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The culture of cities / Lewis Mumford ; with an introduction by Thomas Fisher ; cover design by Mauricio Diaz.

By: Contributor(s): Material type: TextTextSeries: Forbidden bookshelf seriesPublisher: New York, New York : Open Road Integrated Media, Inc., 2016Copyright date: ©1970Description: 1 online resource (457 pages)Content type:
  • text
Media type:
  • computer
Carrier type:
  • online resource
ISBN:
  • 9781504031349 (ebook)
Subject(s): Genre/Form: DDC classification:
  • 307.76 23
LOC classification:
  • HT151 .M864 2016
Online resources:
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Item type Current library Call number Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Ebrary Online Books Ebrary Online Books Colombo Available CBEBK20002074
Ebrary Online Books Ebrary Online Books Jaffna Available JFEBK20002074
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Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A classic work advocating ecological urban planning--from a civic visionary and former architecture critic for the New Yorker.

Considered among the greatest works of Lewis Mumford--a prolific historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and longtime architecture critic for the New Yorker--The Culture of Cities is a call for communal action to "rebuild the urban world on a sounder human foundation." First published in 1938, this radical investigation into the human environment is based on firsthand surveys of North American and European locales, as well as extensive historical and technological research. Mumford takes readers from the compact, worker-friendly streets of medieval hamlets to the symmetrical neoclassical avenues of Renaissance cities. He studies the squalor of nineteenth-century factory towns and speculates on the fate of the booming twentieth-century Megalopolis--whose impossible scale, Mumford believes, can only lead to its collapse into a "Nekropolis," a monstrosity of living death.

A civic visionary, Mumford is credited with some of the earliest proposals for ecological urban planning and the appropriate use of technology to create balanced living environments. In the final chapters of The Culture of Cities , he outlines possible paths toward utopian future cities that could be free of the stressors of the Megalopolis, in sync with the rhythms of daily life, powered by clean energy, integrated with agricultural regions, and full of honest and comfortable housing for the working class. The principles set forth by these visions, once applied to Nazi-occupied Europe's razed cities, are still relevant today as technological advances and overpopulation change the nature of urban life.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (ebrary, viewed February 11, 2016).

Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest, 2016. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest affiliated libraries.

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