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are vital to understanding Maslow's outlook: his lofty regard for the work of writer Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) and an unpublished letter to........

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