A FESTERING PROBLEM OF OUR ERA by

Erin Slow

In the latter part of the 20th century, a growing number of urban planners began to express disapproval of America's obsession with cars. Furthermore, the construction of too many roads and highways contributed to the transformation of our cities into uninviting and dreary landscapes. The combination of escalating gas prices and worries about carbon emissions has resulted in many average Americans echoing these concerns and looking for alternative solutions. As a result, we are now reconsidering the concept of decentralized and pedestrian-friendly cities.

Mumford’s Ideas on Urban Planning

Luis Mumford was an esteemed American thinker, historian, and philosopher who left valuable critiques of the increasing trends of consumerism in technology that he observed in the last century. In his award-winning book, The City in History, he harshly criticizes the phenomenon of urban sprawl and spends much time detailing how its opposite, decentralized ur- ban architecture would work and what would it mean.

Mumford became disillusioned with the myth of Western progress at the outbreak of WWI. He came to the conclusion that desired social change can only be a result of human agency rather than inevitable “historical forces” which may not lead us on the right path.

Mumford writes that urban planners must see the neighborhood as the primary unit of a city. He argued that planning cities around freeways, downtown architecture, and other infrastructure was not sustainable in the long run and would lead to other unpleasant repercussions as well. We can see an exemplification of Mumford’s ideas in Robert Moses, the premier mid-century urban planner of America.

“Bigger is better syndrome” extended to other forms of infrastructure in addition to city planning. One example is dams many of which were designed for flood control rather than power generation. Major hydroelectric power plants were a centerpiece of 20th-century infrastructure all over the world. This was the case in communist China and the USSR, as well as the United States.

A Dam Hard Problem...

Mumford must have loathed these megastructures. Dams today are reaching the end of their life expectancies and need to be rebuilt or replaced entirely. In the US, only a few large dams provide most of the power generation capacity and none of those have been replaced. Instead, most dam removal projects have removed the smaller flood control dams.

However, as the present hydroelectric dams are at the end of their lifespans, they must be replaced or removed entirely. In the latter case, an entirely new option must be found. 100 years is the average life-expectancy of a hydroelectric dam, so time is running short.

One of the problems with traditional hydroelectric plants is that they need large reservoirs to function properly.