Mumford also foresaw a future of autonomous vehicles, warning that “the end product is an encapsulated life.”
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I’ll close with a line from The City in History that might be Mumford’s most famous: “The assumed right of the private motor car to go any place in the city and park anywhere is nothing less than a license to destroy the city.”
aug 10, 2025, 4:34 pm • 136 36 • view
For more on Mumford, I wrote a tribute to him in Bloomberg, drawing from the many auto-skeptical essays he wrote for The New Yorker the 1950s and 60s. (Mumford's essays are an easier starting point than The City in History. It's a classic, but hardly a light read.)
aug 10, 2025, 4:41 pm • 49 3 • view
I think I've started this a dozen different times and have never finished... 😔
aug 10, 2025, 5:45 pm • 6 0 • view
13th time's a charm.
aug 11, 2025, 12:07 pm • 1 0 • view
He's briefly featured in the short documentary, Taken for a Ride, on the subject of GM's underhanded destruction of public transit systems. youtu.be/p-I8GDklsN4
aug 11, 2025, 5:11 am • 0 0 • view
He saw so clearly what was happening and what so many now deny can ever be improved.
aug 10, 2025, 4:39 pm • 0 0 • view
I also like the line from Christopher Alexander (A Pattern Language, 1977): “It may be that cars cause the breakdown of society, simply because of their geometry."
aug 10, 2025, 6:29 pm • 0 0 • view
Mr Mumford is cookin
aug 10, 2025, 4:57 pm • 0 0 • view
This is so visionary
aug 10, 2025, 7:32 pm • 0 0 • view