Advocating Cities Designed for Civility

If you don’t care for a museum exhibit, a movie, concert or play you are attending, you can leave. If you are bored by a book you are reading, you can put it aside. So much for the visual, performing and literary arts.

But the design arts are something else. Whether it is labeled architecture, planning, redevelopment, graphics, interior decoration or furniture making, and whether it is defined as a profession, craft or calling, design, without a doubt, is the most pervasive of human endeavors. It is nearly impossible to avoid or ignore.

Indeed, how our man-made environment is shaped--how we design the places we live, work, shop and play, and how we connect them--shapes, defines and colors our lives.

It is these shapes that over time have provided the most enduring record of our civilization, reflecting more than other creations of man the social, economic, cultural and political values of our fleeting societies. Hence the popular, if pompous, definition of architecture as history set in stone.

No one understood and communicated this better than Lewis Mumford, the cultural commentator and architecture critic who died two weeks ago at the age of 94.

His writings on life, letters and the arts, and how they come together in that most stupendous and threatening creation of man--the city--influenced generations of urban planners and designers, mine included. He was, if not the father of city planning, its sage.

In thousands of essays and reviews, principally in The New Yorker magazine from the 1930s through the ‘50s, and dozens of books, including “The Culture of Cities” (1938) and “The City in History” (1961), Mumford displayed a penetrating and prescient intelligence.

With a refreshingly direct style free of academic jargon, Mumford warned against the increasing dominance of the automobile, highways cutting up neighborhoods, the heedless dependence on machines, buildings that shadow streets and the overcrowding of cities--years before they were issues.

But he was not an arrogant curmudgeon. If anything, Mumford was a utopian, sketching a highly personalized vision of a better, more moral and humane tomorrow. For emphasis, he often would quote his favorite line of poetry from Tennyson’s “Ulysses”: “Come my friends, ‘tis not too late to seek a newer world.”

Mumford’s urgings included more user-friendly, modestly scaled buildings, traffic-free neighborhoods focused on parks and playgrounds, pedestrian-friendly downtowns, the preservation of landmarks and generally an environmentally sensitive approach to land use.

His lessons are germane as ever, particularly in such emerging megalopolises as Southern California.

There is no doubt that Mumford would in spirit be among the staunch supporters of current efforts here to stop the rending of South Pasadena by the 710 Freeway, the march of mini-malls, housing developments on lobotomized mountain tops, the demolition of landmarks and the deterioration of parks and beaches.

Mumford’s ideal community was one that combined “the dynamism and diversity of the city with the enduring values of the village--order, neighborhood stability and community closeness,” according to his biographer, Donald Miller.

Mumford’s view grew out of the philosopher’s embrace of the “garden city” movement pioneered in Britain in the late 19th Century as an alternative then to sickly industrial cities.

Mumford in his criticisms stressed context. He argued that, say, for books or buildings to be properly understood, they had to be perceived in relations to the varied social, economic and political forces that produced them.

In particular, he viewed the design of a building not as an isolated aesthetic object, to be judged for its play of materials and shapes and labeled “Modern” or whatever--as is the tendency today in trendy design schools and publications promoting signature buildings and their architects.

Rather, Mumford stressed that architecture was a social art, and that buildings should be primarily evaluated as places where people live and work; that they had to be both functional and appealing, and be fitted properly into an appropriate setting.

Mumford viewed cities similarly, within a wider cultural context, and forever looking for interrelationships. For him, planning and architecture was a puzzle, with thousands of pieces to be fitted together with the common goal to create “a home for man.”

Although he never graduated from college, Mumford was very much an intellectual, and generally more interested in ideas than people.

His books are not bogged down with indulgent portraits of transient personalities and temporal designs that mark much of the present popular and professional writings. As a result, they persevere, with some two dozen of the more than 30 he wrote still in print.

But unlike most intellectuals, Mumford was an activist. He was, among other things, one of the founders and theoreticians of the Regional Planning Assn. of America. He lived in an experimental cooperative housing project for years, and involved himself in a variety of social and political causes, ranging from protesting local redevelopment projects to nuclear testing and the Vietnam War.

A resolute, Olympian figure, Mumford believed strongly that intellectuals, artists and writers, indeed anyone who cared about the environment and the human race, had a moral obligation to work for reforms.

In recent years, as architecture and the nation went on a hedonistic binge, Mumford’s pleas for the good and simple life, of family and community, in harmony with nature, faded. He was viewed sadly as an anachronism.

But one only has to witness the accelerating deterioration of the quality of life in Los Angeles, as well as other cities, to see that the need for Mumford’s inspirational words and thoughts, and his passion, persists.