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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
The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects
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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
... See moreProfessor James C. Scott • Seeing Like a State
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... See more