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  "text": "Passage 1:\nRegional Planning Association of America\nThe Regional Planning Association of America (\"RPAA\"), formed by Clarence Stein was an urban reform association developed in 1923.  The association was a diverse group of people all with their own talents and skills.  The goal of this group was to “connect a diverse group of friends in a critical examination of the city, in the collaborative development and dissemination of ideas, in political action and in city building projects”.  Throughout the ten-year span in which the association lasted, five leading members contributed to this goal.  Clarence Stein, Benton MacKaye, Lewis Mumford, Charles Harris Whitaker, Alexander Bing, and Henry Wright were the essential backbone of the RPAA. Originally an idea of Clarence Stein’s, through a series of introductions and acquaintances in Washington DC in 1918, the Regional Planning Association began to form.\n\nFounders\nClarence Stein\nClarence Stein attended the Ethical Culture Society’s Workingman’s School, which influenced his interest in the city life and social responsibility through its teaching. Stein was closely influenced by the founder of Ethical Culture, Felix Adler, and teacher, John Lovejoy Elliott, in involvement with movements and committees, such as the Hudson Guild Settlement House and the Progressive Reform movement in New York City at the turn-of-the-century.  Therefore, Stein’s enrollment at Workingman’s School proved to be of strong influence on his later interests and achievements.  The very principle of the Ethical Culture Society being “that an individual’s growth toward excellence comes from furthering the unlike excellence of others”, exemplifies the basis of Stein’s life achievements through the RPAA.\nStein first met future fellow RPAA members, Henry Wright and Alexander Bing, in Washington (in 1918) through a friend, Charles Whitaker (editor of the JAIA).  In 1920, Stein became the Associate Editor for Community Planning with the Journal of the American Institute of Architects and soon later discovered the idea to create the RPAA including his friends at the JAIA office, including Lewis Mumford, as well as many others. The group included members in various fields of study from architects to union leaders, city officials to writers, and engineers to sociologists. And so, on April 18, 1923, the first official meeting of the Regional Planning Association of America was held.  The association began with only a total of eight people present at its first official meeting but it soon grew.\n\nBenton MacKaye\nThe first major project of the RPAA was that of fellow RPAA member, Benton MacKaye; the Appalachian Trail, a trail which we would refer to today as a greenway, of which he wrote an article in the JAIA two years earlier (“An Appalachian Trail – A Project in Regional Planning”).  The trail was planned to connect a footpath from Maine to Georgia in an attempt to “lead civilization to the wilderness”.  The project was not directly implemented by the RPAA, however, their part was successful in introducing their idea to others and helping the various groups of Mountain Clubs come together to create the final project.  The majority of the trail was completed by the mid-1930s.  From this project came another main goal of the RPAA which was to create “the preservation of large areas of the natural environment, including parts of the wilderness, as a green matrix for shaping a “regional city” and for serving its various-sized, spatially well defined, specialized communities”.\n\nLewis Mumford\nThe success in publicizing this project as well as others was in large part due to Lewis Mumford.  Mumford was the RPAA’s leading journalist and spokesperson.  Having published his first book in 1922, The Story of Utopia, and well on his way with another, Mumford was extremely useful to the association. He worked on not only books and articles related to the RPAA but also wrote/edited policy documents.  Mumford also contributed to the group by sharing his interest of Patrick Geddes’ ideas on regional development and planning.  Mumford contributed concepts of “a dispersed yet concentrated urban culture integrated with nature” which were integrated along with MacKaye’s concepts into the RPAA’s later projects.\n\nSunnyside and Radburn\nThe leading community building experiments conceptualized and implemented by the RPAA were Sunnyside Gardens, Queens and Radburn, New Jersey.  Sunnyside started as a small-scale housing development experiment in Queens, New York.  The goal was “to produce good homes at as low a price as possible, to make the company’s investment safe, and to use the work of building and selling houses as a laboratory to work out better house and block plans and better methods of building”.  Radburn, New Jersey, would be the new and improved built community utilizing the analysis from the Sunnyside community experiment.\n\nthrough not only his own real estate company and wealth but through his outstanding real estate and business skills.  Bing, president of the RPAA, found the funds through outside contributions and personal contribution (more so than any other member) to support the projects of the association.  For the Sunnyside community project Bing founded the City Housing Corporation through which he would establish the funding and opportunity to complete the project.\n\nHenry Wright\nHenry Wright, known as the analyst due to his never-ending questioning and analysis on projects, worked alongside Stein in site designs and development on such projects as Sunnyside, New York.  Studied architecture at the University of Pennsylvania along with work as a landscape architect and site planner, Wright shared many interests with Stein.  Close work in 1923 on the Sunnyside Homes development with Stein led to a trip to England in 1924 to study the designs of Unwin and Parker as well as that of Ebeneezer Howard.  Though close at the beginning of the association’s organization, Wright went on to establish “The Housing Study Guild” along with several RPAA members which Stein viewed to work more independently than directly with the RPAA’s projects.  This slight dispute would be the beginning point of the division and end of the Regional Planning Association of America.  In 1933, many members began to move away and/or join various other movements or committees which quickly led to the association's end.\n\nLegacy\nThe Regional Planning Association of America, led by Clarence Stein, Benton MacKaye, Lewis Mumford, Alexander Bing, Henry Wright, as well as many others started simply as a group of people with similar interests wanting to make a difference in the American towns and cities. Through the collaboration of these five, Clarence Stein – the organizer and manager, Benton MacKaye – the conservationist, Lewis Mumford – the writer, Alexander Bing – the developer-builder, and Henry Wright – the analyst, as well as the many other members, the RPAA conceptualized, experimented, and changed our view of American towns, cities, architecture, and planning in America.\nPassage 2:\nLewis Mumford House\nThe Lewis Mumford House is located on Leedsville Road (Dutchess County Route 2) in the Town of Amenia, New York, United States. It is a white Federal style building dating to the 1830s.\nSocial philosopher, historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford and his wife bought the house in the late 1920s, originally using it as a summer house. By the mid-1930s, they decided to make it their permanent residence for a few years. That period extended to more than half a century, the rest of Mumford's life. His experience of living in a rural area informed some of Mumford's thinking about cities and how they should be shaped. In 1999, a few years after his death, the property was  listed on the National Register of Historic Places.\n\nBuildings and grounds\nThe property listed on the Register consists of two adjoining parcels: a 1.9-acre (7,700 m2) lot with the house and carriage house and a larger 11.7-acre (4.7 ha) open field stretching back to Webutuck Creek. Both are located on the west side of Leedsville Road, a street of large semi-wooded residential lots, most formerly part of larger farms, in the eastern section of Amenia. There is a similar 19th-century farmhouse just across the street. The Mumford property is a half-mile (1 km) south of state highway NY 343 and a similar distance west of the Connecticut state line. The house, carriage house and landscaping on the property are all considered contributing resources to the listing.