinds, which Labour philosophy at present scornfully scouts.

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Those shadows, after all, had now been banished, and for most people their reward was to return to their gardens and cars – cars that in time might even be a different colour than black. This was a truth that Frederic Osborn recognised. ‘In Welwyn, where everyone has a house and a garden, we find a moderate desire for social and communal life,’ he wrote to Lewis Mumford in August 1946 from his garden city. ‘The demand has definite limits; I am more communal in my habits than most people are. I find many women dislike the idea of nursery school and crêches; they want to look after their own children. And young men and women prefer lodgings to hostels.’ How, then, was a more communally minded society to be encouraged?

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‘Relatively to the knowledge and aspirations of the times, the wholesale building of multi-storey flats at 40 an acre today in Stepney or Bermondsey is less enlightened than the building there of terrace-houses at much the same density 100 years ago,’ he declared in the spring issue of Town and Country Planning. And by July he was inveighing to Lewis Mumford about how ‘in London just now the authorities are building eight and ten storey flats, intended for families’, though with an average floor area of only 650 square feet, compared to the 1,000 or 1,050 square feet for ‘the current two-storey house’. Yet ‘Royal personages open these wonder-flats, admire the gadgets, the central heating and hot water, the automatic lifts, etc.

This Is Only a Test: How Washington D.C. Prepared for Nuclear War by David F. Krugler

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Berlin Wall, City Beautiful movement, colonial rule, company town, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Dr. Strangelove, Frank Gehry, full employment, glass ceiling, index card, launch on warning, Lewis Mumford, nuclear winter, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, urban planning, Victor Gruen, white flight, Works Progress Administration

If, as philosopher Martin Heidegger contended, most persons evade contemplation of their mortality by immersing themselves in the exigencies of daily life, then how likely was it they would imagine their own annihilation, that of the species too, in an atomic war, and join civil defense programs? To save civilization there was no other choice, according to civil defense supporters. Lewis Mumford had his doubts. In a brilliant essay, Mumford, better known for his architectural criticism, imagined four global situations involving atomic weapons. In the first three, nations use atomic bombs against one another, killing tens of millions, even pushing homo sapiens to the brink of extinction.

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Civil Defense Stalled,” WP, September 12, 1952; Engineer Commissioner memorandum, December 4, 1952, box 228, folder 4102, RG 351, BOC; DCD, Information Bulletin, September 29, 1952, Office of Civil Defense Memoranda Orders, Washingtoniana. “Public Apathy Still Cripples Defense Plans,” WS, June 8, 1951. Robert Jay Lifton, “Imagining the Real: Beyond the Nuclear ‘End,’ ” in Lester Grinspoon, ed., The Long Darkness: Psychological and Moral Perspectives on Nuclear Winter (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986), 79–99. Lewis Mumford, “Social Effects,” Air Affairs (March 1947): 370–82. Søren Kierkegaard, “The Sickness Unto Death,” in Robert Bretall, ed., A Kierkegaard Anthology (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), 344. Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 293.

Chasing the Moon: The People, the Politics, and the Promise That Launched America Into the Space Age by Robert Stone, Alan Andres

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Easter island, feminist movement, Gene Kranz, General Motors Futurama, invention of the telephone, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, military-industrial complex, more computing power than Apollo, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, out of africa, overview effect, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, the scientific method, traveling salesman, Works Progress Administration

However, before the flight there had been talk that the crew might be given an option to proceed onto the lunar surface five hours earlier. And about ninety minutes after landing, Armstrong indeed sent word that he would prefer to exit the lunar module at roughly 9:00 P.M. EDT. Some Americans made a point of saying that they wouldn’t bother to watch any coverage of Apollo 11. Lewis Mumford, one of the country’s leading intellectuals, described the Apollo program as “a symbolic act of war [by a] megatechnic power system, in the lethal grip of the ‘myth of the machine.’ ” Only a few minutes after the Eagle had touched down, Walter Cronkite wondered aloud how young Americans dismissive of the space program were reacting to the news.

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“The hopes and the dreams” Gene Kranz, Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), p. 283. Armstrong later said Neil Armstrong, quoted in Apollo 11: Technical Crew Debriefing, July 31, 1969 (Houston: Manned Spacecraft Center, 1969), p. 60. “A symbolic act” Lewis Mumford, “No: ‘A Symbolic Act of War…’ ” NYT (July 21, 1969), p. 6. “How can anybody” CBS News, “Man on the Moon,” (July 20, 1969). “Old-fashioned humanist” CBS News, “Man on the Moon,” (July 20, 1969). Astronauts deemed Neil Armstrong, “The Moon Had Been Awaiting Us a Long Time,” Life (August 22, 1969): p. 25.

The Idea of Decline in Western History by Arthur Herman

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, bread and circuses, British Empire, David Attenborough, Dr. Strangelove, European colonialism, Future Shock, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Joan Didion, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Bookchin, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois

An admirer of the nineteenth-century anarchist tradition and a close student of earlier antitechnic critics such as Lewis Mumford and Paul Goodman, Bookchin embraced Marcuse’s idea that postscarcity society represented a profoundly new and dangerous development for civilization. In 1966 Bookchin published Crisis of the Cities, in which he predicted that America’s industrial cities were spreading “like a rampant cancer” into the hinterland, destroying wilderness, agricultural land, and waterways. Technological civilization, he claimed, was placing “an intolerable burden” on the environment, or what Lewis Mumford had called the “biosphere.” Like Marcuse, however, Bookchin also thought that new technologies such as wind power could bring “land and city into a rational and ecological synthesis.”

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It was indeed a mighty god.”)4 In the modernist version of technological pessimism, the machine destroys man’s humanity by casting him into an artificial, fluorescent-lit cultural darkness. This barbaric reversion underlies the antitechnic vision of the modern West we find in critics such as Walter Benjamin, Lewis Mumford, and Jacques Ellul in The Technological Society: Men now live in conditions that are less than human. Consider the concentration of our great cities, the slums, the lack of space, air, of time, the gloomy streets and sallow lights that confuse night and day. Think of our dehumanized factories, our unsatisfied senses, our working women, our estrangement from nature.

Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity by Edward Tenner

A. Roger Ekirch, Apple Newton, Bonfire of the Vanities, card file, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Lewis Mumford, Multics, multilevel marketing, Network effects, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, QWERTY keyboard, safety bicycle, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, women in the workforce

Acclaim for EDWARD TENNER’s OUR OWN DEVICES “Insightful and provocative.… Tenner has become a worthy successor to such luminaries as business philosopher Peter Drucker, social critic Lewis Mumford, and historian Lynn White in connecting technology’s past, present, and future.” —Nature “Fascinating.… Delves into, mulls over, and teases apart eye-glasses, shoes, chairs, and other innovations that have changed our bodies in unexpected ways.” —Scientific American “Ambitious, stimulating work.… The lesson Tenner transmits so cogently, unpredictably, and delightfully is that in the best designs ease and complexity cohabit, furthering and reflecting evolution itself.”

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One of the most incisive and influential critics of technology, Jacques Ellul, argued powerfully that modern humanity is enmeshed in such omnipresent, interlocking technological institutions that technology and technique are inseparable. Ellul begins his most important work, The Technological Society, by insisting, against Lewis Mumford, that the machine is only a result of technique, not its source. Mumford established historical periods based on energy—hydraulic, coal, electrical; Ellul sought to understand the spirit behind the power sources and machinery. For him, technology was the product of the ancient Near East; in Western antiquity and medieval Christianity, it was always subordinated to other principles.

The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention by William Rosen

Albert Einstein, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, barriers to entry, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, computer age, Copley Medal, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, delayed gratification, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, fudge factor, full employment, Higgs boson, independent contractor, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, iterative process, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph Schumpeter, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, moral hazard, Network effects, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Simon Kuznets, spinning jenny, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, zero-sum game, éminence grise

The transfer of motion from one plane to another—converting the straight-line motion that was intrinsic to any piston-operated engine into the regular power supplied by a rotating wheel—turned out to be as big a challenge as building the steam engine itself. And as important. In the words of the twentieth-century critic Lewis Mumford, “The technical advance which characterizes32 specifically the modern age is that from reciprocating to rotary motions.” To understand this statement requires (forgive the pun) circling back to the branch of mechanics that describes the transformation of motion from one direction to another, otherwise known as kinematics.

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Clarke, Tour Through the South of England, quoted in Howard Jones, Steam Engines. 21 Adventurers, in turn, appointed “captains” Anthony Burton, Richard Trevithick, Giant of Steam (London: Aurum Press, 2000). 22 “shareholders might grumble” Ibid. 23 One of them, the Great County Adit Ibid. 24 88 lb. in London Hills, Power from Steam. 25 “raise as much water as two Horses” Ibid. 26 As a result of the hostility Ibid. 27 “all the cast iron” Ibid. 28 at least one Boulton & Watt engine was too large Ibid. 29 It was in response to these demands Ibid. 30 “All the world are agape” Marshall, James Watt. 31 “I think that these mills represent” Birmingham Central Library and Adam Matthew Publications, The Industrial Revolution: A Documentary History. Series One: The Boulton and Watt Archive and the Matthew Boulton Papers from the Birmingham Central Library. 32 “The technical advance which characterizes” Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, 1934). 33 “continuous rotary motion” Lynn White, “The Act of Invention: Causes, Contexts, Continuities, and Consequences,” Technology and Culture 3, no. 4, March 1962. 34 Arabs were using them White, Medieval Technology and Social Change. 35 The earliest visual evidence of a crankshaft Ibid. 36 “to render the motion more regular and uniform” Hills, Power from Steam. 37 Watt had not believed George Selgin and John Turner, “James Watt as Intellectual Monopolist: Comment on Boldrin and Levine,” International Economic Review 47, no. 4, November 2006. 38 “I know the contrivance is my own” Watt to Boulton, April 28, 1781, in Robinson and Musson, James Watt and the Steam Revolution. 39 “timmer [timber]… turned on my little lathey [lathe]” “William Murdock” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 40 “I wish William could be brought to do” Ibid. 41 “the most active man and best engine erector I ever saw” Birmingham Central Library and Adam Matthew Publications, The Industrial Revolution: A Documentary History.

Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences by Edward Tenner

air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, animal electricity, blue-collar work, Charles Babbage, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, dematerialisation, Donald Knuth, Edward Jenner, Exxon Valdez, gentrification, germ theory of disease, Herman Kahn, informal economy, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, machine translation, mass immigration, Menlo Park, nuclear winter, oil shock, placebo effect, planned obsolescence, Productivity paradox, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rising living standards, Robert X Cringely, safety bicycle, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, sugar pill, systems thinking, technoutopianism, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory

(Conservative Beacon Hill residents discouraged their children from setting up households on "made land" because it was infra-dig, not because it was inferior digging.) It was the following generations that saw a level of technological transformation unequaled ever since. Electrification of industry helped create what the historian and critic Lewis Mumford was to call a "neotechnic" era of power grids in place of steam engines and new alloys and materials alongside steel and other conventional ones. Mumford urged a new political and social order to decentralize work from grimy urban factories to smaller, electrically powered workshops dotting the countryside.

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And the consequences of a Rube Goldberg technology are definitely intended.28 a Misgivings Official America held fast to technological optimism throughout the Depression and the Second World War. The Tennessee Valley Authority, the Hoover Dam, the streamlined defense plants, the large-scale production of penicillin—each seemed to show that despite the troubles of the economy, rational planning could conquer almost any task. Even critics of technology like the early Lewis Mumford believed that properly implemented, it could promote a more humane life. Science and technology appeared to be benign alternatives to the greed and irrationality that were thought to have brought about the Depression. While atomic weapons turned Mumford and others against this vision, even these terrible instruments had done what they were intended to do.

Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis by Benjamin Kunkel

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, creative destruction, David Graeber, declining real wages, full employment, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, means of production, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Occupy movement, peak oil, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, savings glut, Slavoj Žižek, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, vertical integration, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Among Federici’s potent arguments is that so-called reproductive labor, done preponderantly by women, deserves the same sort of monetary compensation as the “productive” labor of workers on the job market. The idea bears some resemblance to the “basic communism” proposed by the (non-Marxist) American polymath Lewis Mumford, in Technics and Civilization (1934), according to which a minimum income is due all members of society. Writing in the midst of the Depression, Mumford was still admirably capable of utopian accents, and concluded his magisterial survey of technological developments over five centuries with a call to “socialize creation”: The creative life, in all its manifestations, is necessarily a social product.

Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us by Will Storr

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, bitcoin, classic study, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, gamification, gig economy, greed is good, intentional community, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, Mother of all demos, Nixon shock, Peter Thiel, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QWERTY keyboard, Rainbow Mansion, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech bro, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, twin studies, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

It was feared the future would be a ‘technocracy’ in which freedom and individuality would be crushed and the population dominated by machines of coercion, conformity and control. Computers were seen as a war technology that would be co-opted by the collective powers of government and corporation and used against us. ‘The dominant minority will create a uniform, all-enveloping, super-planetary structure, designed for automatic operation,’ wrote Lewis Mumford in his 1967 book, The Myth of the Machine. ‘Instead of functioning actively as an autonomous personality, man will become a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal whose proper functions, as technicians now interpret man’s role, will either be fed into the machine or strictly limited and controlled for the benefit of de-personalised, collective organisations.’

…

As sociologist Professor John Hewitt so adroitly puts it, ‘The era of “character” vanished:’ Dilemmas of the American Self, John P. Hewitt (Temple, 1989), p. 96. It was feared the future would be a ‘technocracy’ in which freedom: From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner (University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 29. wrote Lewis Mumford in his 1967 book, The Myth of the Machine: Quoted in From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner (University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 29. a five-month trip to China as a theology student: Carl Rogers: The Quiet Revolutionary, Carl R. Rogers and David E. Russell (Penmarin, 2002), p. 62.

Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks (Cambridge Studies in the Emergence of Global Enterprise) by Andrew L. Russell

Aaron Swartz, American ideology, animal electricity, barriers to entry, borderless world, Californian Ideology, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, creative destruction, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, open economy, OSI model, packet switching, pre–internet, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, vertical integration, web of trust, work culture

Their work is exemplified in movements that embrace open science, open access publishing, open source software, open innovation business strategies, open education, and so on.1 President Barack Obama’s “Open Government Initiative,” announced on his first day in office in 2009, captured the collective spirit of these efforts: “We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in government.”2 The ideology of openness, as it is articulated and practiced in the early twenty-first century, would have surprised the critic and historian of technology Lewis Mumford. In his 1964 essay, “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics,” he wondered: “Why has our age surrendered so easily to the controllers, the manipulators, the conditioners of an authoritarian technics?”3 The advocates of openness, however, have not surrendered so easily. Instead, they sense the dawn of a radical, almost utopian transformation in which power hierarchies are flattened, secret activities are made transparent, individuals are empowered, and knowledge itself is democratized.

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David, “Understanding the Emergence of ‘Open Science’ Institutions: Functionalist Economics in Historical Context,” Industrial and Corporate Change 13 (2004): 571–589; Steven Weber, The Success of Open Source (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2004); Peter Suber, Open Access (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012); Henry Chesbrough, Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2003); Michael A. Peters and Rodrigo G. Britez, eds., Open Education and Education for Openness (Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers, 2008). 2 Barack Obama, “Transparency and Openness in Government,” The White House, http://www.whitehouse.gov/open (accessed August 19, 2010). 3 Lewis Mumford, “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics,” Technology & Culture 5 (1964): 1–8. See also David E. Nye, “Shaping Communication Networks: Telegraph, Telephone, Computer,” Social Research 64 (1997): 1067–1091. 4 Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996); Thomas L.

Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers by Stephen Graham

1960s counterculture, Anthropocene, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Chelsea Manning, commodity super cycle, creative destruction, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Elisha Otis, energy security, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, Google Earth, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Project Plowshare, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Skype, South China Sea, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, white flight, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

The viewer ‘would then see before him an immense structure, four or five times as large as the greatest hotels in America, about twice or three times as wide, and over 2000 feet high … In a grand hotel communication between these floors would be by means of an elevator; in the mine would be in use the same contrivances, but instead of an “elevator” it would be called a “cage”.’16 Brechin draws here on legendary American urban critic Lewis Mumford (1895–1990). Using Mumford’s ideas of the capitalist ‘mega machine’ – where financial industries constitute an economic apex based ultimately on the exploitative and dangerous processes of mining, especially of gold and silver17 – he stresses that De Quille’s vision is even more evident in the contemporary context of super-tall 1 km towers, 3 to 4 km ultra-deep mines, and super-deep pits and quarries.

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., p. 67. 16Dan De Quille, History of the Big Bonanza: An Authentic Account of the Discovery, History and Working on the World-Renowned Comstock Silver Lode of Virginia City, Nevada, Hartford, CN: American Publishing Co., 1877, p. 322. 17From base to apex, Mumford’s ‘pyramid of mining’ centres on mining, metallurgy, mechanisation, militarism and finance. See Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization, Berkeley: University of California, 2010 [1937]. 18See Gavin Bridge, ‘The Hole World: Scales and Spaces of Extraction’, Scenario Journal 05: Extraction, Fall 2015. 19Brechin, Imperial San Francisco, p. 70. 20Mimi Sheller, Aluminum Dreams: The Making of Light Modernity, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 25. 21It must be remembered, of course, that the Burj houses hotels, offices and restaurants as well as apartments.

Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain by John Grindrod

Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, garden city movement, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Martin Parr, megastructure, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, New Urbanism, Right to Buy, side project, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, young professional

Peter and Alison Smithson, a recently qualified and increasingly influential pair of architects, described them as ‘English towns as off the mark as any English scene by Hollywood’.35 And they didn’t stop there. ‘Drive or walk into any example of the garden city idea and you will lose your sense of direction in the wide streets that lead nowhere. Wide tarmac rivers wave off in every direction, any of them may be the way out.’36 Even Lewis Mumford, American planner and friend of garden city champion Frederic Osborn, wasn’t convinced by these early postwar experiments: ‘Because the new planners were mainly in revolt against congestion and squalor, rather than in love with urban order and cooperation, the new towns do not yet adequately reveal what the modern city should be.’37 The new town planners were bewildered by the vehemence of these reactions to their masterworks.

