The City in History (1961) by the American critic Lewis Mumford is a sweeping account of urban development from its origins to the modern metropolis, for which he won the U.S. National Book Award. Mumford treated the city as a vessel and intensifier of culture, tracing how successive forms expressed the values of their societies. He warned against what he called the megamachine and the gigantism of the over-grown, technocratic, militarised city, contrasting it with more balanced, human-scaled settlements. The book synthesised history, technology and social criticism on a grand scale.
It gave the planning field a long historical and ethical perspective, insisting that cities serve human and ecological ends rather than sheer growth. Mumford's critique reinforced regionalist, human-scale and environmentally cautious currents in twentieth-century urban thought.