\n\nHouse\nThe main house's east (front) section is a three-bay two-story frame structure on a stone foundation sided in clapboard. It is topped with a side-gabled roof shingled in asphalt, pierced by two brick chimneys at either end. A perpendicular rear wing, similarly sided, is one and a half stories in height, with side entrances and a single-story sunroom added to the rear.A single-bay porch with arched pediment and two round columns shelters the main entrance at the northern end of the front facade. All windows have solid wooden shutters. Semicircular windows at the attic level on either side elevation have been boarded in.Federal-style crown moldings, pilasters and fielded side panels surround the main entrance. It opens to a small main hall that gives onto a living room with exposed ceiling beams. A study, kitchen and pantry, bathroom and the sunroom complete the first floor. The flooring is wide pine boards. The brick kitchen fireplace has a large mantel and bake oven.Two staircases lead up to the second floor. The front one has been opened up to provide more light to the upstairs. The kitchen stair is narrow and steep. The basement has a dirt floor and the original, unfinished stone walls.\n\nCarriage house and landscaping\nTo the rear of the house, at the end of the driveway, is the former carriage house, modified for use as an automotive garage. It is a single-story post and beam wood pegged structure sided in clapboard with an asphalt-shingled roof. It has a low loft inside, a northern addition to accommodate a car, and three windows on the south side.Stone paths lead from the driveway south to the house. They are complemented in the landscaping by mature plantings including ornamental shrubs around the house and curvilinear flower beds in the rear yard. Intersecting paths lead through the woods to the open field in the rear.\n\nHistory\nThere is some uncertainty about the age of the house. In his 1982 autobiography Sketches of Life, Mumford gives its construction date as 1837. Research done by New York's State Historic Preservation Office in preparation for the Register nomination found that it might be as much as a decade older.Mumford, a mostly self-taught New York City native, and his wife Sophia had lived in Greenwich Village and Sunnyside Gardens in Queens following their 1921 marriage. After the success of Sticks and Stones, his 1924 history of American architecture, critic Joel Elias Spingarn invited him up to his Amenia estate, Troutbeck. The Mumfords spent the summer of 1926 there, and returned in the following years.By 1929 they had decided to purchase a property of their own for their summers, and found the house just down the road from Troutbeck. For $2,500 ($43,000 in contemporary dollars), they bought the house and what Mumford later called its \"weedy acre\". After seven more summers, the family decided to settle there year-round in 1936, and began adding additional acreage and upgrading the house with electricity and heating to make it livable in wintertime.It was a considerable adjustment for the Mumfords, both of whom had up to that point been city dwellers. \"There,\" wrote one scholar three decades later, \"the rural life that previously he had only glimpsed became real to him.\" He took up gardening in earnest, and the Mumfords began landscaping the property, eventually adding paths that opened up vistas across the Webutuck valley to Oblong Mountain on the west. They bought a used 1932 Chevrolet, their first car. Mumford left it to his wife to drive after he nearly crashed it into the maple trees in front of the house on one attempt to learn, and swore never to get behind the wheel again.The Mumfords primarily socialized with the Spingarns up the road. They nevertheless appreciated their neighbors' help in lending them tools and garden equipment and watching the house when they were away from it; one large family nearby was extremely helpful with the Mumford children. The experience reinforced Mumford's belief that livable city neighborhoods needed to have \"something of the village\" in them.They told their friends in New York that they initially meant to stay in Amenia for only a few years. But Lewis gradually found the quiet rural environment a good place to write, and it was in the downstairs study that he turned out many of his later major works on the role of cities in civilization and the roots of industrialization. In the early 1940s, after his son Geddes was killed in action during World War II, Mumford recalled his son's childhood in and around the house in Green Memories.\"We gradually fell in love with our shabby house as a young man might fall in love with a homely girl whose voice and smile were irresistible\", Mumford later recalled. \"In no sense was this the house of dreams. But over our lifetime it has slowly turned into something better, the house of our realities ... [T]his dear house has enfolded and remodeled our family character—exposing our limitations as well as our virtues.\"Over the rest of their lives, the Mumfords sometimes took residence elsewhere for Lewis's teaching or research positions, up to a year at a time. They always returned to what they called the \"Great Good Place\". Mumford's biographer Donald Miller wrote:\n\nIn the act of living in this house and making it over it became like a person to them; and like a good friend they grew more fond of it with closer and deeper acquaintance. Every patch garden and lawn, every vista and view, carried the imprint of some of the best hours of their lives.\nThey made some changes to it, siding the first story in shingles and removing the south chimney. Inside they put bookcases on almost every wall.In the 1980s, when Lewis could no longer write due to his advanced age, he retreated to the house. He died there in his bed in 1990, at the age of 94. Sophia followed him seven years later.After her death, the house was sold to a local carpenter who decided to restore it to its original appearance and resell it. He removed all the bookcases and the nine layers of linoleum the Mumfords had added to the kitchen floor every time one wore out. Later renovations restored the original siding and chimney.In 1999, after being listed on the National Register, the house was again put up for sale with a list price of $375,000. The restorations made it more difficult to sell despite the historic provenance, since it still lacked many amenities sought by contemporary buyers of country houses. It eventually did, and is now an occupied residence again.\n\nSee also\nNational Register of Historic Places listings in Dutchess County, New York\nPassage 3:\nThe City in History\nThe City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects is a 1961 National Book Award winner by American historian Lewis Mumford.\nIt was first published by Harcourt, Brace & World (New York).\n\nSynopsis\nMumford argues for a world not in which technology rules, but rather in which it achieves a balance with nature. His ideal vision is what can be described as an \"organic city,\" where culture is not usurped by technological innovation but rather thrives with it. Mumford contrasts these cities with those constructed around wars, tyrants, poverty, etc. However, the book is not an attack on the city, but rather an evaluation of its growth, how it came to be, and where it is heading, as evidenced by the final chapter \"Retrospect and Prospect.\"\nMumford notes apologetically in his preface that his \"method demands personal experience and observation,\" and that therefore he has \"confined [him]self as far as possible to cities and regions [he is] acquainted with at first hand.\"\n\nStyle\nMumford's florid writing style is also \"organic\" compared to the cold, mechanical style of many history texts.  Stylistically, his works are full of metaphors and similes, as well as quotations from famous novelists, giving his prose shades of poetry.  He refers to such texts as Great Expectations and Hard Times, sometimes using citations to illustrate to the reader what life was like during the industrial era and the city in which Dickens lived.\nArticles have been written on Mumford's use of metaphors and how his works can often be read as \"fiction,\" in the sense that they have narrative flow.  That is evident in this book, in which, instead of a human protagonist on which the story centers, we have the city and its growth in a quasi-bildungsroman fashion.\n\nEditions\nHardcover, MJF Books (August 1997) ISBN 978-1-56731-211-9\nPaperback, Harvest Books (October 1968) ISBN 978-0-15-618035-1\nPassage 4:\nMegalopolis\nA megalopolis () or a supercity, also called a megaregion, is a group of metropolitan areas which are perceived as a continuous urban area through common systems of transport, economy, resources, ecology, and so on. They are integrated enough that coordinating policy is valuable, although the constituent metropolises keep their individual identities. The megalopolis concept has become highly influential as it introduced a new, larger scale thinking about urban patterns and growth.\n\nEtymology and earlier definitions\nThe term has specific geographic definitions dating from 1832, when its meaning was \"a metropolis,\" that is, \"a very large, heavily populated urban complex\".\nIn the late 1950s and early 1960s, Jean Gottmann, a professor of political science at the University of Paris and member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, directed \"A Study of Megalopolis\" for The Twentieth Century Fund, wherein he described a megalopolis as a \"world of ideas\". Gottmann, in his extensive studies, applied the term megalopolis to an analysis of the urbanized northeastern seaboard of the U.S., in particular from Boston, Massachusetts to Washington, D.C.