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Richards, ‘Failure of the New Towns’, Architectural Review, July 1953, p31 33 Gordon Cullen, ‘Prairie Planning in the New Towns’, Architectural Review, July 1953, p36 34 J. M. Richards, ‘Failure of the New Towns’, Architectural Review, July 1953, p32 35 Peter and Alison Smithson, Ordinariness and Light, Faber, 1970, p25 36 Peter and Alison Smithson, Ordinariness and Light, Faber, 1970, p26 37 Lewis Mumford in David Kynaston, Family Britain, Bloomsbury, 2010, p345 38 Frederick Gibberd in Gibberd, Hyde Harvey and White, p112 39 Roger Berthoud, The Times, 16/12/77, p14 40 Frederick Gibberd in Gibberd, Hyde Harvey and White, p6 i A decade later when the Gulbenkian Foundation bestowed a £3,000 grant for the town to commission a sculpture, The Times remarked on the modernist tone of the existing examples that ‘so far there is no one on horseback’.

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier by Edward L. Glaeser

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, declining real wages, desegregation, different worldview, diversified portfolio, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, endowment effect, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, global village, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, job-hopping, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, RFID, Richard Florida, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, strikebreaker, Thales and the olive presses, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Works Progress Administration, young professional

One problem with policies that subsidize sprawl is that car-based living imposes environmental costs on the entire planet. The patron saint of American environmentalism, Henry David Thoreau, was another antiurbanite. At Walden Pond, he became so “suddenly sensible of such sweet beneficent society in Nature” that “the fancied advantages of human neighborhood” became “insignificant.” Lewis Mumford, the distinguished architectural critic and urban historian, praised the “parklike setting” of suburbs and denigrated the urban “deterioration of the environment.” Now we know that the suburban environmentalists had it backward. Manhattan and downtown London and Shanghai, not suburbia, are the real friends of the environment.

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Levitt wasn’t going to bottom-fish, as he had in Norfolk. He was building a high-quality product, at least for its time. The homes had modern appliances and sturdy construction. He master-planned the community. It had, and has, parks and schools and plenty of green space. Although the result—Levittown—drove highbrow critics like the New Yorker’s Lewis Mumford to fits of literary condescension, the town’s low prices and relative opulence made it wildly popular with ordinary folks. The critics may have been right in decrying the endless monotony of similarly styled ranch and colonial buildings, but tenements were hardly architectural masterpieces either.

On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World by Timothy Cresswell

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Alvin Toffler, Boeing 747, British Empire, desegregation, deskilling, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, global village, illegal immigration, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, moral panic, post-Fordism, Rosa Parks, scientific management, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, urban planning

Wandering minstrels, troubadours, crusaders, pilgrims, and some peripatetic monks existed, for periods of time, outside of the obligations of place and roots. So-called wandering Jews lived outside the web of obligations and duties that marked feudalism. For this reason they were looked down upon and distrusted. As Lewis Mumford put it: The unattached individual during the Middle Ages was one condemned either to excommunication or to exile: close to death. To exist one had to belong to an association—a household, manor, monastery or guild. There was no security except through group protection and no freedom that did not recognize the constant obligation of a corporate life.

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Dodgshon, The European Past: Social Evolution and Spatial Order (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Education, 1987), chapter 6. 26. John C. Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 27. Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters (Oxford: Polity Press, 1987), 39. 28. Ibid., 40. 29. Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961), 269. 30. Leslie Feldman, Freedom as Motion (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2001); John Rutherford, The Troubadours: Their Loves and Their Lyrics: With Remarks on Their Influence, Social and Literary (London: Smith Elder, 1873). 31.

The Human Cosmos: A Secret History of the Stars by Jo Marchant

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, British Empire, complexity theory, Dava Sobel, Drosophila, Easter island, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, founder crops, game design, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Nicholas Carr, out of africa, overview effect, Plato's cave, polynesian navigation, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, Skype, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, trade route

And as time became more accurate, it was also less negotiable. Life was increasingly ruled not by events or natural cues, but the inexorable march of the clock. Historians generally pinpoint this period as laying the ground for capitalism and the Industrial Revolution: according to the influential twentieth-century historian Lewis Mumford, “The clock, not the steam engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age.” The precisely made gears and technological expertise necessary for clockmaking led to the development of machinery that allowed automated mass production.* But more important was the increased regulation and coordination of work and workers, and the change in attitudes toward time.

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an obsession with time: North, God’s Clockmaker; David Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); John Scattergood, “Writing the Clock: The Reconstruction of Time in the Late Middle Ages,” European Review 11 (2003): 453–74; Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, reprint ed., 2010); Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). “temporal discipline”: Landes, Revolution in Time, 59. “pray and pray often”: Landes, Revolution in Time, 61.

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand by John Markoff

A Pattern Language, air freight, Anthropocene, Apple II, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Beryl Markham, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Biosphere 2, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, Danny Hillis, decarbonisation, demographic transition, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, feminist movement, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Filter Bubble, game design, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, off grid, off-the-grid, paypal mafia, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Hackers Conference, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

Brand took his inspiration for the size and format of the first Catalog from Steve Baer’s oversize Dome Cookbook, which had been published the previous year, and drew together his drawings of geometric shapes, handwritten memories of building various domes, typewritten instructions, and black-and-white photos. Baer, introduced to Brand by Steve Durkee, was an early example of the diverse assembly of technophiles Brand organized Tom Sawyer–style to help create the Catalog. A fellow army vet, Baer had originally been inspired by Lewis Mumford to view technology as a positive force for society, and he played a key role in the design of the dome residences at the early Colorado commune Drop City. Brand was gradually moving away from LSD, but he still had a penchant for psychedelics. For a while an E tank of nitrous oxide, ordered weekly, was a permanent fixture at the Truck Store office.

