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The books I am proposing to read for you may have a few extraneous sounds and will be imperfectly read and produced. Hopefully, you will excuse any defects, as these old books are quite unlikely to become audiobooks otherwise and still have great value.

Lewis Mumford (1895 - 1990) is 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.

Utopia has long been another name for the unreal and the impossible. We have set utopia over against the world. As a matter of fact, it is our utopias that make the world tolerable to us: the cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live. The more that men react upon their environment and make it over after a human pattern, the more continuously do they live in utopia; but when there is a breach between the world of affairs and the overworld of utopia, we become conscious of the part that the will-to-utopia has played in our lives.

Lewis Mumford var medlem af redaktionen på en raekke tidsskrifter og magasiner, bl.a. The Dial og The New Republic. Han fik en betydelig rolle i Regional Planning Association of America og begyndte fra de tidlige 1930'ere at skrive fast i The New Yorker, bl.a. den velkendte Sky Line-klumme om arkitektur. Efter udgivelsen af The Culture of Cities (1938) blev Mumford portraetteret på forsiden af Time Magazine. Mumford er primaert anerkendt for sin arkitektur- og litteraturkritik og sine historiske analyser af teknologi, sprog og bykultur.