Lews Mumford

[stormdog]

Ok urban studies, history, or general academic and research folks. Just who is Lewis Mumford and what made him an expert on cities? I've read his Wikipedia page and it feels like he was a kind of amateur architectural historian who made good and wrote a door-stop of a tome about the history of cities (which many academics and other folks now cite), starting with pre-historic cultures that I suspect he didn't actually know a whole lot about.

I'm willing to be disabused of my potentially unfair and ill-informed conception of Lewis Mumford. Can anybody do the disabusing?

In the meantime, I'm getting a little guilty pleasure out of choosing a passage from his "The City in History" as a problematic piece of writing to offer a revision of for a weekly writing assignment.