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In the mass movement into the suburban areas a new kind of community was produced, which caricatured both the historic city and the archetypal suburb… - Lewis Mumford
" "In the mass movement into the suburban areas a new kind of community was produced, which caricatured both the historic city and the archetypal suburban refuge: a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold, manufactured in the central metropolis. Thus the ultimate effect of the suburban escape in our time is, ironically, a low-grade uniform environment from which escape is impossible.”
English
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About Lewis Mumford
Lewis Mumford (19 October 1895 – 26 January 1990) was an American historian of technology and science, also noted for his study of cities.
Biography information from Wikiquote
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Additional quotes by Lewis Mumford
The underlying assumption of this system is that wealth, leisure, comfort, health, and a long life belonged by right only to the dominant minority; while hard work and constant deprivation and denial, a 'slaves' diet and an early death, became the lot of the mass of men.
Once this division was established, is it any wonder that the dreams of the working classes throughout history, at least in those relatively happy periods when they dared to tell each other fairy stories, was a desire for idle days and for a surfeit of material goods? These desires were kept from an explosive eruption, perhaps, by the institution of occasional feasts and carnivals. But the dreams of an existence which counterfeited closely that of the ruling classes, as the brummagen jewelry worn by the poor in Victorian England imitated in brass the gold baubles of the upper classes, have remained alive from age to age: indeed they are still an active ingredient in the fantasy of effortless affluence that currently hovers like a pink smog over Megalopolis.
This New World utopia, this promised land, was soon buried under the ashes and cinders that erupted over the Western World in the nineteenth century, thanks tot he resurrection and intensification of all the forces that had originally brought 'civilization' itself into existence. The rise of the centralized state, teh expansion of the bureaucracy and the conscript army, the regimentation of the factory system, the depredations of speculative finance, the spread of imperialism, as in the Mexican War, and the continued encroachment of slavery-all these negative movements not only sullied the New World dream but brought back on a larger scale than ever the Old World nightmares that the immigrants to America had risked their lives and forfeited their cultural treasures to escape.
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