\n\nModern definitions\nA megalopolis may also be called a megaregion. \"Megalopolis\" and other similar terms have been used by different scholars and countries to describe similar spatial forms.\nA megalopolis, following the work of Gottmann, refers to two or more roughly adjacent metropolitan areas that, through a commonality of systems—e.g., of transport, economy, resources, and ecologies—experience a blurring of the boundaries between the population centers, such that while some degree of separation may remain, their perception as a continuous urban area is of value, e.g., \"to coordinate policy at this expanded scale\". Simply put, a megalopolis (or a megaregion) is a clustered network of big cities. Gottmann defined its population as 25 million, while Doxiadis defined a small megalopolis a similar cluster with a population of about 10 million. America 2050, a program of the Regional Plan Association (RPA), lists 11 megaregions in the United States and Canada.\nMegaregions of the United States were explored in a July 2005 report by Robert E. Lang and Dawn Dhavale of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech. A later 2007 article by Lang and Nelson uses 20 \"megapolitan\" areas grouped into 10 megaregions. The concept is based on the original \"Megalopolis model\".Modern interlinked ground transportation corridors, such as rail and highway, often aid in the development of megalopolises. Using these commuter passageways to travel throughout the megalopolis is informally called megaloping, a term coined by Davide Gadren and Stefan Berteau.In Brazil, the term megarregião has a legal meaning, different from the English word megaregion: mesoregions of Brazil (mesorregião) and microregions of Brazil (microrregião).\nIn China, the official term corresponding to the meaning of \"megalopolis\" is '城市群' (chéngshì qún), which, in Chinese, was originally coined by Yao Shimou and literally means \"city cluster\". A \"city cluster\" is defined as \"[a]n area in which cities are relatively densely distributed in a certain region\". In an older standard, the term was mistranslated as \"agglomeration\". In 2019, National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC)  published guidelines and made a distinction from a similar concept \"metropolitan area\" (都市圈), which is of a smaller scale than a city cluster. In the latest standard terminologies of both economics and urban planning, 城市群 is translated as \"city cluster\", replacing \"agglomeration\".\n\nList of megalopolises\nIn popular culture\nMetropolis\nMetropolis is a 1927 German expressionist science-fiction drama film directed by Fritz Lang. Written by Thea von Harbou in collaboration with Lang, it stars Gustav Fröhlich, Alfred Abel, Rudolf Klein-Rogge and Brigitte Helm. Erich Pommer produced it in the Babelsberg Studios for Universum Film A.G. (Ufa). The silent film is regarded as a pioneering science-fiction movie, being among the first feature-length movies of that genre. Filming took place over 17 months in 1925–26 at a cost of over five million Reichsmarks.\n\nJudge Dredd\nIn the Judge Dredd (1977) comic book series and its spinoff series, Mega-City One is a huge fictional megalopolis-size city-state covering much of what is now the Eastern United States and some of Canada. The exact geography of the city depends on which writer and artist has done which story, but from its first appearance it has been associated with New York City's urban sprawl; originally it was presented as a future New York, which was retconned as the centre of a \"Mega-City One\" in the very next story. The Architects' Journal placed it at No. 1 in their list of \"comic book cities\".\n\nBlade Runner\nBlade Runner is a 1982 neo-noir science fiction film directed by Ridley Scott, written by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, and starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, and Edward James Olmos. It is a loose adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). The film is set in a dystopian future Los Angeles of 2019, in which synthetic humans known as replicants are bio-engineered by the powerful Tyrell Corporation to work on off-world colonies. When a fugitive group of replicants led by Roy Batty (Hauer) escapes back to Earth, burnt-out cop Rick Deckard (Ford) reluctantly agrees to hunt them down.\n\nSprawl trilogy\nIn William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy, \"the Sprawl\" is a colloquial name for the \"Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis\" (BAMA), an urban sprawl environment on a massive scale, and a fictional extension of the real Northeast megalopolis.  The Sprawl is a visualization of a future where virtually the entire East Coast of the United States, from Boston to Atlanta, has melded into a single mass of urban sprawl. It has been enclosed in several geodesic domes and merged into one megacity. The city has become a separate world with its own climate, no real night/day cycle, and an artificial sky that is always grey.\n\nFurther reading\nHagler, Yoav (November 2009). \"Defining U.S. Megaregions\" (PDF). America 2050. Retrieved February 19, 2022 – via RPA.org. This work, while dated, is from Associate Planner Yoav Hagler of America 2050, and while not used as a source in this article, is one of the most focused articles available on the American aspects of the title subject. It includes history, methodology, and statistical and other criteria sections, and identifies the U.S. megaregions as of its publication date.America 2050 Staff (February 19, 2022). \"Megaregions\". America 2050. Archived from the original (homepage) on May 16, 2017. Retrieved February 19, 2022 – via RPA.org. Starting point for access to articles from the America 2050 effort, while it was active. Note, an earlier cited article by Matt Taylor, on urban transit issues, appears among the works linked at this home page.\n\nSee also\nPassage 5:\nCritical Mass (book)\nCritical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another, a non-fiction book by English chemist and physicist Philip Ball originally published in 2004, discusses the concept of a \"physics of society\". Ball discusses thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, Lewis Mumford, Emyr Hughes, and Gottfried Achenwall who have attempted to apply (or argue against the use of) physics, chemistry, or mathematics in the study of mass social phenomena. He also discusses how the concept relates to recent research, including his own.\n\nPhysics of society\nThe outlines of Ball's Critical Mass, the most popular of his many noted books, beginning in various circa 2001 lectures, talks, and articles focused on what he calls a 'physics of society', similar to the social physics in the Auguste Comte sense, a subject Ball approaches using statistical mechanics viewing people as atoms or molecules that show characteristic behaviours in bulk. The following is an excerpt of his 2003 talk on the physical modeling of society:\n\"There seem to be 'laws' [of] social systems that have at least something of the character of natural physical laws, in that they do not yield easily to planned and arbitrary interventions. Over the past several decades, social, economic and political scientists have begun a dialogue with physical and biological scientists to try to discover whether there is truly a 'physics of society', and if so, what its laws and principles are. In particular, they have begun to regard complex modes of human activity as collections of many interacting 'agents' - somewhat analogous to a fluid of interacting atoms or molecules, but within which there is scope for decision-making, learning and adaptation.\"In his 2004 book, Ball summarizes this to the effect that \"to develop a physics of society, we must take a bold step that some might regard as a leap of faith and others as preposterous idealization: particles become people.\" Nearly as soon as he gives this definition, however, Ball falls back on the two biggest hurdles to this perspective: that of the theories of being alive and of free will, both of which seem to contradict the physics viewpoint.\n\nOther topics\nOther topics discussed in the book include the business cycle, random walks, phase transitions, bifurcation theory, traffic flow, Zipf's law, Small world phenomenon, catastrophe theory, the Prisoner's dilemma. The overall theme is one of applying modern mathematical models to social and economic phenomena.\n\nAwards\nCritical Mass was the winner of the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books and the 2005 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books.\n\nSee also\nCritical mass (sociodynamics)\nPsychohistory\nHistorical materialism\nNetwork economics\nPassage 6:\nTechnics and Civilization\nTechnics and Civilization is a 1934 book by American philosopher and historian of technology Lewis Mumford.  The book presents the history of technology and its role in shaping and being shaped by civilizations.  