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Space is part of the wildness in which lies ‘the preservation of the world.’ ” The ensuing debate stretched over multiple issues of the Quarterly and brought out a series of big names on both sides of the issue, including Lynn Margulis, Wendell Berry, Paul and Anne Ehrlich, E. F. Schumacher, Lewis Mumford, Buckminster Fuller, Ernest Callenbach, David Brower, Carl Sagan, Gary Snyder, and Russell Schweickart. None of the attacks were more bitter than Berry’s, whose writings on agriculture and the environment had been showcased in the Catalog. Calling Brand’s enthusiasm a “warmed-over Marine Corps recruitment advertisement,” he wrote, “As you represent it, a space colony will be nothing less than a magic machine that will transmute little problems into big solutions.

Vanishing New York by Jeremiah Moss

activist lawyer, back-to-the-city movement, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, Broken windows theory, complexity theory, creative destruction, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, food desert, gentrification, global pandemic, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, Mason jar, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, plutocrats, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Skype, starchitect, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, young professional

In the very heart of the “commercial” city on Manhattan Island south of 59th Street, the inspectors in 1922 found nearly 420,000 workers, employed in factories. Such a situation outrages one’s sense of order. Everything seems misplaced. One yearns to re-arrange the hodge-podge and to put things where they belong. Critic Lewis Mumford savaged the plan, writing in New Republic that it represented a “sociological failure” and existed for “the interests and prejudices of the existing financial rulers.” You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to see that the financial rulers wanted a sociological failure, to disrupt the progressive working class of New York, dividing whites from blacks, to protect and expand their own power.

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Again and again, we will hear the same insistence that this kind of urban change is natural and inevitable. But these are lies. As author Ta-Nehisi Coates has remarked, “white flight was a triumph of social engineering.” URBAN RENEWAL, SLUM CLEARANCE, AND BLOCKBUSTING In his 1932 critique of the Regional Plan, Lewis Mumford presciently noted that what the RPA had prepared was an elaborate scheme “to lead the population farther and farther out into the suburbs, without bothering to ask what will become of the wasted districts that remain.” But maybe they did ask. Maybe they knew. Even the new highways and bridges that led whites and ethnics out of the city to the suburbs were conceived by the RPA.

Wasps: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy by Michael Knox Beran

anti-communist, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, company town, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Etonian, fulfillment center, George Santayana, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, old-boy network, phenotype, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, W. E. B. Du Bois, éminence grise

They stare out at us from the canvases of Sargent, well-to-do but uncertain young people, the splendor of whose poses is diminished by a certain vacuousness in their expressions, an emptiness in their eyes. Some committed suicide; others were sent to lunatic asylums or languished in self-doubt and nervous debility, an affliction they knew as neurasthenia, for which reading Dante was the only cure. Oppressed by the gloom of what the critic Lewis Mumford called the Brown Decades, in which coal smoke and perverse fashions combined to color the world with “mediocre drabs, dingy chocolate browns, sooty browns that merged into black,” they suffered, in lugubrious rooms furnished somberly in walnut, from obscure hurts and identified with the roi mehaignié—the wounded king—of the Grail legend.

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The most insightful work on agora or plasquagórazza culture has been done almost entirely by Europeans, and almost entirely in the years between 1790 and 1940: Burke’s theory of the “little platoon,” Wordsworth’s evocation of provincial Cumbria and the “high value he set upon customariness, upon all that is habitual, local, rooted in the ground,” Coleridge’s vision of the provincial nucleus “round which the capabilities” of a place “may crystallize and brighten,” Ruskin’s studies of Venice, Pater’s “Denys L’Auxerrois” and his other agora fantasies, Fustel de Coulanges’ work on the Roman city and Jacob Burckhardt’s studies of Greek and Renaissance culture, the agora scholarship of Camillo Sitte, Johan Huizinga, and Werner Jaeger. (Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition was published in 1958, but belongs in spirit to the earlier period.) With the possible exceptions of Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs (whose work was devoted rather to the large urban center than to the plasquagórazza forum) and of such expatriates as T. S. Eliot and Hemingway, no American has made a comparable contribution. The Roosevelts with the clergy (and King George VI and Queen Elizabeth) outside St.

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“trained and public-spirited caste”: Edmund Wilson, “John Jay Chapman,” in Wilson, The Triple Thinkers and the Wound and the Bow: A Combined Volume (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1984), 150. “grey debris”: Walt Whitman, “When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d.” “mediocre drabs”: Lewis Mumford, The Brown Decades: A Study in the Arts of America 1865–1895 (New York: Dover, 1955), 5. “a dying race”: Adams, Life of George Cabot Lodge, 130. plutocracy that had outstripped it: Seymour Martin Lipset believed that WASP Progressives were “American Tory radicals—men of upper-class backgrounds and values, who as conservatives helped to democratize society as part of their struggle against the vulgar nouveaux riche businessman.”

Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, clockwork universe, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, digital capitalism, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, gig economy, Google bus, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, invisible hand, iterative process, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mirror neurons, multilevel marketing, new economy, patient HM, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, theory of mind, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

We described ourselves as living in a “clockwork universe” John of Sacrobosco, De Sphaera Mundi (On the Sphere of the World), c. 1230, available at http://www.esotericarchives.com/solomon/sphere.htm. Dennis Des Chene, Spirits and Clocks: Machine and Organism in Descartes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). We sought to operate faster George Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). Lewis Mumford, Myth of the Machine (Boston: Mariner, 1971). Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage, 1993). Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). It’s not just treating machines as living humans; it’s treating humans as machines John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2000). 38.

Chief Engineer by Erica Wagner

book value, Charles Lindbergh, company town, Edmond Halley, Elisha Otis, Ford Model T, index card, Lewis Mumford, oil shale / tar sands, railway mania, Silicon Valley

The story of its construction, one of the greatest emblems of “progress” in the nineteenth century, is such a dramatic tale of vision, innovation, and endurance in the face of extraordinary odds that it overshadows—understandably, perhaps—the rest of its builder’s life. At the same time, if you stop a few dozen pedestrians walking across the bridge and ask them who brought it into being, they won’t be able to give you an answer. The architectural historian Lewis Mumford—who wrote of the “clean exaltation” engendered by a walk over the Brooklyn Bridge, also admired “the tradition of anonymity” cloaking the identities of most engineers. Washington’s life is, in itself, a striking one. Born in 1837, he lived to be nearly ninety, and so his years spanned the most American of centuries.

