At the beginning of the new millennium, what in the lesson of Lewis Mumford can still appear teeming with ideas for the reflection upon contemporary society and city? The instrumental recourse to historical narrative in order to reconstruct a cultural setting of belonging as reference to the formulation of a future utopia; the assumption of neighbourhood, a place of local community relations between physical and social space, as a starting point for the definition of a new urban order; the importance assigned to description as practice of self-education to watch and comprehend complex physical and social changes, are still themes at the centre of debate, even if with interpretations sometimes far from those originally expressed by a man who can now be defined an anthropologist at the edge of modernity.
