Mayer was born in New York City and attended Columbia University and then Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received a degree in engineering in 1919.

[3] Mayer was said to be "one of a group of socially oriented architects, planners and urban theorists, including Lewis Mumford, Clarence Stein and Henry Wright.

"[2] With Mumford and Wright, Mayer co-founded the Housing Study Guild, a group of design professionals that explored rapid urbanization at the turn of the 20th century.

Like many of his contemporaries, including Lewis Mumford and Clarence Stein, Mayer saw a solution in planning that prevented rapid growth and industrialization.

During World War II, Mayer was abroad in India (after he served in the United States and North Africa) where he worked as an engineer for the U.S.

In 1945 Mayer met Jawaharlal Nehru in India and discussed a plan for "model villages" that would establish "good housing, sanitation, and community structure.

[3] Mayer was brought on to the Chandigarh project in 1949 because of his personal relationship with Nehru, who believed Indian engineers and architects would be unsuited to the task of town planning.

Mayer discontinued his work on Chandigarh after developing a master plan from the city when his architect-partner Matthew Nowicki died in a plane crash in 1950.

Mayer's hypothesis was tested and by 1930 his belief that unregulated suburban sprawl would ultimately put too much pressure on transportation and degrade the rural countryside.

In The Urgent Future, Mayer noted, "Trend is not destiny" while defining a "megalopolis" as "the oozing together of already amorphous cities into a sort of lava flow hundreds of miles in dimensions.