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Modern Industries: A Series of Reports on Industry and Manufactures, As Represented in the Paris Exposition in 1867 by Twelve British Workmen. London: Macmillan, 1868. Morris, Jan. Fisher’s Face. London: Viking, 1995. Morton, Nathaniel. New England’s Memorial. Boston: Congregational Board of Publication, 1855. Mumford, Lewis. Sidewalk Critic: Lewis Mumford’s Writings on New York. Edited by Robert Wojtowicz. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998. Opening Ceremonies, New York and Brooklyn Bridge, May 24, 1883. Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Eagle Job Printing Department, 1883. Paris Universal Exhibition 1867, Complete Official Catalogue. London: J.

Future Shock by Alvin Toffler

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, East Village, Future Shock, global village, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, information retrieval, intentional community, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Menlo Park, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open immigration, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, social intelligence, Teledyne, the market place, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, urban renewal, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

Human work will move out of the factory and mass office into the community and the home. Machines will be synchronized, as some already are, to the billionth of a second; men will be desynchronized. The factory whistle will vanish. Even the clock, "the key machine of the modern industrial age," as Lewis Mumford called it a generation ago, will lose some of its power over human, as distinct from purely technological, affairs. Simultaneously, the organizations needed to control technology will shift from bureaucracy to Ad-hocracy, from permanence to transience, and from a concern with the present to a focus on the future.

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MC-67 (P-27C-1) US Department of Commerce. 394 Family ritual is examined in [5], p. 32. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN 401 Dewey and Hutchins are quoted in [112], the dedication and p. 70. 401 The Barzun reference is from [101], p. 125. 402 The significance of the clock is explored in "The Monastery and the Clock" by Lewis Mumford in [293], p. 61. See also the excellent paper entitled "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism" by E. P. Thompson in Past and Present, December, 1967, pp. 56-97. 403 Snow is quoted from [306], p. 12. 406 For a description of McDonald's proposal see "Beyond the Schoolhouse" by Frederick J.

The State and the Stork: The Population Debate and Policy Making in US History by Derek S. Hoff

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, back-to-the-land, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, clean water, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, feminist movement, full employment, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, George Gilder, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, New Economic Geography, new economy, old age dependency ratio, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, pensions crisis, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, wage slave, War on Poverty, white flight, zero-sum game

Later in the decade, this argument was turned on its head; as the suburbs, bulging with Baby Boomers, came under attack for their conformity and anti-intellectualism, theorists claimed that an increasing numeric mass of people exacerbated the stultifying conformity of consumer-driven “mass society.” Lewis Mumford, a famous critic of the American city, even worried that population increase had driven cemeteries to the edges of the cities. He complained that without a dramatic change of course, “the demand for open spaces for the dead threatens to crowd the quarters of the living on a scale impossible to conceive in earlier urban cultures.”138 Because many quality-of-life arguments concerned the landscape, they fell within the purview of mainstream conservationists.

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See Pells, Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age, esp. the discussion of the “problems of prosperity” beginning on 188. 135. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “The Challenge of Abundance,” The Reporter, May 3, 1956, 8. 136. For a summary of The Affluent Society, see Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith, chap. 13. 137. John Kenneth Galbraith, “Economics and Environment,” AIA Journal, September 1966, 57. 138. Lewis Mumford, “The Natural History of Urbanization,” in Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, ed. William L. Thomas Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 395. 139. Samuel Hays introduces this line of inquiry in Beauty, Health, and Permanence, noting that the environmental movement’s new concern with “amenities” in the 1960s emerged from and reinforced the postwar rise of postmaterialist values (266).

Animal Spirits by Jackson Lears

1960s counterculture, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, clockwork universe, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Doomsday Clock, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, escalation ladder, feminist movement, financial innovation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, George Santayana, heat death of the universe, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Ida Tarbell, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Norman Mailer, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, short selling, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, the market place, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

The rise of dictatorships abroad had encouraged Americans to find signs of madness in foreign leaders. Hitler’s frenetic posturing made him and his followers seem deranged. But the men who were building and testing atomic weapons introduced a new kind of madness into public policy. In March 1946, on hearing of the plan to test two atomic bombs on Bikini Atoll, Lewis Mumford announced: “Gentlemen, you are mad!” The gentlemen in question were the strategists planning the tests, and the “fatal symptom of their madness,” Mumford wrote, was “the solemn conviction that they are normal, responsible people, living sane lives, working for reasonable ends. Soberly, day after day, the madmen continue to go through the undeviating motions of madness: motions so stereotyped, so commonplace, that they seem the normal motions of normal men, not the mass compulsions of people bent on total death.”

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“There is much to fear”: Clinton Rossiter, “Constitutional Dictatorship in an Atomic Age,” Review of Politics 2 (1949), 418. “scare the pants off”: Cited in Boyer, Bomb’s Early Light, 70. “to preserve our civilization”: Eugene Rabinowitch, “Five Years After,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 7, no. 1 (Jan. 1951), 3. “Gentlemen, you are mad!”: Lewis Mumford, “Gentlemen, You Are Mad!” Saturday Review of Literature, March 2, 1946, 5, 6. “scare hell out of the American people”: Arthur Vandenberg, cited in Greg Herken, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State (1977), 282–84. “The atom bomb”: Wyndham Lewis, America and Cosmic Man (1949), 244.

The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York by Caro, Robert A

Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, benefit corporation, British Empire, card file, centre right, East Village, Ford Model T, friendly fire, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, land reform, Lewis Mumford, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Right to Buy, scientific management, Southern State Parkway, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

He was a seminal thinker, perhaps the single most influential seminal thinker, in developing policies in these fields, and the innovator, perhaps the single most influential innovator, in developing the methods by which these policies were implemented. And since parks, highways and urban renewal, taken together, do so much to shape cities' total environment, how then gauge the impact of this one man on the cities of America? The man who was for thirty years his bitterest critic, Lewis Mumford, says: "In the twentieth century, the influence of Robert Moses on the cities of America was greater than that of any other person." With his power, Robert Moses built himself an empire. The capital of this empire was out of public sight—a squat, gray building crouching so unobtrusively below the Randall's Island toll plaza of the Triborough Bridge that most of the motorists who drove through the toll booths never even knew that the building existed.

