Is Twentieth Century Luminary Lewis Mumford a Precursor to the Twenty-First Century Grassroots Reformation?
Mumford's decentralized regionalism grown from innerman outward.
In my last post, I discussed JT Thomas’s Paper that positions archeology as an interpretive science in search of meaning.
Lewis Mumford is one of the greatest thinkers in city planning of the twentieth century. Mumford was popular after World War II, a time when cities were being rebuilt, and when my Dad returned to his studies in Industrial Design at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.
A paper written by Dr. Peter Critchley titled LEWIS MUMFORD AND THE SEARCH FOR THE HARMONIOUS CITY THE ARCHITECTONICS OF AN ECOLOGICAL REGIONALISM is an elegant and extraordinary read. Critchley is familiar with all of Mumford’s writing and presents a comprehensive view, starting with Technics and Civilization (1934) and following Mumford’s thinking as it is impacted by World War II. Critchley describes Mumford as writing as a moral philosopher first rather than as a professional urban planner, first.
Mumford’s popularity rose during the mid-twentieth century at a time of restoration. In The Story of Utopias, Mumford gives hope in a comprehensive vision of a better world. Utopia is presented not as a practical goal within existing parameters, but as an aspirational perception of a humanistic society in balance with nature. Mumford is an early environmentalist. In his work, one can see the beginnings of the international Green Party inspired by an ideology that places the relationship between man and nature at its center. Mumford’s concept of city planning grows from within outward. Critchley calls it decentralized regionalism connecting to the outer world from the interior individual rooted in regional localities. Thus Mumford gives form and voice to the grassroots.
During the last quarter of the twentieth century, the opposite approach to community development was instituted with The United States Intergovernmental Cooperation Act of 1968, Public Law 90–577i, an act that authorized the federal government to centrally manage the economy of the USA through wealth redistribution to the states, which in turn set up their own internal systems of central management co-ordinated with federal government programs. Rather than decentralized regionalism, as was the design of the founding fathers in limiting the federal government to enumerated powers, the USA became centrally managed from the top down, like a corporation, as a system that coordinates capitalistic motivations with technology, that Mumford calls “the machine”.
The years from the end of World War II into the 1970s were ones of substantial economic growth and broadly shared prosperity.
Incomes grew rapidly and at roughly the same rate up and down the income ladder, roughly doubling in inflation-adjusted terms between the late 1940s and early 1970s.
The gap between those high up the income ladder and those on the middle and lower rungs — while substantial — did not change much during this period. Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.
The discussion in LEWIS MUMFORD AND THE SEARCH FOR THE HARMONIOUS CITY THE ARCHITECTONICS OF AN ECOLOGICAL REGIONALISM is apropos for contemporary times integrating technology, biology, and humanity into a holistic philosophy of community design that empowers humanity in direct relationship to the environment.
In the quote below Critchley could be describing the societal role of large platforms such as Amazon, Uber, and Etsy:
Mumford’s critical and moral focus is upon the processes by which creative human agency is transformed into human enslavement, means becoming enlarged and displacing the ends. The final stage of this inversion is reached with the emergence of the megamachine as the reified power system. This culmination of bureaucratic rationalisation is the ultimate self-alienation of human social power. Mumford emphasises the way that human beings have become slaves of their own creations. The machines have ceased to be means to human ends but have become ends in themselves. Human beings find themselves compelled to act according to imperatives, priorities and rules dictated by the machine system. LEWIS MUMFORD AND THE SEARCH FOR THE HARMONIOUS CITY THE ARCHITECTONICS OF AN ECOLOGICAL REGIONALISM by Dr Peter Critchley (emphasis by Mackenzie)
The following could be a description of the direction that the current leadership elite of the Boothbay Peninsula is advancing as it markets a peninsula, once known for natural wonders like Ocean Point and Hendricks Head, and its many land preserves, for its commercially cultivated landscapes of the Country Club, and the Botanical Gardens.