According to Mumford, modern technology has its roots in the Middle Ages rather than in the Industrial Revolution. It is the moral, economic, and political choices we make, not the machines we use, Mumford argues, that have produced a capitalist industrialized machine-oriented economy, whose imperfect fruits serve the majority so imperfectly.\n\nBackground\nApart from its significance as a monumental work of scholarship in several disciplines, Mumford explicitly positioned the book as a call-to-action for the human race to consider its options in the face of the threats to its survival posed by possible ecological catastrophe or industrialised warfare. Technics and Civilization is the first book in Mumford's four-volume Renewal of Life series, followed by The Culture of Cities (1938), The Condition of Man (1944), and The Conduct of Life (1951).\n\nSynopsis\nMumford divides the development of technology into three overlapping phases: eotechnic (Greek, eos meaning \"dawn\"), paleotechnic and neotechnic.The first phase  of technically civilized life (AD 1000 to 1800) begins with the clock, to Mumford the most important basis for the development of capitalism because time thereby becomes fungible (thus transferable).  The clock is the most important prototype for all other machines.  He contrasts the development and use of glass, wood, wind and water with the inhumanly horrific work that goes into mining and smelting metal.  The use of all of these materials, and the development of science during the eotechnic phase, is based on the abstraction from life of the elements that could be measured.  He approves those people, cities and cultures who strove for a harmonious balance between the senses and the freedom from labor provided by science.\n\nThe second phase, the paleotechnic (roughly 1700 to 1900), is \"an upthrust into barbarism, aided by the very forces and interests which originally had been directed toward the conquest of the environment and the perfection of human nature.\"  Inventions of the paleotechnic are made by men trying to solve specific problems rather than hunting for general scientific principles; in fact, scientific learning is devalued by men of business.  The invention of coal-fired steam powered factories and the installation of capital-intensive machinery leads to a necessarily gigantic round-the-clock scale of production supported by unskilled machine tenders. Labour becomes a commodity, rather than an inalienable set of skills, the labourer who tended machines, lived in slums, and was paid starvation wages, became physically stunted and socially and spiritually stultified.  Mumford notes that the death rate of urban slums compares unfavorably to the agricultural worker of the same time period, and furthermore that life in the nineteenth century compares unfavorably to cleanliness and standards of living available to workers in thirteenth century cities.  He also identifies iron as the primary building material of the paleotechnic, and skyscrapers, bridges and steamships as première accomplishments of the age.  War and mass sport he saw as social releases from mechanized life, and the hysteric duties of wartime production (or even the hysteria of a baseball team's victory) is a natural outgrowth of the tensions and structures of such paleotechnic life.\nIn describing the neotechnic age (from about 1900 to Mumford's present, 1930), he focuses on the invention of electricity, freeing the factory production line from the restrictions of coal through the addition of small electric motors to individual machines, and freeing the laborer to create small but competitive factories.  Mumford presciently notes that a small producer can deliver what is needed when it is needed more efficiently than paleotechnic assembly lines. The neotechnic phase he saw was dominated by men of science, rather than mechanically apt machinists. Rather than pursuing accomplishments on the scale of the trains, it is concerned with the invisible, the rare, the atomic level of change and innovation.  Compact and lightweight aluminum is the metal of the neotechnic,  and communication and information—even inflated amounts—he claimed was the coin.\n\n\n== Notes ==\nPassage 7:\nJack Hillmer\nJack Hillmer (1918–2007) was an American architect based in San Francisco, California.  An exponent of what Lewis Mumford called the \"Bay Region style,\" Hillmer is known for his meticulously hand-crafted modernist homes built from redwood.  Jack Hillmer's most notable projects include the Ludekens house on Belvedere island, the Munger house in Napa, and the Cagliostro house in Berkeley.  Architectural writer Alan Hess called Jack Hillmer \"one of the most original architects produced by California.\"\n\nEarly life\nHillmer was born and raised in Texas.  As a 15-year-old boy, he travelled to Chicago with his mother, a cousin and a friend to visit the 1933 World's Fair.  It was there, in the California exhibit, that he encountered the redwood boards that would become a key feature of his later architectural practice:  four-foot by twenty-foot planks displayed under spotlights to highlight one of that state's key products.  Several years later Hillmer received a scholarship to the University of Texas, where he enrolled in architecture.  After college, Hillmer joined the air force, and was stationed in San Diego.  Hillmer used his time-off during the war to explore the new modernist buildings that were being built in southern California, including renting a room in the Pueblo Rivera Apartments by R. M. Schindler, and living for a time at the La Jolla Art Center by Irving Gill.  Toward the end of the war, Hillmer visited Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesen West in Scottsdale, Arizona.  Hillmer was invited by Wright to join his Taliesen Fellowship, but Hillmer declined despite his appreciation for Wright's work.Hillmer first visited the San Francisco Bay Area in 1945, when he flew up the coast to Hamilton Air Force Base to deliver a new bomber on which he had worked as a draftsman.  Hillmer was transferred to Travis Air Force Base in Solano County, California toward the end of the war.  After he was discharged, Hillmer decided to remain in the Bay Area, where he opened an architectural office with his friend Warren Callister at 425 Bush Street in San Francisco.\n\nCareer\nHillmer and Callister's first commission was the Haines and Betty Hall house in 1947, a house with an abstract geometry built from redwood boards that were reclaimed from a dismantled barn on the property.  The house would later be published in Life magazine.Shortly after the Hall house was published, Callister and Hillmer dissolved their partnership and set up individual practices.  Hillmer's first commission on his own came in 1948 from Fred Ludekens, a successful graphic artist who had purchased a lot on Belvedere Island with views across the Bay to San Francisco.  Arguably Hillmer's most successful design, the Ludekens house featured rough redwood walls and airplane wing-like ceilings that soared above the walls of the building, seemingly supported only by glass.  Shortly after its completion in 1951, the Ludekens House would be featured in Architectural Forum.In the early 1950s, Hillmer was invited to teach as a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley by the dean of the architecture school, William Wurster, and again in the 1960s by Charles Moore.  Several significant commissions followed over the next three decades, including the Milton Munger house in Napa (1950), the Owen Stebbins house in Kent Woodlands (1960), the John and Patti Wright house in Inverness (1962), and the Dominic Cagliostro house in Berkeley (1977).\n\nStyle\nJack Hillmer's style is most closely identified with the Second Bay Tradition period of architecture in the California Bay Area.  Hillmer's work is characterized by \"bold exterior fascias and interior cornice lines [that] turn the structure into its own ornament.  He hones unnecessary details to a minimum; window frames are typically absent; the glass is often embedded directly into the wood structure.  This approach is thoroughly Modern.  Beauty is drawn from the inherent structure itself rather than from applied carving.\"Architect Pierluigi Serraino described Hillmer's architecture as \"assertive, but it's always benevolent.  It's always very delicate in the way it fits onto the site.  It's not architecture that wants to scream, but it has its own monumentality.\"In Hillmer's own words:  \"My approach to architecture was as an art.  The approach of most other architects is as a business.  I never really thought about how much money I was getting.\"\nPassage 8:\nHenry Roth\nHenry Roth (February 8, 1906 – October 13, 1995) was an American novelist and short story writer who found success later in life after his 1934 novel Call It Sleep was reissued in paperback in 1964.