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Moses applied these labels generously, branding them not only onto labor leaders ("radical, left-wing") and New Deal Brain Trusters (Rexford Tugwell he assailed as a "Planning Red") and urban planners who dared to offer suggestions for the future of New York City ("regarded in Russia as our greatest builder," was how he characterized Frank Lloyd Wright; he called Lewis Mumford "an outspoken revolutionary"; Walter Gropius, he said, was seeking to change the American system by advocating "a philosophy which doesn't belong here"; planners in general, he said, are "socialists," "revolutionaries" who "do not reach the masses directly but through familiar subsurface activity.

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And then he suddenly realized that he was hearing at last what he had been seeking for so long—a shaping vision of how to plan the most heavily populated and densely congested metropolitan region in the world—hearing it pouring out of a man who had never in his life held any official or unofficial planning position. The author continued interviewing planners and public officials. Eventually he was to hear such a vision—conflicting, of course, but of similar grand scale and scope—from two men: elderly Lewis Mumford and young Lee Koppelman, a brilliant planner from Long Island. He was never—in a hundred interviews—to hear it again. Except when, months later, he finally got to interview Paul Moses' brother. During his young manhood Robert Moses was the uncompromising idealist, specifically anxious to "help" the "lower classes."

Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick J. Deneen

classic study, David Brooks, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, intentional community, Lewis Mumford, mortgage debt, Nicholas Carr, plutocrats, price mechanism, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, Steven Levy, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

At best we can try to limit our children’s access to the internet, but Turkle seems resigned to dim prospects of fundamentally changing the current dynamic.3 These recent works follow in the tradition established by critics of technology who emphasize the way that technology changes us and, in particular, destroys long-standing ways of life, attacking the very basis of culture. There is a long tradition of cultural criticism, ranging from Lewis Mumford’s critiques of modernism to Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society, which emphasizes the way the “technique” of technology erases everything in its path in the name of utility and efficiency, and more recently to Wendell Berry, who has argued that machine technology has its own logic, which tends to destroy the practices and traditions of a community.

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, bank run, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, citation needed, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Honoré de Balzac, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Louis Daguerre, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microbiome, Milgram experiment, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, PageRank, pattern recognition, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pre–internet, quantum cryptography, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Simon Singh, Socratic dialogue, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, talking drums, the High Line, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, Turing machine, Turing test, women in the workforce, yottabyte

/ Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”) It is an ancient observation, but one that seemed to bear restating when information became plentiful—particularly in a world where all bits are created equal and information is divorced from meaning. The humanist and philosopher of technology Lewis Mumford, for example, restated it in 1970: “Unfortunately, ‘information retrieving,’ however swift, is no substitute for discovering by direct personal inspection knowledge whose very existence one had possibly never been aware of, and following it at one’s own pace through the further ramification of relevant literature.”♦ He begged for a return to “moral self-discipline.”

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♦ “KNOWLEDGE OF SPEECH, BUT NOT OF SILENCE”: T. S. Eliot, “The Rock,” in Collected Poems: 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1963), 147. ♦ “THE TSUNAMI OF AVAILABLE FACT”: David Foster Wallace, Introduction to The Best American Essays 2007 (New York: Mariner, 2007). ♦ “UNFORTUNATELY, ‘INFORMATION RETRIEVING,’ HOWEVER SWIFT”: Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, vol. 2, The Pentagon of Power (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1970), 182. ♦ “ELECTRONIC MAIL SYSTEM”: Jacob Palme, “You Have 134 Unread Mail! Do You Want to Read Them Now?” in Computer-Based Message Services, ed. Hugh T. Smith (North Holland: Elsevier, 1984), 175–76. ♦ A PAIR OF PSYCHOLOGISTS: C.

The Techno-Human Condition by Braden R. Allenby, Daniel R. Sarewitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, airport security, Anthropocene, augmented reality, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, coherent worldview, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, different worldview, Edward Jenner, facts on the ground, friendly fire, Hans Moravec, industrial cluster, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, mutually assured destruction, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, Peter Singer: altruism, planetary scale, precautionary principle, prediction markets, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, smart grid, source of truth, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

We know that the dependence of modern market economies on continual growth means that we have to keep inventing and consuming new technologies, whether we really Level I and Level II Technology 33 need them or not-indeed, it is not clear what "need" means in our modern framework, Abraham Maslow to the contrary.3 Moreover, this process of continual innovation, productivity enhancement, and economic growth leads to apparently unavoidable spasms of severe unemployment and socioeconomic disruption and transformation, along with the wealth creation that seems to have become an underpinning for civil stability. Technology, that is, seems at once to render the idea of progress more concrete and more perplexing-and more suitable for academic research and debate. Writing in the early 1930s, Lewis Mumford called this the "ambivalence" of the machine, which, he observed, "is both an instrument of liberation and one of repression." "It has," Mumford continued, "economized human energy and it has misdirected it. It has created a wide framework of order and it has produced muddle and chaos. It has nobly served human purposes and it has distorted and denied them.,,4 In this light, then, the area of innovation lumped under the term "human enhancement" can be understood as simply the latest version of the technology-and-progress Rorschach test, and transhumanism as a claim for old-fashioned, technologyinduced progress-for things, generally, getting better because of the development and use of technologies, in this case applied directly to making human bodies, genomes, and brains better than they have ever been before.

Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Meadows. Donella, Diana Wright

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, clean water, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, game design, Garrett Hardin, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, peak oil, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Stanford prison experiment, systems thinking, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, Whole Earth Review

I express my admiration and gratitude to all its members. I also have drawn from thinkers in a variety of disciplines, who, as far as I know, never used a computer to simulate a system, but who are natural systems thinkers. They include Gregory Bateson, Kenneth Boulding, Herman Daly, Albert Einstein, Garrett Hardin, Václav Havel, Lewis Mumford, Gunnar Myrdal, E.F. Schumacher, a number of modern corporate executives, and many anonymous sources of ancient wisdom, from Native Americans to the Sufis of the Middle East. Strange bedfellows, but systems thinking transcends disciplines and cultures and, when it is done right, it overarches history as well.

