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February 20, 2008
“Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf”
Ahead of his time, technology historian and urban philosopher Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) grasped the paradoxes of modern life and the long term pitfalls of the urban evolution he witnessed in the 1950s and 1960s. I stumbled across some great quotes of his today:
- Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.
- Restore human legs as a means of travel. Pedestrians rely on food for fuel and need no special parking facilities.
- The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.
- New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.
- Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf. (my favorite)
Much of Mumford’s work is timeless and a treat to read. Similar to the work of Jane Jacobs, perhaps more applicable now than when he wrote.
Topics: urban history, urban technologies, transportation |
February 22nd, 2008 at 7:41 am
[…] Waters of urban design website All about Cities dug up some zinger quotes from Lewis Mumford (1895-1990), proving as always that plus ça change, […]