Lewis Mumford

(1895 - 1990)
Biography

 Internationally renowned for his writings on cities, architecture,

technology, literature, and modern life.
 Lewis Mumford was called by Malcolm Cowley, the last of the
great humanists.
 His contribution to literary criticism, architectural criticism,
American studies, the history of cities, civilization, and
technology, as well as to regional planning, environmentalism,
and public life in America, mark him as one of the most
original voices of the twentieth-century.
ABOUT THE PLANNER

 Born in Flushing on October 19, 1895.

 He lived much of his life in New York.
 Settling in Dutchess County in 1936 with his wife Sophia, in Amenia, where he died over a
half-century later, on January 26, 1990.
 His first book, The Story of Utopias, was published in 1922, and his last book, his
autobiography Sketches from Life, was published sixty years later in 1982.
 Mumford preferred to call himself a writer, not a scholar, architectural critic, historian or
philosopher.
 His writing ranged freely and brought him into contact with a wide variety of people,
including writers, artists, city planners, architects, philosophers, historians, and
archaeologists.
 Throughout his life, Mumford sketched and painted his surroundings, visualizing his
impressions of people and places & in image, as his ever - present notepad visualized them
in words.
 Given the range of Mumford's scholarly work, it is all the more interesting that he did not
have a college degree, having had to leave City College of New York after a diagnosis of
tuberculosis.
Works

  He was architectural critic for The New Yorker magazine for over thirty years, and his
1961 book, The City in History, received the National Book Award.
 In 1923 Mumford was a cofounder with Clarence Stein, Benton MacKaye, Henry Wright
and others, of the Regional Planning Association of America, which advocated limited-
scale development and the region as significant for city planning.
Theory of city: Urban Planning

v Cities can be classified along two dimensions:

Ø  1. Form
(1)historical development
(2)physical structure
(3)geographic space
(4)region
Ø 2. Function—a stage for human interaction
WHAT IS A CITY:

 Lewis Mumford view the city as a "purely physical fact" Mumford suggests a broader view and asks
"what is the city as a social institution?" and offers the following answer; "The city in its complete
sense, then is a geographic plexus, an economic organization, an institutional process, a theater of
social action, and an aesthetic symbol of collective unity.“
 " Mumford's focus is not on "the built environment" as such but rather the city as locus of social
networks
 While the nature of the built environment no doubt influence this social drama, Mumford sees its role
as primarily that of a well designed stage set, to facilitate and intensify the performance of the actors
upon it. Mumford asserts that the quintessential character of the city is to "create drama," for
although all of the necessary physical structures of cities may exist elsewhere, namely in the suburbs,
it is this "opportunity for social disharmony and conflict" that only urban densities and proximities
provide. A city may be viewed according to Mumford as "a special framework directed toward the
creation of differentiated opportunities for a common life and a significant social drama."
 UNDERSTANDING: TOWN PLANNING

 Mumford argues that it is this consideration that ultimately should determine such limiting
factors as size, density, area and layout of a city, rather than topographical or technological
concerns. Since it is most important to express "size as a function of the social
relationships to be served" it is natural that Mumford should advocate for small scale
clusters of communities "adequately spaced and bounded" known as the "polynucleated
city" as opposed to the monopolistic, hypertrophied and aggrandizing "mononucleated
city" with its single focal point. Dubbing it the Highwayless Town, Mumford sees an
eventual trend toward this form of limited, decentralized and dissociated urban
development through the effective zoning of functions in which "the various functional
parts of the structure are isolated topographically as urban islands appropriately designed
for their specific use." It is through this deliberate design and articulation that the
necessary social concentration for social drama may be best achieved
Mumford’s plan for urban design:
  1. Densities must be kept low.
2. The size of cities must be limited.
  3. People must live in natural, open, green environments.
  4. Most interaction must be kept on a primary level to assure mental health and the quality of social
relationships.
  5. The family, as the most important primary group, is the focus of redevelopment.
  6. Neighborhoods are the main units of redevelopment and settlement.
  7. Education, both formal and informal, is stressed.
  8. Vehicular and pedestrian traffic are separated.
  9. Mumford’s new cities are complete communities.
 Medal of Freedom

