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What is a city
Editors’introduction lewis mumford (5981 – 5881 ) has been called America’s last great public intellectual . beginning with his first book in 5811 and continuing throughout a career that saw the publication of some twenty- five influential volumes , Mumfo rd made signal contributions to social philosophy , America literary and cultural history , the history of technology and , preeminently , the history of cities and urban planning practice .
Mumford saw the urban experience as an integral component in the development of human culture and the human personality . he consistently argued that the physical design of cities and their economic functions were secondary to their relationship to the natural environment and to the spiritual values of human community . Mumford applied these principles to his architectural criticism for the New Yorker magazine in the 5811s , to his work with the Regional Planning Association of America , to his compaign against plans to build a highway through Washington Square in New York’s Greenwich Village in the 5811s , and to his lifelong championing of the Garden City idealsof Ebenzer Howard .
In “What Is a City ? ”Mumford lays out his fundamental propositions about the plnning of cities and the human potential , both individual and social , of urban life . the city , he writes , is “a theater of social action ,” and everything else – art , politics , education , commerce – only serve to make the “ social drama ... more richly significant , as a stage-set , well-designed , intensifies and underlines the gestures of the actors and the action of the play .”It was a theme and an image to which Mumford would return over and over again : in the chapter “The Nature of the Ancient Cit”in his magisterial The City in History : Its origins , Its