Lewis Mumford and the ecological region

by Mark Luccarelli

Well known for his column in The New Yorker and his visionary political and ecological ideas, Lewis Mumford is widely regarded as one of the foremost urban critics of the century. Mumford's work, which spanned the 1920s through the 1960s, addressed the environmental, aesthetic, and social dimensions of American culture. Clearly a man ahead of his time, he advanced a conception of regional development that balanced the needs of the social world with those of the natural ecosystem. This book first traces the development of his ideas and his work as founder of the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA), and then explores the relevance of Mumford's vision to today's urban and environmental problems. In the first part of the book, Mark Luccarelli excavates the intellectual sources of Mumford's ideas. He shows how Mumford's notion of ecological regionalism reflected a tradition of ecological thinking that was most eloquently elaborated in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry D