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City & Region. In Lewis Mumford's eyes the metropolitan suburb is a romantic evasion, a faked innocence of the facts. During the 19th Century two stronger movements that ran counter to the general rush toward the metropolis were what was known in the U. S. as "conservation" and what took form in England as "the garden city," a planned settlement in the open country with industrial, residential and communal areas separated by park space. They and their related modern developments—the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Columbia River development, the scattered "greenbelt" towns of the Resettlement Administration and similar towns built by independent associations in Europe and the U. S.—are the major mutations in Lewis Mumford's world. Together they mean regional planning. This is one of Mumford's answers to Hell on the Subway.
Among the physical changes which have made regional organization not only possible but natural he names the use of electricity instead of coal for power, the mobility of automobiles over the highway network instead of the grooved transportation of railway lines converging on the metropolis. In Author Mumford's long view, communal ownership of the land— all the land—is an absolute necessity. For readers who regard this as "revolutionary" he recalls that a century ago half the North American continent was public domain. Before it may be again, he sees a century-long, difficult period of transition, in which education must play the leading part in restoring a general sense of local realities and the ability to deal with them by cooperation.
In such a society, whose construction Mumford calls "the grand task of politics for the oncoming generation," the smaller city becomes the open nucleus of the economic and geographical region, no longer the satellite of a closed metropolis. What becomes of the metropolis in a regional society? As other cities grow in importance they retain and attract population; people move out of the metropolis, leaving room for reconstruction. That reconstruction is prefigured in the housing developments of the past ten years in the U. S., exemplified in Brooklyn's Ten Eyck Houses (see cut) of which Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. last week promised a bigger & better example. And the purpose of the reconstruction, utilizing the economy, flexibility and intelligence of modern architecture, will not be a "perfect" city, but a city in which conflicts may have meaning, in what Lewis Mumford calls a Biotechnic economy. The city, as Author Mumford sees it, is "a collective work of art." The means to give it form and clarity are already in the hands of architects and planners.
* THE CULTURE OF CITIES, by Lewis Mumford —Harcourt, Braco ($5).