“Technology and the City”-- Josef W. Konvitz, Mark H. Rose, Joel A. Tarr. 1990

The authors claim that a century of politic, business and social discourse of urban Americans have depended on those technological systems that are labeled as infrastructure: water works, sewers, transit, port improvements, communications networks and energy systems. But there is very little work that explains the city- building process in relation to technology and social organization.

The initial approach in urban sociology was to study the city from an evolutionary perspective. The historical study of technology and urban history have focused on technologies that enabled cities to function more efficiently that led to the improvement in the quality of urban life. The idea was one of city’s plasticity and inevitable progress. But not everybody believed that and Lewis Mumford certainly did not. Beginning in 1934 in his book Technology and Civilization Mumford formulated detailed analysis of the influence of medieval and early modern technology on subsequent development of urban epoch. But he also studied the role of cities in shaping technology – as centers of education, as showcases for new processes, as sources of capital. In short, he emphasized the consequences for cities of technological change. He argued that technology strengthened the role of the city as an agent of domination and concentration. Later, he took a negative view of the restructuring that technology was bringing about in urban spatial patterns and social development. In a similar vein Oswald Spengler had said, “Technology enabled cities to grow at a point where life was no longer sustainable.”