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Abstract
Lewis Mumford’s life spanned the era in which American cities were rebuilt for the automobile and his writings addressed that theme from the 1920s to the 1970s. Norman Bel Geddes achieved fame during the 1930s for his imaginative evocations of future urban and regional landscapes designed for high‐speed auto travel, culminating in the Futurama exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair. Both of these men were influential figures during the period (1935–45) when the basic contours of American urban highway policy were codified. Mumford advocated a careful integration of street, highway and landscape in order to tame the destructive impacts of the automobile. By the 1950s he had become a fervent opponent of both central city freeway building and auto‐dependent suburban sprawl. Norman Bel Geddes embraced the emerging world of automobiles and freeways, and poured his energies into the creation of exhibits, models, plans and books showing how high‐speed motorways could shape a new metropolis. This paper compares these two men along multiple dimensions and argues that the contrasting styles of Mumford and Bel Geddes embody a recurring split in the American attitude toward cities and urban planning.
Notes
* Cliff Ellis is an assistant professor in the Graduate Program in Urban Planning at the University of Kansas. His research interests include land use planning, urban design, growth management, transportation planning, planning history, history of urban form and planning theory. He is currently writing a book on the history of urban freeway planning in the USA. He holds a PhD in City and Regional Planning from the University of California at Berkeley.
National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Vol. 44. New York: J. T. White, 1967, pp. 24–5; N. Bel Geddes, Miracle in the Evening. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1960.
Ibid.
K. Reid, Masters of design: Norman Bel Geddes. Pencil Points 18, 1 (January 1937) 3–32.
National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, op. cit. [1], p. 25.
J. Meikle, Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial Design in America, 1925–39. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979; C. Cogdell, The Futurama recontextualized: Norman Bel Geddes’ eugenic ‘World of Tomorrow’. American Quarterly 52, 2 (2000) 193–245.
N. Bel Geddes, Magic Motorways. New York: Random House, 1940.
D. L. Miller, Lewis Mumford: A Life. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989.
R. Wojtowicz, Lewis Mumford and American Modernism: Eutopian Theories for Architecture and Urban Planning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998; M. Luccarelli, Lewis Mumford and the Ecological Region: The Politics of Planning. New York: Guilford Press, 1995; D. R. Hill, Lewis Mumford’s ideas on the city. Journal of the American Planning Association 51, 4 (1985) 407–21.
L. Mumford, Technics and Civilization. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1934.
L. Mumford, The Culture of Cities. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938.
L. Mumford, From the Ground Up: Observations on Contemporary Architecture, Housing, Highway Building, and Civic Design. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1956.
F. T. Kihlstedt, Utopia realized: The world’s fairs of the 1930s, in J. J. Corn (ed.) Imagining Tomorrow: History, Technology, and the American Future. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986, pp. 97–118; H. A. Harrison and The Queens Museum, Dawn of a New Day: The New York World’s Fair, 1939/40. New York: New York University Press, 1980.
J. Meikle, op. cit. [5].
N. Bel Geddes, op. cit. [6], p. 4.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 238.
Ibid., p. 211.
Ibid, pp. 215–18.
C. Willis, Skyscraper utopias: Visionary urbanism in the 1920s, in J. J. Corn (ed.) Imagining Tomorrow: History, Technology, and the American Future. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986, pp. 164–87.
N. Bel Geddes, op. cit. [6], pp. 242–4.
Ibid., p. 240.
Ibid., p. 238.
J. Meikle, op cit. [5], p. 207.
F. T. Sheets, The development of primary roads during the next quarter century. American Highways 18 (1939) 34.
J. Meikle, op cit. [5], pp. 208–9.
N. Bel Geddes, op. cit. [6], p. 281.
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S. Adler, The transformation of the Pacific Electric Railway: Bradford Snell, Roger Rabbit, and the politics of transportation in Los Angeles. Urban Affairs Quarterly 27, 1 (1991) 51–86; M. Bianco, The decline of transit: A corporate conspiracy or failure of public policy? The case of Portland, Oregon. Journal of Policy History 9, 4 (1997) 450–74; S. Goddard, Getting There: The Epic Struggle between Road and Rail in the American Century. New York: Basic Books, 1994.
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K. C. Parsons, Collaborative genius: The Regional Planning Association of America. Journal of the American Planning Association 60, 4 (Autumn 1994) 462–82.
M. Dalbey. Regional Visionaries and Metropolitan Boosters: Decentralization, Regional Planning, and Parkways during the Interwar Years. Boston: Kluwer, 2002.
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R. Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977.
L. Mumford, Bridges and beaches. The New Yorker (July 17, 1937) 30.
L. Mumford, The Highway and the city. Architectural Record 123 (April 1958) 179.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 181.
J. R. Kellett, The Impact of Railways on Victorian Cities. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969.
L. Mumford, op. cit. [10], p. 445.
M. C. Boyer, The City of Collective Memory. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994.
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D. Gelerntner, 1939: The Lost World of the Fair. New York: Free Press, 1995.
M. Greif, Depression Modern: The Thirties Style in America. New York: Universe Books, 1975.
L. Mumford. The Conduct of Life. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1951.
L. Mumford, op. cit. [10], pp. 492–3.
L. Mumford, The City in History. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961, p. 494.
Ibid., p. 548.
N. Bel Geddes, Letter from Norman Bel Geddes to Henry Waite, 17 May 1944. Norman Bel Geddes Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. Box 35, Folder 525.2.
N. Bel Geddes, India Plan (1942–1954), Presentation Typescript. Norman Bel Geddes Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. Box O/S 11, Folder 655.3, Section 1, p. 5, [no date].
Ibid., pp. 12–15.
Ibid., Box 53, Folder 655.3, p. 19.
S. Mannheim, Walt Disney and the Quest for Community. Hants, England: Ashgate, 2002.
S. Von Moos, The visualized machine age, or: Mumford and the European avant‐garde, in T. P. Hughes and A. C. Hughes (eds) Lewis Mumford: Public Intellectual. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990, pp. 181–232.
M. Bianco, Robert Moses and Lewis Mumford: competing paradigms of growth in Portland, Oregon. Planning Perspectives 16 (2001) 95–114; R. B. Stephenson, A vision of green: Lewis Mumford’s legacy in Portland, Oregon. Journal of the American Planning Association 65, 3 (1999) 259–69.
C. Stein, Toward New Towns for America. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1951.
D. R. Hill, op. cit. [8].
L. Mumford, op cit. [10], p. 296.
A. Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.
L. Mumford, Yesterday’s city of tomorrow. Architectural Record 132 (November 1962) 139–44.
A. Duany, E. Plater‐Zyberk and J. Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream. New York: North Point Press, 2000; P. Calthorpe and W. Fulton, The Regional City: Planning for the End of Sprawl. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2001; T. Beatley, Green Urbanism: Learning from European Cities. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2000.
L. Mumford, op cit. [10], p. 404.
Ibid., p. 444.