The 4Th Migration

5 4 The Regional Community

2 The Fourth Migration
Lewis Mumford

they show it as an end toward which New York with its Regional Plan
Commission and Pennsylvania with its Giant Power Survey Board are already moving; they portray it as a place of more satisfying homes, as a
place where children today and their children tomorrow may find a
fuller life.
This then is the first roundedstatement in magazine form of a new
plan of relating masses of population to the land. This plan harks back
to the robust "geotechnics" of Patrick Geddes-and through the summer
we shall publish a series of brilliant articles from the pen of this seer of
cities. The plan is closely linked in spirit and practice with the garden
cities of England, whose founder, Ebenezer Howard, is a delegate to theNew York Conference on Town, City and Regional Planning; it has frequently been dealt with, since the war, in the Journal of the American
Institute of Architects: it binds up the common hopes of scattered
planners in many cities. Here it is newly set down in broad outline for
what it is worth-tentative as it must be, prophetic rather than descriptive, yet full of exhilarating promise.

In aperiod of flow, men have the opportunity to remold themselves
and their institutions. The great migrations that swept over Europe in
the past; the migrations that surged past the water-boundaries of Europe
and crawled through the formidable American wilderness-these great
tides of population, which unloosed all the old bonds, have presented
such an opportunity. To some of us it seems that inAmerica we are in
the midst of another such tidal movement of population-and for convenience, we have called it the fourth migration.
Historically, there are two Americas: the America of the settlement
and the America of the migrations. The first America consists of the
communities that were planted on the seaboard and up the river valleys
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By1850 these communities had achieved their maximum development; they had worked
out a well-rounded industrial and agricultural life, based upon the fullest
use of their regional resources through the water-wheel, mill and farm
and they had created that fine provincial culture, humbly represented
in the schools, universities, lyceums and churches, which came to a full
efflorescence in thescholarship of Motley, Prescott, Parkman and Marsh,
Reprinted from Survey Graphic 7 (May 1925): 130-133.

5 6 The Fourth Migration

and in the literature of Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Whitman and Poe.
, The second America is the America of the migrations; the first migrat~on that cleared the land west of the Alleghenies and opened the contInent, the work of the land pioneer; the second migration,that worked
over this fabric a new pattern of factories, railroads, and dingy industrial
towns, the bequest of the industrial pioneer; and finally-and this brings
u,s down to the present period-there is the America of the third migration, the flow of men and materials into our financial centers, the cities
where buildings and profits leap upward in riotous pyramids. These
three migrationshave covered the continent and knitted together its
present framework; and our efforts to promote social welfare to "make
crooked cities straight," and to conduct industries efficiently 'are based
for. the most part on the notion that this framework is complete and
satIsfactory-and final.
B~t the mold of America has not been set: we are again in another
perIOd of flow, caused like the flows ofthe past by new industrial methods, new wants and necessities, and new ideals of life, and we have before us the great adventure of working out a new pattern so that the
fourth migration will give to the whole continent that stable, well-balanced, settled, cultivated life which grew out of its provincial settlement. We can hinder this tidal change and rob ourselves of its potential
benefits...