“in the name of sanity, he has constantly worked to rescue and extend the qualities of
urban life that will preserve and stimulate the human spirit of western civilization”

MOTTO
 “a need for a conception of what constitutes a valid human life, and how much of life will
be left is we go on ever more rapidly in the present direction. What has to be challenged is
an economy that is based not on organics needs, historic experience, human aptitudes,
ecological complexity and variety, but upon a system of empty abstractions: money, power,
speed, quantity, progress…
 APPLICATIONS AND SUGGESTIONS:
Although Mumford was not himself an architect or planner, he became the spokesman for the Regional
Planning Association of America, an informal group of architects, planners, economists and writers who
came to prominence during the 1920s and 1930s. This group lobbied business and government for the
establishment of regional cities as an antidote to the metropolitan congestion then increasing at an
alarming rate. Essentially a reworking of the British “garden city,” the regional city would be planned on a
sustainable scale with requisite residential, cultural, commercial and industrial components. Furthermore,
the regional city would be surrounded by an agricultural greenbelt that would supply its food as well as
delineate its borders from neighboring communities.
Among the association’s best-known achievements are the planning of the Appalachian Trail along the
eastern mountain ridge of the United States, the residential neighborhood of Sunnyside Gardens in
Queens, New York, and the New Jersey town of Radburn, the forerunner of today’s neo-traditional
suburbs. The “townless highway,” one of the association’s most ambitious proposals, would have linked
America’s cities via limited-access parkways. Unlike today’s interstate highways, townless highways were
intended to harmonize with the rural landscape while skirting downtown districts altogether
Bauer and Lewis Mumford were deeply involved wit the regional planning association of
America (RPAA) , An Organization committed to building partnerships among like minded
individuals to forge a new urban design paradigm. The organization had commissioned
designed Radburn, the new town designed by RPAA founder Clarence Stein ad adapted the
British garden city model to an American context .
The Radburn principles involved separating pedestrians from automobiles by routing vehicular
through traffic away from residential enclaves and building pedestrian pathway system .
Radburn allowed automobile use, while keeping pedestrians separate and dominant, with
dedicated walkways away from the roads. These design principals were very influential for a
generation of practitioners including Stonorov, Bauer and Bacon.
RADBURN LAYOUT
Radburn layout was greatly influenced by the concept of garden city of Ebenezer Howard. Planners
prepared the town plan in 1928 for Radburn, New Jersey about 25km from New York, USA.

The land required for the development was purchased by the new york city housing corporation and the plan
aimed to accommodate about 25000 persons.

The idea of architects in the preparation of layout at Radburn was not to construct a new town or a garden
city, but to develop a new form of design for community housing to suit the requirements of the age of
automobiles.

The Radburn layout is sort of garden suburb laid on a neighbourhood principle

ELEMENTS OF RADBURN LAYOUT

1. A community park running through the centre of superblock is provided instead of one big park
at some distance which may not be used at all.
2. All houses are oriented to face the gardens and park strips. The roads and backs of the houses
are usually not kept clean. Here, the houses are turned inside out. The working areas like store,
kitchen, bath, etc. will face the front road whereas the living areas like drawing room, bedroom,
dining rooms, etc. will be on the rear side of the road. This is also refered to as Radburn idea and
it has earned the name of the town for motor age.
3. The footpath for the pedestrians and vehicular traffic are completely separated to grant safety to
the movement of the pedestrians.
4. The service lanes of cul-de-sac streets are designed and built for one use instead for all uses.
5. The superblocks are enclosed by main roads from which a succession of narrow lanes or cul-de-
sac streets lead to and accommodate a succession of group of houses with garages attached.
6. The town is divided into large blocks known as superblock instead of the usual narrow sub
division pattern between streets.
7. The town is so planned that children will not be run over on their way to school as there are
subways or passages tunnelled under the streets from block to block.
eflection of all through traff
NEIGHBOURHOOD CONCEPT
What is Neighbourhood Unit Plan?

es which bound and clearly

The Neighbourhood unit plan in brief is the effort to create a
residential neighbourhood to meet the needs of family life in a
unit related to the larger whole but possessing a distinct entity.

hbourhood
The design of the Radburn neighbourhood model was in
essence hierarchical one comprising four levels
•Enclave
•Block
•Superblock
•Neighbourhood.
ENCLAVE

•The fundamental component was an enclave of twenty or

so
houses.
• These houses were arrayed in a
U-formation about a short
vehicular street called alane,really a cul de-sac court with
access to individual
garages.
•While the back of each house faced this court the front of
the
house had a garden.