The metropolis stands at the apex in the destruction of nature as the city expands outwards into the surrounding countryside. Urban society embraces nature as a form of recreation, reducing nature to being a backdrop of metropolitan culture. ‘A world where the great masses of people, unable to have direct contact with more satisfying means of living, take life vicariously, as readers, spectators, passive observers’ (Mumford CC 1938:258). LEWIS MUMFORD AND THE SEARCH FOR THE HARMONIOUS CITY THE ARCHITECTONICS OF AN ECOLOGICAL REGIONALISM by Dr Peter Critchley
Locally, even our formerly functional and rationally designed roadways have been transformed by repurposing the road as a structure to support geometrically arranged road decor inspired by the Palace of Versailles, rerouting the once unobstructed flow of traffic to move around a tiny one lane roundabout-obstruction situated at the entrance to Mr. Coulmbe’s Country Club.
It is no secret that Mr. Coulombe was in charge of the design. It is designed to be so in centrally managed wealth redistribution public policy, not only that the community that comes with the most money in hand will go to the front of the line for the distribution of Maine Department of Transportation funding, but that in an equal three-way division of costs, the private developer is the authority in charge of the design, giving private developers the power to change our communities at their will and alienating the voice and needs of the greater community. This is what is meant by “the machine” or the “empire” or ”the public-private for-profit non-profit wealth concentration and redistribution industrial complex”.
DOT Cooperative Agreement, pg 3 (right to know request)
1. Proiect Design:The Developer has procured a contract with a qualified engineering firm to design the Project in accordance with specifications approved by MaineDOT (the "Design Contract")….
Nor is it a secret that Mr. Coulombe is inspired by the Palace of Versailles in the design of his own home, or that he set out to personally redesign the first impression of Boothbay greeting the motorist, or that he intended that the Common, once a center of activity for common people would reflect the image of the country club:
The landscaping will be similar to that across the road at the entrance to the country club. The widening of the road leading to the center, the landscaping and a median strip that will be planted with flowers are all in the works. “It’s all about Route 27,” Coulombe said. “It’s going to be gorgeous.” source
Mr. Coulombe has a propensity for image over function and substance, and for copying other successes as described by Simon van Zuylen-Wood in Does Boothbay Have a Vodka Problem? In reinventing his family liquor business, Mr. Coulombe made “slight variations on better, more popular liquors. For Three Olives, which he created in 1998, he cribbed Grey Goose’s frosted glass. For Pinnacle, which came later, he had it manufactured in France—again, just like Grey Goose (hence the nickname “Baby Goose”.
Mr. Coulombe is interested only in the wealthy and has no appreciation for Boothbay’s past as a diverse community with the middle class at its cultural center. Mr. Coulombe’s approach is the very opposite of Mumford’s decentralized regionalism, which if followed produces original and diverse communities, connected to the past while in tune with trajectories of the present, as described by Mr. Critchley in talking about Mumford’s admiration of the historical New England Village:
For Mumford, the New England town embodied the values of the individuals who lived in it. The New England of the mid-nineteenth century maintained a perfect balance between the past and the future, combining old and new in its regional culture. Ideally, the new New England town would manage to integrate the survivals of a past culture with the best features of the modern age. Mumford sought a renaissance along the lines of the New England town, a regionalism LEWIS MUMFORD AND THE SEARCH FOR THE HARMONIOUS CITY THE ARCHITECTONICS OF AN ECOLOGICAL by Dr Peter Critchley
Contrarily, during the last ten years Coulombe and others of his ilk, have been bulldozing over Boothbay’s past and replacing it with architecture copied from somewhere else.
The following passage from Lewis Mumford’s The Culture of Cities could easily be a portrait of the Country Club looming atop the blasted hillside looking down on the coveted Town Common surrounded by the new road configuration:
When the plan for Versailles was laid down, the palace itself was set on the site of the old hunting lodge where Louis XIV had first wooed his mistress, Madame de la Valliere. The palace at Karlsruhe was likewise on the site of a hunting lodge. But in the plan, this meeting place had a different context : the palace gathered to itself the new avenues of the city as the ruler himself gathered together the political power that had once been dispersed among a multitude of groups and corporations. All the main avenues would lead to the palace. And when one raised one's eyes in the street, the palace, as often as not, would close the vista. Lewis Munford- the Culture of Cities
According to Mr. Coulombe and contingency, Boothbay’s history can be summed up in the word “dead”, a narrative that was amplified by Kenneth Rayle when he ran unopposed for Boothbay Harbor Selectmen and said, ”Our economy became stagnant in the 80s, through the 2000s and there has been a distinct uptick in the last 10 years.”