The End of Traffic and the Future of Transport: Second Edition by David Levinson, Kevin Krizek

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, bike sharing, carbon tax, Chris Urmson, collaborative consumption, commoditize, congestion pricing, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, dematerialisation, driverless car, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, Google Hangouts, high-speed rail, Induced demand, intermodal, invention of the printing press, jitney, John Markoff, labor-force participation, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Lyft, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Network effects, Occam's razor, oil shock, place-making, pneumatic tube, post-work, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, tacit knowledge, techno-determinism, technological singularity, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The future is already here, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, Zipcar

So things became less convenient for the carless — the farther things are spread out, the less effective is walking or public transit — and thus the more people got cars. The growth in infrastructure supply fed the growth in demand; the ascent for the summit of Mount Auto was relentless. Evoking the idea perhaps first popularized by Lewis Mumford,19 Tony Downs, in his 1992 book Stuck in Traffic, described what he called the "Iron Law of Congestion."20 By expanding capacity (i.e., building a road), much, though rarely all, of the additional capacity gets used in the short term by people switching routes, modes, and time of travel. Longer term impacts (i.e., development or behavior change) further reinforce the phenomenon.21 22 The race to the summit of Mount Auto persisted for almost a century.

Road to ruin: an introduction to sprawl and how to cure it by Dom Nozzi

Boeing 747, business climate, car-free, congestion pricing, Donald Shoup, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, New Urbanism, Parkinson's law, place-making, Ray Oldenburg, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, skinny streets, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, transit-oriented development, urban decay, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, zero-sum game

Progress is certainly being made, in Gainesville and elsewhere, but at a glacial pace. I’ll bet Dom Nozzi was at work when the need became apparent for a balanced, straight-forward text that breaks past the usual shrill rhetoric about cars and traffic. While it is written for popular readers, Road to Ruin also picks up and advances an important scholarly thread stirred by Lewis Mumford, furthered by Jane Jacobs, and more lately coalesced into practice by the New Urbanists and Smart Growthers. A two-part formula about land use and transportation was associated with twentieth-century city planning in America, especially in the rapidly changing Sun Belt. First, the formula assumed that land uses would remain separate and kept low in their intensity and density.

Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time by David Prerau

British Empire, Ford Model T, Lewis Mumford, Ronald Reagan, Yom Kippur War

In the face of dogged opposition by one Parliament after another, it seemed that Willett’s cause had been lost along with its galvanizing champion. Few could have imagined that his cherished idea would soon find renewed support, in a most unlikely quarter, under the pressure of world war. Chapter Two From Sun Time to Standard Time The clock, not the steam engine, is the key machine of the modern industrial age. —Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization William Willett’s proposal for daylight saving time was scorned by many for its artificiality. Yet Willett did not propose “to change from natural time to artificial time,” as Winston Churchill told Parliament, “but only to substitute a convenient standard of artificial time for an inconvenient standard of artificial time.”

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

A. Roger Ekirch, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, big-box store, British Empire, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Hans Lippershey, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, inventory management, Jacquard loom, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Live Aid, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, Murano, Venice glass, planetary scale, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, techno-determinism, the scientific method, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, walkable city, women in the workforce

It set in motion a reorientation of society that was more subtle, but no less transformative, than the reorientation of our place in the universe that the telescope engendered. “The most powerful prince in the world created a vast hall of mirrors, and the mirror spread from one room to another in the bourgeois household,” Lewis Mumford writes in his Technics and Civilization. “Self-consciousness, introspection, mirror-conversation developed with the new object itself.” Social conventions as well as property rights and other legal customs began to revolve around the individual rather than the older, more collective units: the family, the tribe, the city, the kingdom.

The Big Shift: Navigating the New Stage Beyond Midlife by Marc Freedman

airport security, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Blue Ocean Strategy, David Brooks, follow your passion, illegal immigration, intentional community, Isaac Newton, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, McMansion, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tech worker, transcontinental railway, working poor, working-age population

My own research on the history of retirement in the United States led me to similar conclusions about the construction of life stages. While the economic institution of retirement grew steadily in the twentieth century, especially after the introduction of Social Security in the early 1940s, this time in life became seen as a problem period in the years after World War II. In the 1950s, for example, Lewis Mumford argued that at no point in society had any group been so rejected as older people were at that time. But then it all changed. Beginning in the 1950s, we turned that stage of life from a dreaded desert to a cherished destination, transforming it into a cornerstone of the American Dream. A leisured retirement became a symbol of a life well lived, and whoever got there first was deemed all the more successful.

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg

A. Roger Ekirch, back-to-the-land, British Empire, California gold rush, colonial rule, Copley Medal, desegregation, Donald Trump, feminist movement, full employment, gentleman farmer, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, joint-stock company, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, mass immigration, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration

And rather than lift up everyone, the system tended to favor those who were already middle class, or those working-class families with steady incomes.23 Suburban subdivisions encouraged buyers to live with their “own kind,” constantly sorting people by religion, ethnicity, race, and class. The esteemed architectural critic Lewis Mumford described Levittown as a “one-class community.” In 1959, the bestselling author and journalist Vance Packard summed up the suburban filtration process as “birds-of-a-feather flocking.” As we have so often seen, the importance of animal stock, and of “breed” generally, remained on the tip of the American tongue when idiomatic distinctions of class identity were being made.24 In 1951, the Levitts opened their second development, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, after U.S.

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For lack of variety in suburbs, see Sidonie Matsner Gruenberg, “The Challenge of the New Suburbs,” Marriage and Family Living 17, no. 2 (May 1955): 133–37, esp. 134; David Reisman, “The Suburban Dislocation,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 314 (November 1957): 123–46, esp. 134. For Lewis Mumford’s critique, see Penn Kimball, “‘Dream Town’—Large Economy Size: Pennsylvania’s New Levittown is Pre-Planned Down to the Last Thousand Living Rooms,” New York Times, December 14, 1952; and Vance Packard, The Status Seekers: An Exploration of Class Behavior in America and the Hidden Barriers That Affect You, Your Community, Your Future (New York: David McKay Co., 1959), 28. 25.

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game