\n\nBiography\nRoth was born in Tysmenitz near Stanislawow, Galicia, Austro-Hungary (now known as Tysmenytsia, near Ivano-Frankivsk, Galicia, Ukraine). Although his parents never agreed on the exact date of his arrival in the United States, it is most likely that he and his mother landed at Ellis Island and began his life in New York in 1908. The family briefly lived in Brooklyn, and then on the Lower East Side, in the slums where his classic novel Call It Sleep is set. In 1914, they moved to Harlem. Roth lived there until 1927, when, as a senior at City College of New York, he moved in with Eda Lou Walton, a poet and New York University instructor who lived on Morton Street in Greenwich Village.\nWith Walton's support, he began Call It Sleep in about 1930, completed the novel in the spring of 1934, and it was published in December 1934, to mostly good reviews. Yet the New York Herald Tribune's book critic Lewis Gannett foresaw that the book would not prove popular with its bleak depiction of New York's Lower East Side, but wrote readers would \"remember it and talk about it and watch excitedly\" for Roth's next book. Call It Sleep sold slowly and poorly, and after it was out-of-print, critics writing in magazines such as Commentary and Partisan Review kept praising it, and asking for it to be reprinted. After being republished in hardback in 1960 and paperback in 1964, with more than 1,000,000 copies sold, and many weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, the novel was hailed as an overlooked Depression-era masterpiece and classic novel of immigration. Today, it is widely regarded as a masterpiece of Jewish American literature.\nAfter the book's 1934 publication, Roth began a second novel that was contracted with editor Maxwell Perkins, of Scribner's. But Roth's growing ideological frustration and personal confusion contributed to a profound writer's block, which lasted until 1979, when he began the earliest drafts of Mercy of a Rude Stream (although material written much earlier than 1979 was also incorporated into this later work). In 1938, during an unproductive sojourn at the artists' colony Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York, Roth met Muriel Parker, a pianist and composer; much of this period is depicted in Roth's final work, An American Type. Roth severed his relationship with Walton, moved out of her apartment, and married Parker in 1939, to the disapproval of her family. With the onset of World War II, he became a tool-and-gauge maker. The couple moved first to Boston with their two young sons, Jeremy and Hugh, and then, in 1946, to Maine. There, Roth worked as a woodsman, a schoolteacher, a psychiatric attendant in the state mental hospital, a waterfowl farmer, and a Latin and math tutor.\nArthur Hertzberg credited editor Harold U. Ribalow with \"rediscovering\" Roth. Ribelow found him on a farm in Maine, persuaded him to permit a new edition of the novel, and wrote an introduction to the new edition, which was published by Pageant Books in 1960.  Many years later, after Ribalow had died and Roth was awarded the Ribalow Prize, he wrote to Ribalow's son, Meir Z. Ribalow, \"Thanks for the encomia. Things like that keep me alive, I'm sure: what little is left me capable of feeling swells with pride like the staves of an old barrel when filled. Harold, to whom I owe so much, would have been happy to witness the occasion.\"In fact, Roth did not initially welcome the success of the 1964 reprint of Call It Sleep, valuing his privacy instead. But his writing block slowly began to break. In 1968, after Muriel's retirement from the Maine state school system, the couple moved to a trailer home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, closer to where Roth had stayed as writer-in-residence at the D. H. Lawrence ranch outside of Taos. Muriel began composing music again, while Roth collaborated with his friend and Italian translator Mario Materassi to put out a collection of essays called Shifting Landscape, published by the Jewish Publication Society in 1987. After Muriel's death, in 1990, Roth moved into a ramshackle former funeral parlor and occupied himself with revising the final volumes of his monumental work, Mercy of a Rude Stream. It has been alleged that the incestuous relationships between the protagonist, a sister, and a cousin in Mercy of a Rude Stream are autobiographical. Roth's sister, however, has denied that such events occurred.\nRoth failed to garner the acclaim some say he deserves, perhaps because after the publication of Call It Sleep he failed to produce another novel for 60 years. He attributed his massive writer's block to personal problems, such as depression, and to political conflicts, including his disillusionment with Communism. At other times, he cited his early break with Judaism and his obsessive sexual preoccupations as probable causes. Roth died in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1995.\nThe character E. I. Lonoff in Philip Roth's Zuckerman novels (The Ghost Writer and Exit Ghost in this case), is a composite of Roth, Bernard Malamud and fictional elements.\n\nWorks and writing\nCall It Sleep\nPublished in 1934, Call It Sleep centers on the turbulent experiences of a young boy, David Schearl, growing up in the Jewish immigrant slum of New York's Lower East Side in the early 20th century.\n\nMercy of a Rude Stream\nMercy of a Rude Stream is a monumental epic published in four volumes. It follows protagonist Ira Stigman from his family's arrival in Jewish-Irish Harlem in 1914 to the night before Thanksgiving in 1927, when Ira decides to leave the family tenement and move in with Edith Welles.  According to critic David Mehegan, Roth's Mercy represents a \"landmark of the American literary century\".The first volume, A Star Shines over Mt. Morris Park was published in 1994 by St. Martin's Press and the second volume, called A Diving Rock on the Hudson, appeared from St. Martin's in 1995.  In A Diving Rock on the Hudson, \"Roth writes graphically about the sexual relationship between the protagonist, Ira Stigman, and Stigman's sister, Minnie, as teen-agers. Roth also describes an incestuous relationship between Stigman and his cousin, Stella.\" Roth's sister \"chastise[d] Roth for writing about the 'revelation'\" and \"threaten[ed] to sue him and St. Martin's Press.... Roth and his sister entered into a contract in which he agreed to pay his sister $10,000 in exchange for immunity from legal action. The contract ... also stipulated that future volumes of Roth's novel would no longer portray Minnie Stigman 'as having any further sexual relationship with her brother, Ira Stigman.'\"From Bondage, which appeared in hardcover in 1996, was the first volume of the four Mercy books to appear posthumously. Requiem for Harlem, the fourth and final volume, appeared in 1998.  Roth was able to revise both the third and fourth volumes in 1994 and 1995 with the help of his assistant, Felicia Steele, shortly before his death.\nBefore his death, Roth commented numerous times that Mercy of a Rude Stream comprised six volumes.  In fact, Roth did write six separate books. He called the first four \"Batch One,\" and the last two, \"Batch Two.\"  Roth's editor at St. Martin's, Robert Weil, along with Felicia Steele, Larry Fox, and Roth's agent, Roslyn Targ, found the epic would be best served in four volumes, as the four books of \"Batch One\" contained a stylistic and thematic unity inconsistent with the remaining two books.\nExplaining the difference between Mercy of a Rude Stream and Call It Sleep, critic Mario Materassi, Roth's longtime friend, argues that \"Call It Sleep can be read as a vehicle through which, soon after breaking away from his family and his tradition, young Roth used some of the fragments of his childhood to shore up the ruins of what he already felt was a disconnected self.  Forty-five years later, Roth embarked on another attempt to bring some retrospective order to his life's confusion:  Mercy of a Rude Stream, which he has long called a 'continuum,' can be read as a final, monumental effort on the part of the elderly author to come to terms with the pattern of rupture and discontinuity that has marked his life\".Fran Lebowitz, writer and public intellectual, in her Netflix special \"Pretend It's a City\" speaks about how you can still appreciate the art of an individual separate from his actions.\n\nAn American Type\nRoth's final novel, An American Type, emerged from \"Batch 2,\" which Roth wrote during the late 1980s and early 1990s. With his assistant's help, Roth produced 1,900 typed pages of scenes beginning where Mercy left off and continuing through 1990.  The manuscript of \"Batch 2\" remained untouched for over a decade until Weil sent it to The New Yorker, which published two excerpts from \"Batch 2\" in the summer of 2006 under the titles \"God the Novelist\" and \"Freight.