Feed

Get updates by e-mail

Enter your email address:


Popular Ponderings

Book Reviews

...    ........   .

Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace…One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin

image

The Warhol Economy by Elizabeth Currid

image

Wikinomics - 5 implications for cities

...    ........   .

The Missing Class: Portraits of the near poor in America by Newman and Chan

...    ........   .

Suburban Transformations by Paul Lukez

Search



Previous Ponderings



« Is this the Obama city plan? | Home | New playground as community anchor »

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 |

One Response to ““Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf””

  1. Eco-Cide: Exploring Ecology Says:
    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, […]

Comments