BLOCK

• Three or more of these enclaves were lined together to form a

block.
Enclaves within the block were separated from one another by p
edestrian pathway that ran between 
the front gardens of all the houses.
•The blocks, usually four in number, were arranged around the
sides of a central parkway in such a manner so as to enclose the
open green space
 SUPERBLOCK
• The clustered 5 blocks together with the central parkway
comprised of a superblock
•NEIGHBOURHOOD ( 4-6 superblocks) that was bounded by
major roads or natural features.
• SCHOOLS OR COMMUNITY ROOMS at one end of the
parkway 
Hierarchical roads- bordering each neighbourhood, distributor
roads to surround each superblock, and culs-de-sac to provide
access to individual property lots.

OVERLAPPING NEIGHBOURHOODS
Neighbourhoods arranged in an OVERLAPPING MANNER to
support joint use of facilities such as hospitals, high schools, etc.

Conclusion
•To their minds there should be a three level hierarchy consisting of
neighbourhood, town, and region.
•They believed, that future urban development should be based on
the regional city, a constellation of smaller-sized towns tied together
by a parkway
or open highway.
Neighborhood unit principles

•Size.
 A residential unit development should provide housing for that population for which 
one elementary school is ordinarily required, its actual area depending upon population density.

• Boundaries.
 The unit should be bounded on all sides by arterial streets, sufficiently wide to facilitate its bypassing by all through
traffic.

•Open spaces.
 A system of small parks and recreations spaces should be provided, planned to meet the needs of the particular
neighbourhood.

• Institution sites.
 Sites for the school and other institution shaving service spheres coinciding with the limits of the unit
should be suitably grouped about a central point, or common area.
Internal street system.
 The unit should be provided with a special street system, each highway being proportioned to its probable traffic load,
and the street net as a whole being designed to facilitate circulation within the unit and to discourage its use by through
traffic

Local shops.
 One or more shopping districts, adequate for the population to be served, should be laid out in the
circumference of the unit, preferably at traffic junctions and adjacent to similar districts of adjoining neighbourhoods.
 ROAD NETWORKS
The separation of pedestrian and cycle routes from cars

 RADBURN paths are a new public route which never crosses

a road carrying mechanical vehicles at the same level, and
goes directly to every home and building in the country. 

They are primarily for pedestrians, but include facilities for

prams, wheel chairs, cyclists, roller bladders and skate
boarders.  They are designed to avoid serious accidents.

 The 2 metre wide pedestrian path is parallel with the 2 metre

wide cycle way which will allow commuters to get to work
from the suburbs and make the children's journey to school
safer.
The light blue patches show the road rising 1 metre, the dark blue fading lines
show the road going down 1 metre. This three dimensional segregation allows
cars to travel at the speed they are designed for and eliminates the need for
varying speeds and stoplights.
 There is plenty of space for entry halls and staircases to the houses above, which
can be on the same level as the outside pavement which ramps down one metre
 Plan showing a series of culs-
de-sae grouped in super block
around a central park

Houses faces park and front

yards rather than the streets
Traffic passes by rather than
among the houses

The traffic highway border the

super block,
And it gives the access to the
rare of the houses
In above plan we can see that the houses faces park and front yards rather than the streets
Traffic passes by rather than among the houses

Failure of radburn open spaces

 The design of radburn believed that people would actively use the front of the house
facing the greenways
 More people and children walking and playing in the little drive ways and cul-de-
sacs than on the actual greenways
 Second,the market has repeatedly shown that home owners prefer more personal
land around their homes
THANK YOU
SAKSHI
VAISHNAVI
ISHANI
SUNAINA
APURVA
SHWETA
GAURAV
AMIR
SHUBHAM
RITUPARNA