A Study Of Lewis Mumford's City Cultural Ideology

Lewis Mumford is not only a famous literary critic but also a city historian.Furthermore he is one of the prime representative of humanistic city planning theory.Owing to the multidisciplinary background,Mumford's reflection of the formation and development of city is under the research scope of macro history instead of only focus on architectural level.Mumford has a clear understanding of the duality of city.On one hand he is delighted to see that the development of city brings prosperity and development to human society,on the other hand he has a critical attitude of negative aspects of city development.Mumford shows the positive view about the worth of a man which gives expression to the strong consciousness and real concern of a humanistic city scholars.This essay summarizes,analyzes and verifies Mumford's city development history,city container theory,city drama theory,city magnet theory and organic city planning to refine the city cultural theories of Mumford.At mean time,this essay tries to trace the origin of theory.This essay consists of four chapters.The first chapter goes into Mumford's city religious cultural thought from a diachronic perspective.First this chapter traces the background of the development of city religious cultural,then summarize the development of city religious cultural.The second chapter makes a detailed analysis of institutional level in order to generalize Mumford's city system culture thought.The third chapter summarize the city material culture thought of Mumford,besides introduce the attraction and storage function of city as a container also a magnet.This chapter also analyses the central idea of Mumford's city planning thought.Taking city communication theory,city media and humanistic communication theory as the starting point the forth chapter has a systematic exposition of Mumford's city spiritual culture thought.This essay from the perspective of diachronic and synchronic analyses Lewis Mumford's perspective of city culture.Though analyses Mumford's view and concept of city culture's current research and relevant area's research achievements,this dissertation comprehensively and systematically point out that Mumford's perspective of city culture still has academic value and practical significance even to this day.