Lewis Mumford intro - Erin

Lewis Mumford was born in Flushing, New York 1895. He was an American historian and a philosopher of technology and science. He is noted specifically for his studies on cities and urban architecture (1). He wrote for a number of publications in New York including The New Yorker. His earlier writings are noted for being fairly optimistic about mankind’s budding technological future and its opportunity to build a better world. Later, Mumford built his reputation with an increasingly pessimistic view that in some cases focuses on an inexorable future of depravity.
Mumford was recognized in numerous research positions, receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. He was also awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca in 1976. His writing on architecture also brought wider recognition to architects: Henry Hobson Richardson, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Mumford died in his home in Amenia, NY in 1990.
Notable works: The City in History, Technics and Civilization, The Myth of the Machine

Mumford talks about the ‘specialized industrial center’ and calls it a ‘spore’ that thrived in an environment of cheap rural land, abundance of waterpower sources, and starved labor force. He claimed that the Factory became the ‘nucleus of the urban organism’ where every other necessity of civilization was subordinate. To Mumford, utilitarianism leaves vital social processes to chance and boasts mechanical conquest. Is the fictional lower class of the Underground city therefore capable to capitalize upon this premise? The economics and philosophy of Utilitarianism in the Underground City appears to function as a capable alternative lifestyle. Mumford pleads through this fictional society for man to repossess his ‘human center’ and restore the organic exchange between humans and earth.
This pessimistic view of the industrial future does not, however, negate the positive influences that are able to emerge from such depraved social circumstances that Mumford mentions. Among these, influences in medical care and sanitation become necessities in order to survive, the beginnings of a welfare state consciousness emerge, and though belated, the seeds for underground infrastructure as a means to remove waste are also planted.