\" At The New Yorker the book came into the hands of Willing Davidson, then a young assistant in the magazine's fiction department. At the suggestion of Weil and Roth's literary executor, Lawrence Fox, Davidson edited \"Batch 2\" into An American Type, which was published by W.W. Norton in 2010.Both a love story and a lamentation, the novel opens in 1938, and reintroduces us to Ira Stigman of the Mercy cycle, a thirty-two-year-old \"slum-born Yiddle\" eager to assimilate but traumatized by his impoverished immigrant past. Restless with his lover and literary mentor, English professor Edith Welles, Ira journeys to Yaddo, where he meets M (who only appeared in the old man's reveries in the Mercy series), a blond, aristocratic pianist whose \"calm, Anglo-Saxon radiance\" engages him.\nThe ensuing romantic crisis, as well as the conflict between his ghetto Jewish roots and the bourgeois comforts of Manhattan, forces Ira to abandon his paramour's Greenwich Village apartment and set out with an illiterate, boorish Communist on a quest for the promise of the American West. But feeling like a total failure in LA, Ira begins an epic journey home, thumbing rides from truckers and riding the rails with hobos through the Dust Bowl. Ira only knows that he must return to M, the woman he truly loves.\nSixty-five pages of excerpts from Batch Two consisting of short journal entries appeared in the journal, Fiction, Number 57, in 2011. The majority of these pages are about Roth's move to Maine, afraid that his associations with the Communist Party would haunt him at his factory job in Massachusetts. Purchasing a small farm, and surrounded by Yankee neighbors, Roth questions his identity as a Jew and struggles to wrest a living out of a Maine countryside where the soil is so hard that he has to dynamite in order to lay pipe deep enough to avoid the winter freezes. The extreme cold that he and his family endured, his work logging, bargaining over antiques and livestock with neighbors, and the world of backwoods and village America form the principal and unlikely drama of these pages. There is also return to the tense, incestuous world of the Roth family in Henry's childhood in the last of these extracts.\n\nThemes\nHenry Roth's writing centers on immigrant experience, particularly a Jewish-American experience in Depression-era America. He has also been hailed as a chronicler of New York City life.\nRoth's work reveals an obsession with cultural depravity: the internal dislocation of the intellectual and of society at large that features so prominently in the work of the greatest Modernist writers. Indeed, Roth often fixates on human depravity in a multitude of forms. Sexually abhorrent acts such as incest, infidelity, and predation, for instance, inform much of his work, as does a more general climate of violence or abuse, often inflicted on others and masochistically turned inwards.\nThroughout his life, Roth simultaneously embraced and rejected the notion of a forgiving God, and this ambivalence is also registered in his writing. Mario Materassi suggests, in \"Shifting Urbanscape: Roth's 'Private' New York,\" that Roth \"has never been interested in any story other than the anguished one of a man who, throughout his life, has contradicted each of his previously held positions and beliefs.\"While Roth's works are generally tragic, and often relentlessly so, his later work holds out for the possibility of redemption, or of mercy in a rude stream. This notion is especially evident in An American Type where the love between Ira and M becomes a means of transcendence.\n\nAwards and honors\nRoth received two honorary doctorates, one from the University of New Mexico and one from the Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion. He won the 1987 International Nonino Prize in Italy. Posthumously, he was honored in 1995 with the Hadassah Harold Ribalow Lifetime Achievement Award and by the Museum of the City of New York with Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger having named February 29, 1996, as \"Henry Roth Day\" in New York City. From Bondage was cited by the National Book Critics Circle as being a finalist for its Fiction Prize in 1997, and it was in that same year that Henry Roth won the first Isaac Bashevis Singer Prize in Literature for From Bondage, an award put out by The Forward Foundation. In 2005, ten years after Roth's death, the first full biography of his life, the prize-winning Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth, by literary scholar Steven G. Kellman, was published, followed in 2006 by Henry Roth's centenary, which was marked by a literary tribute at the New York Public Library, sponsored by CCNY and organized by Lawrence I. Fox, Roth's literary executor.\n\nBibliography\nCall It Sleep (1934)\n\"Where My Sympathy Lies,\" The New Masses, vol. 22, no. 10 (March 2, 1937), pg. 9.—extols and justifies the Moscow Trials.\nNature's First Green (1979)\nShifting Landscape: A Composite, 1925–1987 (1987)\nMercy of a Rude Stream Vol. 1: A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park (1994)\nMercy of a Rude Stream Vol. 2: A Diving Rock on the Hudson (1995)\nMercy of a Rude Stream Vol. 3: From Bondage (1996)\nMercy of a Rude Stream Vol. 4: Requiem for Harlem (1998)\nAn American Type (2010)\nPassage 9:\nLewis Mumford\nLewis Mumford (19 October 1895 – 26 January 1990) was an American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic. Particularly noted for his study of cities and urban architecture, he had a broad career as a writer. He made signal contributions to social philosophy, American literary and cultural history, and the history of technology.He was influenced by the work of Scottish theorist Sir Patrick Geddes and worked closely with his associate the British sociologist Victor Branford. \nMumford was also a contemporary and friend of Frank Lloyd Wright, Clarence Stein, Frederic Osborn, Edmund N. Bacon, and Vannevar Bush.\n\nLife\nEarly life and education\nMumford was born in Flushing, Queens, New York, and graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1912. He studied at the City College of New York and The New School for Social Research, but became ill with tuberculosis and never finished his degree. In 1918 he joined the navy to serve in World War I and was assigned as a radio electrician. He was discharged in 1919 and became associate editor of The Dial, an influential modernist literary journal. He later worked for The New Yorker where he wrote architectural criticism and commentary on urban issues.\n\nFirst book\nMumford's earliest books in the field of literary criticism have had a lasting influence on contemporary American literary criticism. In The Golden Day (1926), he argued for a mid-19th-century American literary canon comprising Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman, all of whom he argued reflected an antebellum American culture of the period that would be destroyed by the late-19th-century social changes wrought by the American Civil War and industrialization of the United States. Herman Melville (1929), which combined an account of Melville's life with an interpretive discussion of his work, was an important part of the Melville revival.\n\nCorrespondence\nMumford was a close friend of the psychologist Henry Murray, with whom he corresponded extensively from 1928 until the 1960s on topics including Herman Melville, psychology, American values and culture, and the nature of the self.\n\nUrban planning\nIn his early writings on life in an urban area, Mumford was optimistic about human abilities and wrote, that the human race would use electricity and mass communication to build a better world for all humankind. \nMumford would later take a more pessimistic stance on the sweeping technological improvements brought by the second industrial revolution. His early architectural criticism also helped to bring wider public recognition to the work of Henry Hobson Richardson, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright.\n\nHonours\nMumford was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1941 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1947. In 1963, Mumford received the Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism from the College Art Association. Mumford received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. In 1975 Mumford was made an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE). In 1976, he was awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca. In 1986, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts.\n\nFurther publications\nHe served as the architectural critic for The New Yorker magazine for over 30 years. His 1961 book, The City in History, received the National Book Award.\n\nRetirement\nLewis Mumford died at the age of 94 at his home in Amenia, New York, on January 26, 1990. Nine years later the house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. His wife Sophia died in 1997, at age 97.\n\nIdeas\nIn his book The Condition of Man, published in 1944, Mumford characterized his orientation toward the study of humanity as \"organic humanism.