Urban Culture and Innovation

Paper Summary:

This paper examines the role of the urban ecosystem in expediting the exchange of ideas, in creating vast local markets for new products, in forcing urban planners and engineers to look at new ways of meeting the pressing exigencies brought about by dynamic growth, and in concentrating human and productive resources in a geographically discrete location so that they can be exploited fully. The author points out that Lewis Mumford relates that, in the early American towns, businesses, in ceaseless competition, sought innovations to stay "one step ahead". The paper states that Mumford argues that the essential "garden city", which incorporates nature into the urban world and vice versa, actually existed in the colonial America of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

From the Paper:

"One of the more controversial items Mumford raises in his work is the view that the urban community and the culture springing from it are not simply phenomena intrinsically designed to build human wealth and/or to fulfill basic human needs. Perhaps, at one time, that was indeed the case, but Mumford insists that the modern urban society is pre-eminently one in which the "conquest" of nature and the "control of life" are the chief aims of those who wield power over the productive appendages of the mega-machine."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Ellis, Cliff. (2005). Lewis Mumford and Norman Bel Geddes: the highway, the city and the future. Planning Perspectives, 20(1): 51-68.
• Long, Stewart (2002). Lewis Mumford and institutional economics. Journal of Economic Issues, 36(1): 167-82.
• Mumford, Lewis. (1924). Sticks and Stones: A Study of American Architecture and Civilization. New York: Boni & Liveright. Retrieved August 14, 2006 from Questia <http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=4905901>
• Mumford, Lewis. (1934). Technics and Civilization. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.
• Mumford. Lewis. (1967). The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development (Vol.1). New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.

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