Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery Page A

because freedom was Motordom’s rallying cry.
    “Americans are a race of independent people, even though they submit at times to a good deal of regulation and officialdom. Their ancestors came to this country for the sake of freedom and adventure,” declared Roy Chapin, president of the Hudson Motor Car Company. “The automobile supplies a feeling of escape from this suppression of the individual. That is why the American public has seized upon motor travel so rapidly and with such intensity.” *
    The industry and its auto club supporters pressed their agenda in newspapers and city halls. They hired their own engineers to propose designs for city streets that served the needs of motorists first. They stacked the national transportation-safety conferences staged by U.S. commerce secretary Herbert Hoover in the 1920s, creating model traffic regulations that forced pedestrians and transit users into regimented corners of the street such as crosswalks and streetcar boarding areas. When the regulations were published in 1928, they were adopted by hundreds of cities eager to embrace what seemed like a forward-thinking approach to mobility. They set a cultural standard that has influenced local lawmakers for decades.
    Futurama
    The first American to earn a doctorate in traffic was a bookish young man named Miller McClintock. After his graduation from Harvard in 1924, McClintock called for strict rules that would restrict cars and cities. Efficiency, fairness, and speed limits were the name of the game. But then the Studebaker car company put him at the helm of a new traffic foundation it funded, and McClintock, who had a new wife and child to take care of, had a philosophical change of heart. With Studebaker’s quiet backing, he became the national authority on streets and traffic while training America’s first generation of traffic experts. His diagnosis for cities came to resemble the aspirations of the auto interests who funded him, and by the time he addressed the Society of Automotive Engineers in 1928, he was sounding a lot like Roy Chapin.
    “This country was founded on the principle of freedom,” he announced. “Now the automobile has brought something which is an integral part of the American spirit—freedom of movement.”
    In this new age, freedom had a very particular character. It was not the freedom to move as one pleased. It was the freedom for cars, and cars alone, to move very quickly, unhindered by all the other things that used to happen on streets. The enemy of freedom , McClintock declared, was friction ! The nation needed roads unhindered by the friction of intersections, parked cars, and even roadside trees.
    At the 1937 National Planning Conference in Detroit, McClintock unveiled spectacular images of that vision: a futuristic city where pearl-hued skyscrapers poked through a latticework of elevated freeways and cloverleafs unsullied by crosswalks or corner shops or streetcars. The pictures, a collaboration between McClintock and stage designer Norman Bel Geddes, had been paid for by Shell Oil. They would grow into the most persuasive piece of propaganda in the history of city planning, when Bel Geddes expanded the model into Futurama, a vast pavilion for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. Futurama showed people the wondrous world they would inhabit in 1960 if cities embraced the Motordom vision. Visitors were transported in moving chairs over a football field–size diorama where automated superhighways shuttled toy cars between city and country. At the end of the ride, visitors strolled out onto an elevated pedestrian walkway above a perfect street packed with new automobiles. It was a life-size version of the motor age city: the future made real, thanks to the exhibit’s sponsor, General Motors.
    Although the model was presented as a free-market dreamworld, it bore a striking resemblance to drawings of Le Corbusier’s egalitarian Radiant City. Two radically different philosophies had fallen