\"  The term is an important one because it sets limits on human possibilities, limits that are aligned with the nature of the human body. Mumford never forgot the importance of air quality, of food availability, of the quality of water, or the comfort of spaces, because all these elements had to be respected if people were to thrive. Technology and progress could never become a runaway train in his reasoning, so long as organic humanism was there to act as a brake. Indeed, Mumford considered the human brain from this perspective, characterizing it as hyperactive, a good thing in that it allowed humanity to conquer many of nature's threats, but potentially a bad thing if it were not occupied in ways that stimulated it meaningfully. Mumford's respect for human \"nature\", that is to say, the natural characteristics of being human, provided him with a platform from which to assess technologies, and technics in general. Thus his criticism and counsel with respect to the city and with respect to the implementation of technology was fundamentally organized around the organic humanism to which he ascribed. It was from the perspective of organic humanism that Mumford eventually launched a critical assessment of Marshall McLuhan, who argued that the technology, not the natural environment, would ultimately shape the nature of humankind, a possibility that Mumford recognized, but only as a nightmare scenario.\nMumford believed that what defined humanity, what set human beings apart from other animals, was not primarily our use of tools (technology) but our use of language (symbols). He was convinced that the sharing of information and ideas amongst participants of primitive societies was completely natural to early humanity, and had obviously been the foundation of society as it became more sophisticated and complex.  He had hopes for a continuation of this process of information \"pooling\" in the world as humanity moved into the future.Mumford's choice of the word \"technics\" throughout his work was deliberate. For Mumford, technology is one part of technics. Using the broader definition of the Greek tekhne, which means not only technology but also art, skill, and dexterity, technics refers to the interplay of social milieu and technological innovation—the \"wishes, habits, ideas, goals\" as well as \"industrial processes\" of a society. As Mumford writes at the beginning of Technics and Civilization, \"other civilizations reached a high degree of technical proficiency without, apparently, being profoundly influenced by the methods and aims of technics.\"\n\nMegatechnics\nIn The Myth of the Machine Vol II: The Pentagon of Power (Chapter 12) (1970), Mumford criticizes the modern trend of technology, which emphasizes constant, unrestricted expansion, production, and replacement. He contends that these goals work against technical perfection, durability, social efficiency, and overall human satisfaction. Modern technology, which he called \"megatechnics,\" fails to produce lasting, quality products by using devices such as consumer credit, installment buying, non-functioning and defective designs, planned obsolescence, and frequent superficial \"fashion\" changes. \"Without constant enticement by advertising,\" he writes, \"production would slow down and level off to normal replacement demand. Otherwise many products could reach a plateau of efficient design which would call for only minimal changes from year to year.\"\nHe uses his own refrigerator as an example, reporting that it \"has been in service for nineteen years, with only a single minor repair: an admirable job. Both automatic refrigerators for daily use and deepfreeze preservation are inventions of permanent value. ... [O]ne can hardly doubt that if biotechnic criteria were heeded, rather than those of market analysts and fashion experts, an equally good product might come forth from Detroit, with an equally long prospect of continued use.\"\n\nBiotechnics\nMumford was deeply concerned with the relationship between technics and bioviability.  The latter term, not used by Mumford, characterizes an area's capability to support life up through its levels of complexity.  Before the advent of technology, most areas of the planet were bioviable at some level or other; however, where certain forms of technology advance rapidly, bioviability decreases dramatically.  Slag heaps, poisoned waters, parking lots, and concrete cities, for example, are extremely limited in terms of their bioviability. Non-bioviable regions are common in cinema in the form of dystopias (e.g., Blade Runner). Mumford did not believe it was necessary for bioviability to collapse as technics advanced, however, because he held it was possible to create technologies that functioned in an ecologically responsible manner, and he called that sort of technology biotechnics. Mumford believed that biotechnic consciousness (and possibly even community) was emerging as a later stage in the evolution of Darwinian thinking about the nature of human life. He believed this was the sort of technics needed to shake off the suicidal drive of \"megatechnics.\" While Mumford recognized an ecological consciousness that traces back to the earliest communities, he regarded emerging biotechnics as a product of neo-Darwinian consciousness, as a post-industrial form of thinking, one that refuses to look away from the mutually-influencing relationship between the state of the living organism and the state of its environment. In Mumford's mind, the society organized around biotechnics would restrain its technology for the sake of that integral relationship.\nIn Mumford's understanding, the various technologies that arose in the megatechnic context have brought unintended and harmful side effects along with the obvious benefits they have bequeathed to us. He points out, for example, that the development of money (as a technology) created, as a side effect, a context for irrational accumulation of excess because it eliminated the burdensome aspects of object-wealth by making wealth abstract. In those eras when wealth was not abstract, plenitude had functioned as the organizing principle around its acquisition (i.e., wealth, measured in grains, lands, animals, to the point that one is satisfied, but not saddled with it). Money, which allows wealth to be conceived as pure quantity instead of quality, is an example of megatechnics, one which can spiral out of control. If Mumford is right in this conceptualization, historians and economists should be able to trace a relationship between the still-increasing abstraction of wealth and radical transformations with respect to wealth's distribution and role. And, indeed, it does appear that, alongside its many benefits, the movement toward electronic money has stimulated forms of economic stress and exploitation not yet fully understood and not yet come to their conclusion. A technology for distributing resources that was less given to abstract hoarding would be more suitable to a biotechnic conception of living.\nThus Mumford argued that the biotechnic society would not hold to the megatechnic delusion that technology must expand unceasingly, magnifying its own power and would shatter that delusion in order to create and preserve \"livability.\" Rather than the megatechnic pursuit of power, the biotechnic society would pursue what Mumford calls \"plenitude\"; that is, a homeostatic relationship between resources and needs. This notion of plenitude becomes clearer if we suggest that the biotechnic society would relate to its technology in the manner an animal relates to available food–under circumstances of natural satisfaction, the pursuit of technological advance would not simply continue \"for its own sake.\"\nAlongside the limiting effect of satisfaction amidst plenitude, the pursuit of technological advance would also be limited by its potentially negative effects upon the organism. Thus, in a biotechnic society, the quality of air, the quality of food, the quality of water, these would all be significant concerns that could limit any technological ambitions threatening to them. The anticipated negative value of noise, radiation, smog, noxious chemicals, and other technical by-products would significantly constrain the introduction of new technical innovation. In Mumford's words, a biotechnic society would direct itself toward \"qualitative richness, amplitude, spaciousness, and freedom from quantitative pressures and crowding. Self-regulation, self-correction, and self-propulsion are as much an integral property of organisms as nutrition, reproduction, growth, and repair.\" The biotechnic society would pursue balance, wholeness, and completeness; and this is what those individuals in pursuit of biotechnics would do as well.\nMumford's critique of the city and his vision of cities that are organized around the nature of human bodies, so essential to all Mumford's work on city life and urban design, is rooted in an incipient notion of biotechnics: \"livability,\" a notion which Mumford got from his mentor, Patrick Geddes.