Maslow Saw Vibrant City Life as an Unrealized Goal

As America's most populous city ushers in the new mayorship of African-born Zohran Mamdani, the time seems opportune to highlight Abraham Maslow's own viewpoint on optimal urban life. He warmly recalled to a California business group, "My father was an immigrant. I was brought up in the slums of New York City. I am a sidewalk boy who has gone on to a marvelous location. I got to exactly the spot for which I was born."

Though Maslow never wrote specifically on urban design, his reminiscences are filled with allusions to the bustling neighborhoods he frequented in Brooklyn and Manhattan. As his biographer and a native New Yorker like Maslow, I could well identify with his evocative memories of such iconic settings as the majestic 42nd Street Library on Fifth Avenue, the New School for Social Research in Greenwich Village (where he studied with Max Wertheimer), Columbia University far uptown (where Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead introduced him to cultural anthropology), and the vanished Gramercy Park Hotel—where Alfred Adler's informal seminars awakened Maslow's enduring interest in humanity's latent potentials.

But New York City not only evoked nostalgia for Maslow late in life, but also spurred his thoughts on what urban life should ideally be like. In this regard, two important aspects are vital to understanding Maslow's outlook: his lofty regard for the work of writer Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) and an unpublished letter to philanthropist John D. Rockefeller III, which Maslow wrote a month before his sudden death.

Since Mumford's death several decades ago, his name recognition has diminished. But during the mid-to-late 20th century, he was renowned as an impassioned historian and critic of modern city life, in its best and worst qualities. Born in Flushing, Queens, he dropped out of New York City College, like Maslow, due to boredom. But unlike Maslow, Mumford never found another academic setting in which to acquire academic credentials. Nevertheless, beginning with Mumford's lucid first book, The Story of Utopias (1922), he helped bring architecture, aesthetics, and visionary urban planning into broad psychological and public awareness. His most acclaimed, later works included The City in History (1961) and The Myth of the Machine (1967-1970).

An admiring Maslow cited Mumford's books, but more significantly, he appointed Mumford as a founding member of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology editorial board. This was alongside such seminal psychologists as Charlotte Buhler, Viktor Frankl, Rollo May, and Carl Rogers. In an unpublished essay on "Science, Psychology, and the Existential Outlook," Mumford's name was the only thinker that Maslow specified in describing what he called the rapidly growing, "humanistic worldview of life, particularly regarding human nature."

For example, in The Pentagon of Power (1970), Mumford wrote that modern city life was marked by a "lack of close personal involvement in (one's) daily routine (bringing) a general loss of contact with reality, (a lack of) continuous interplay between the inner and the outer world (that provides) stimulus to fresh creativity." External aspects like urban sprawl, dehumanizing commercial architecture, vapid industrial "parks," and monotonous commuting, have real, damaging effects on our individual and societal well-being. In precisely this light, Maslow led a little-known experimental study exploring how our mood is affected by the aesthetics around us.

I have little doubt that Maslow would have ventured more forcefully into the domain of urban policy had he lived beyond his 62 years. Persuasive evidence can be found in a letter he wrote to John D. Rockefeller III, outlining the crucial dimensions of human potential. For Maslow emphasized that our everyday "quality of life (depends on fulfillment of) material needs, then come the safety-security needs; then comes belongingness; then comes loving and caring, friendship, and affection; then comes respect and self-respect and dignity; and then, finally, comes fulfilling one's own individual potentials." That's quite a relevant map to guide public policy.

As urban journalist Benjamin Schneider recently observed, "Certain needs in Maslow’s hierarchy are highly dependent on the design and governance of the physical world we all inhabit. We can envision myriad ways that the external environment contributes to mental and emotional health. For instance, having access to necessities within walking distance, and most importantly, a stable, comfortable home, are hugely important for our well-being. This is an insight that psychology should study further."

Especially encouraging is that Maslow's humanistic system is now attracting urban planners worldwide, including those in Australia, China, England, Japan, and Thailand. The title of a recent article led by Xuesen Zheng in the journal Buildings is illustrative: "From Maslow to Architectural Spaces: The Assessment of Reusing Old Industrial Buildings." Currently, such scholars are mainly drawn to Maslow's hierarchy of inborn needs. Perhaps even more powerful will be the application of his work on peak experiences and inner growth to optimize the vibrant city life that he long envisioned.