The Development Of Technology And City In Lewis Munford's View

Science and technology, especially after the Industrial Revolution, has improved the social productivity in an unprecedented way and made it possible build and expand our world. However, the development and application of science and technology generally produced "the Machine Myth" and brought the crisis to make the people become the slaves of machine. City, as the people's spiritual and practical home, has been changed in nature. As an important representative in the philosophy of humanism technology and theorist specialized in the theory of city, Lewis Munford penetrated such a change. He advocated a kind of "Polytechnics" in order to change the civilization of Monotechnics, recover the human's subjective position in technology and realize the harmonious development between human and technology. He thought the world that the people are living in should be a kind of unification of the knowledge world, the life world and the meaning world. This paper was going to regard Munford's city development, the technological evolution and the relationships between them as analysis objective and discussed deeply the philosophical nature of technology and city development of Munford's view.Except the part of introduction, this paper consisted of four parts.In the first part, the paper summarized variable city's definitions and the development history of city, explained Munford's city development thought in details and its enlightening to our city programming, and analyzed all kinds of factors in the city development.In the second part, the paper introduced Munford's thought about technology. He divided the technology history into three phrases: primitive technology, ancienttechnology and modern technology, and generalized all technologies into two types: Polytechnics and Monotechnics. He thought the democratic technology which advocated the people can coexist harmoniously with technology came to be replaced by the totalitarian technology represented by "Mega-Machine", which produced "the Machine Myth" and made the people become the slaves of machine. He advocated life-oriented technology. This recovered the people's subjective position in technology and realized the harmonious development between human and technology.In the following paper, the traditional technology was included in culture, and the traditional city was the container of culture. So the traditional technology can coexist harmoniously with the traditional city. But technology gradually separated from culture after the Industrial Revolution. Its nature has been changed completely and caused many urgent city problems. Technology has influenced greatly the city's space, programming and functions. However, it should not be blamed for all of these. Basically speaking, it's not because of the technological nature, but of the people's excessive needs.In the fourth part, the paper summarized the theoretical and practical meaning of Munford's thoughts about technology and city development, analyzed carefully the city's problems caused by technology. The writer thought the cultural unification and the return towards the life world are the promising way to solve the problems of modern technology and city development.Through the study on Munford's thoughts about technology and city development, the paper discovered two special characteristics: organic cultural unity and profound historical sense. With such kind of recognition, this paper tried to study the complicated relationships between technology and city development and the philosophical connotation of Munford's thoughts in order to provide a new angle of view for solving the problems in modern city development. And this is the right purpose of this paper.