\nMumford used the term biotechnics in the later sections of The Pentagon of Power, written in 1970. The term sits well alongside his early characterization of \"organic humanism,\" in that biotechnics represent the concrete form of technique that appeals to an organic humanist. When Mumford described biotechnics, automotive and industrial pollution had become dominant technological concerns, along with the fear of nuclear annihilation. Mumford recognized, however, that technology had even earlier produced a plethora of hazards, and that it would do so into the future. For Mumford, human hazards are rooted in a power-oriented technology that does not adequately respect and accommodate the essential nature of humanity. Mumford is stating implicitly, as others would later state explicitly, that contemporary human life understood in its ecological sense is out of balance because the technical parts of its ecology (guns, bombs, cars, drugs) have spiraled out of control, driven by forces peculiar to them rather than constrained by the needs of the species that created them. He believed that biotechnics was the emerging answer and the only hope that could be set out against the problem of megatechnics.  It was an answer, he believed, that was already beginning to assert itself in his time.\nIt is true that Mumford's writing privileges the term \"biotechnics\" more than the \"biotechnic society.\" The reason is clear in the last sentence of The Pentagon of Power where he writes, \"for those of us who have thrown off the myth of the machine, the next move is ours: for the gates of the technocratic prison will open automatically, despite their rusty ancient hinges, as soon as we choose to walk out.\" Mumford believed that the biotechnic society was a desideratum—one that should guide his contemporaries as they walked out the doors of their megatechnic confines (he also calls them \"coffins\"). Thus he ends his narrative, as he well understood, at the beginning of another one: the possible revolution that gives rise to a biotechnic society, a quiet revolution, for Mumford, one that would arise from the biotechnic consciousness and actions of individuals. Mumford was an avid reader of Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy of the organism.\n\nPolytechnics versus monotechnics\nA key idea, introduced in Technics and Civilization (1934) was that technology was twofold:\n\nPolytechnic, which enlists many different modes of technology, providing a complex framework to solve human problems.\nMonotechnic, which is technology only for its own sake, which oppresses humanity as it moves along its own trajectory.Mumford commonly criticized modern America's transportation networks as being \"monotechnic\" in their reliance on cars. Automobiles become obstacles for other modes of transportation, such as walking, bicycle and public transit, because the roads they use consume so much space and are such a danger to people. Mumford explains that the thousands of maimed and dead each year as a result of automobile accidents are a ritual sacrifice the American society makes because of its extreme reliance on highway transport.\n\nThree epochs of civilization\nAlso discussed at length in Technics and Civilization is Mumford's division of human civilization into three distinct epochs (following concepts originated by Patrick Geddes):\n\nEotechnic (the middle ages)\nPaleotechnic (the time of the industrial revolution) and\nNeotechnic (later, present-day)\n\nMegamachines\nMumford also refers to large hierarchical organizations as megamachines—a machine using humans as its components. These organizations characterize Mumford's stage theory of civilization. The most recent megamachine manifests itself, according to Mumford, in modern technocratic nuclear powers—Mumford used the examples of the Soviet and United States power complexes represented by the Kremlin and the Pentagon, respectively. The builders of the pyramids, the Roman Empire and the armies of the World Wars are prior examples.\nHe explains that meticulous attention to accounting and standardization, and elevation of military leaders to divine status, are spontaneous features of megamachines throughout history. He cites such examples as the repetitive nature of Egyptian paintings which feature enlarged pharaohs and public display of enlarged portraits of Communist leaders such as Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin. He also cites the overwhelming prevalence of quantitative accounting records among surviving historical fragments, from ancient Egypt to Nazi Germany.\nNecessary to the construction of these megamachines is an enormous bureaucracy of humans which act as \"servo-units\", working without ethical involvement. According to Mumford, technological improvements such as the assembly line, or instant, global, wireless, communication and remote control, can easily weaken the perennial psychological barriers to certain types of questionable actions. An example which he uses is that of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official who organized logistics in support of the Holocaust. Mumford collectively refers to people willing to carry out placidly the extreme goals of these megamachines as \"Eichmanns\".\n\nThe clock as herald of the Industrial Revolution\nOne of the better-known studies of Mumford is of the way the mechanical clock was developed by monks in the Middle Ages and subsequently adopted by the rest of society. He viewed this device as the key invention of the whole Industrial Revolution, contrary to the common view of the steam engine holding the prime position, writing: \"The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age. ... The clock ... is a piece of power-machinery whose 'product' is seconds and minutes ....\"\n\nUrban civilization\nThe City in History won the 1962 U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction. In this influential book Mumford explored the development of urban civilizations. Harshly critical of urban sprawl, Mumford argues that the structure of modern cities is partially responsible for many social problems seen in western society. While pessimistic in tone, Mumford argues that urban planning should emphasize an 'organic' relationship between people and their living spaces.\nMumford uses the example of the medieval city as the basis for the \"ideal city,\" and claims that the modern city is too close to the Roman city (the sprawling megalopolis) which ended in collapse; if the modern city carries on in the same vein, Mumford argues, then it will meet the same fate as the Roman city.\nMumford wrote critically of urban culture believing the city is \"a product of earth ... a fact of nature ... man's method of expression.\" Further, Mumford recognized the crises facing urban culture, distrustful of the growing finance industry, political structures, fearful that a local community culture was not being fostered by these institutions. Mumford feared \"metropolitan finance,\" urbanization, politics, and alienation. Mumford wrote: \"The physical design of cities and their economic functions are secondary to their relationship to the natural environment and to the spiritual values of human community.\"\n\nSuburbs\nSuburbia did not escape Mumford's criticism either:\n\nIn the suburb one might live and die without marring the image of an innocent world, except when some shadow of evil fell over a column in the newspaper. Thus the suburb served as an asylum for the preservation of illusion. Here domesticity could prosper, oblivious of the pervasive regimentation beyond. This was not merely a child-centered environment; it was based on a childish view of the world, in which reality was sacrificed to the pleasure principle.\n\nReligion and spirituality\nMumford is also among the first urban planning scholars who paid serious attention to religion in the planning field. In one of his least well-known books, Faith for Living (1940, p. 216), Mumford argues that:\n\nThe segregation of the spiritual life from the practical life is a curse that falls impartially upon both sides of our existence.\n\nInfluence\nMumford's interest in the history of technology and his explanation of  \"polytechnics\", along with his general philosophical bent, has been an important influence on a number of more recent thinkers concerned that technology serve human beings as broadly and well as possible. Some of these authors—such as Jacques Ellul, Witold Rybczynski, Richard Gregg, Amory Lovins, J. Baldwin, E. F. Schumacher, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Murray Bookchin, Thomas Merton, Marshall McLuhan, Colin Ward and Kevin Carson—have been intellectuals and persons directly involved with technological development and decisions about the use of technology.\nMumford also had an influence on the American environmental movement, with thinkers like Barry Commoner and Bookchin being influenced by his ideas on cities, ecology and technology. Ramachandra Guha noted his work contains \"some of the earliest and finest thinking on bioregionalism, anti-nuclearism, biodiversity, alternate energy paths, ecological urban planning and appropriate technology.\"Mumford's influence is also evident in the work of some artists including Berenice Abbott's photographs of New York City in the late 1930s.Mumford was an inspiration for Ellsworth Toohey, the antagonist in Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead (1943).\n\nWorks",
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