By middle-class standards, Andersen Design was doing a booming business in destination shopping in East Boothbay in the 80’s up until 2002, and we were not alone. Mr. Rayles’description of our economy during that time only fits if the measure of a thriving economy is one that exclusively serves the top percent.
Beginning in the 1970s, economic growth slowed and the income gap widened.
Income growth for households in the middle and lower parts of the distribution slowed sharply, while incomes at the top continued to grow strongly.
The concentration of income at the very top of the distribution rose to levels last seen nearly a century ago, during the “Roaring Twenties.”Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.
Mr. Coulombe arrived in Boothbay in 2012 to spearhead the gentrification of a once uniquely middle-class community creating a distinct uptick in the wealth divide in the last ten years evident in the rapid extinction of housing affordable to people who work for a living, to be replaced with “affordable workforce housing”, built as wall to wall grids like urban blocks, providing that the party of the new can get the ordinance changes that they want.
Political talking points used to advance the gentrification of the peninsula bypasses national and global concerns about the wealth divide and formulate the narrative as the "fear of missing out" in competition with high-end coastal towns like Kennebunkport, Camden, Bar Harbor, and Martha’s Vineyard.
While the current political leaders of the Peninsula latch on to the popular term, “affordable workforce housing”, other current national talking points not engaged by the leadership class on the Peninsula are the growing wealth divide, affordable housing for the general public, homelessness, the Great Resignation, remote working, collapse of the crypto, collapse of tech stocks, the war in Ukraine, environmental concerns, and so forth. The world is changing rapidly and leaving the leaders behind in different era.
Workforce housing is used to signify housing for employees of the corporations that the leadership class wants to attract to the Peninsula. They are the workforces needed for the profit-making interests of companies traded on the stock market that generate passive incomes for the property-owning classes.
Dad often spoke of his admiration for Lewis Mumford. That which Mumford conceptualized in his writing, Dad actualized as an industrial designer. The choice to operate a small business in a home, to make all of the glazes and bodies from raw materials, and to develop original recipes is organically connected to the physical and transformative qualities of air, earth, fire, and water. Andersen Design was not created in the image of another. It is an original, exemplifying in the real world, Mumford’s ideal, established on the Boothbay Peninsula in 1952.
Mumford’s critical approach to the exploitative technology and materialism of this era never induced him to repudiate the material world of human creation. Rather, he celebrated the sensuous terrain and the physicality of the life world, not so much as ends in themselves but as a route to a higher wisdom. Mumford affirmed the superiority of empirical knowledge obtained through direct contact with the material world. Significantly, Mumford was not interested in ‘technology’ as an abstract, rational pursuit but ‘technics’ as the industrial arts (Mumford to Kranzberg 15 January 1970). Mumford seeks an affirmative materialism in which human beings are a part of their environment through the integration of everyday work and life activity with practical and sensate experience. Such a world would be human in a direct sense. LEWIS MUMFORD AND THE SEARCH FOR THE HARMONIOUS CITY THE ARCHITECTONICS OF AN ECOLOGICAL REGIONALISM by Dr Peter Critchley
Whether talking philosophy. science, or artistry, ceramics is a pursuit of higher knowledge, the more so when it involves the creation of original glazes and bodies from raw materials. The science and the art of ceramics is a complex and interactive process. that engages holistic understanding from the practitioner.
Regionalism is crucial in achieving organic community promoting life-enhancing values.-Dr. Peter Critchley LEWIS MUMFORD AND THE SEARCH FOR THE HARMONIOUS CITY THE ARCHITECTONICS OF AN ECOLOGICAL REGIONALISM
Beautiful home, great input on Mumford, and looking forward to visiting Booth Bay this summer.
Love, Alan