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Mumford, who was an expert on cities and architecture, publishing the monumental The City in History in 1961, had a unique insight into the way that technics operated in an urban environment. His essay is concerned with how technical systems, from ancient times to today, have the propensity to enable or resist authoritarianism. As he writes:

Matt Bluemink • From Cyberpunk to Solarpunk: Technics and the Cities of the Future | Blue Labyrinths

Mumford, Lewis. The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations and Its Prospects. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1961.

Steven Johnson • Where Good Ideas Come From

In The Image of the City (1960), Lynch identified the crucial role of the sense of place that ‘in itself enhances every human activity that occurs there and encourages the deposit of a memory trace’. This separation of ‘place’ in spirit and idea could, he argued, be differentiated physically and conceptually, as in edge, path, node, district and la... See more

Gillian Darley • How Gaston Bachelard gave the emotions of home a philosophy | Aeon Essays

“The existence of a public realm,” Arendt observed, “and the world's subsequent transformation into a community of things which gathers men together and relates them to each other depends entirely on permanence.”

L. M. Sacasas • The Stuff of Life: Materiality and the Self

A Big Little Idea Called Legibility

Venkatesh Rao ribbonfarm.com

logic, in this instance, go hand in hand. As Mumford notes, "The beauty of this mechanical pattern, from the commercial standpoint, should be plain. This plan offers the engineer none of those special problems that irregular parcels and curved boundary lines present. An office boy could figure out the number of square feet involved in a street

Professor James C. Scott • Seeing Like a State

Place and Non-Place

newworldeconomics.com newworldeconomics.com

A handful of thinkers like Mumford were even beginning to venture a revolutionary opinion: that automobiles—and highways—should be barred from certain central areas of the city, that some congested avenues and streets should, instead of having their roadways widened for cars, be closed to cars and turned into “pedestrian malls.”