Lewis Mumford and the Ecological Region

990 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE most university libraries, but it should be part of any industrial his­ tory collection. Lindy Biggs Dr. Biggs teaches history at Auburn University and is the author of The Rational Factory: Architecture, Technology, and Work in America’sAge ofManufacturing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). Lewis Mumford and the Ecological Region: The Politics of Planning. By Mark Luccarelli. New York: The Guilford Press, 1995. Pp. x+230; figures, notes, index. $26.95 (cloth). In an era when the historical pattern of urban and suburban growth is being questioned and when state and federal legislation are encouraging new ways of thinking about planning, design, and settlement, Mark Luccarelli’s book is timely indeed. Following the career and intellectual development of Lewis Mumford, Luccarelli presents a thorough discussion of the concepts of ecological region­ alism and planned decentralization. He also traces the emergence of the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA), of which Mumford was a founder, and presents an intellectual history of the thinkers and ideas that influenced him. Lewis Mumford and the Ecological Region is organized in three parts. Part 1 develops the notion of regionalism and presents the intellec­ tual context in which it arose. Mumford and others—including New York architect Clarence Stein—formed the RPAA in 1923, with Stein as the organization’s chief promoter and Mumford as its chief spokesman. While Stein and the others might have envisioned a number of goals for RPAA, Mumford was adamant about one in particular: promulgating the concept of regionalism. Mumford’s regionalism was not just about thinking and planning on a re­ gional—or metropolitan—basis. Rather, itwas the idea ofan ecolog­ ical partnership between social beings and the natural environment. Mumford also saw regionalism as a type of settlement and interac­ tion with the environment that could be informed and facilitated by the new technologies of the modern era—the automobile, the truck, hydroelectric power, and modern urban planning. These new technologies—“neotechnics”—could help liberate human beings from both the alienating lifestyle of concentrated urban centers and the dehumanizing work environment of industrial production. Part 2 presents the RPAA’s efforts to attract planners to the idea of regionalism. An important selling point in this effort was the con­ cept of the garden city, as developed by Ebenezer Howard. Mumford embraced Howard’s garden city concept, with its emphasis on new development occurring not within the great cities but in new towns that would dot the surrounding landscape. These new towns would TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 991 be autonomous, not merely bedroom communities connected to the great city by superfreeways. Limited-access freeways would link the new towns but would not dominate the greenbelts that separated them. A full array of activities and jobs would be present in these towns, facilitated by the electricity produced by hydroelectric dams, which would allow for a dispersal—rather than a concentration— of energy production throughout a region. Because of hoped-for changes in the cost of land and raw materials, housing would be affordable to a much wider range of people, making for socioeco­ nomic diversity. Civic centers, public spaces, common courts, open green spaces, neighborhood community centers, and curvilinear streets that inhibited growth were characteristics of the garden city as espoused by Mumford, Stein, and others at the RPAA. Stein in particular hoped to make the garden city concept palat­ able to an “elite audience” of business interests, professionals, pub­ lic servants, and reformers. The RPAA’s thought was that, since de­ centralization was occurring anyway, why not channel it into intelligently planned cities? But the ideas of the RPAA did not take hold with either an elite audience or a popular constituency. In­ stead, suburbanization proceeded in a diffused manner, catering to Americans’ desire for consumption and isolation. In Part 3, Luccarelli develops his analysis of the reasons for the failure of the RPAA and associated New Deal undertakings. From Luccarelli’s perspective, the reason is obvious: most of the RPAA’s vision assumed a much greater degree ofgovernmental intervention in the housing market than American laissez-faire ideology could stomach; in addition, the RPAA’s ideas challenged the status quo

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