Lewis Mumford’s The Culture of Cities is a classic: the editors of The City Reader (3^rd edition) go so far as to say that, “Lewis Mumford’s magisterial The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1938) was the first and remains the best book on the culture of cities” (2005, 10). Yes and no.

Mumford advocated ‘decentralization’ and earned a reputation for hating large cities. Jane Jacobs, for example, had a different opinion. In her Death and Life of Great American Cities, in a discussion of “orthodox modern city planning and city architectural design” she directs readers to Mumford for “a sympathetic account which mine is not” (1992, 17). On Mumford’s The Culture of Cities, specifically, Jacobs writes that it “was largely a morbid and biased catalog of ills. The great city [for Mumford and others] was Megalopolis, Tyrannopolis, Nekropolis, a monstrosity, a tyranny, a living death. It…