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

in love with technology to produce a similarly separationist vision. But Futurama was distinguished by its reverence for speed. With its sleek highways propelling citizens from orderly cities to pristine open spaces, it seemed to confirm that the fast city really would set people free, as Frank Lloyd Wright had promised.
    More than twenty-four million people waited in line to see the future that year. The exhibit, which was featured in magazines and newspapers, drew an entire nation to the high-speed philosophy of its sponsors and helped cement a massive cultural shift toward the automobile lifestyle.
    Meanwhile, a company formed by GM, Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, Phillips Petroleum, and Standard Oil was busy buying up and dismantling hundreds of private streetcar lines in dozens of cities across the United States. Various conspiracy theories have argued that this was a plan to force people to buy cars by eliminating public transit. This may have been true, but it was hardly necessary. The streetcar had been fatally wounded when the definition of the street changed. It drowned in a sea of cars.

    Futurama
    LEFT : The future is revealed at the vast General Motors pavilion for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York: a city built for cars. RIGHT : The Futurama vision has now been built into cities around the world. The fourteen high-speed lanes of Dubai’s de facto main street, Sheikh Zayed Road, are impossible for pedestrians to cross for miles at a time. ( Left : GM Media Archive; right : Charles Montgomery)
    The final assault on the old city arrived via the interstate highway system. In 1956 the Federal-Aid Highway Act funneled billions of tax dollars into the construction of new freeways, including dozens of wide new roads that would push right into the heart of cities. This—along with federal home mortgage subsidies and zoning that effectively prohibited any other kind of development but sprawl—rewarded Americans who abandoned downtowns and punished those who stayed behind, with freeways cutting swaths through inner-city neighborhoods from Baltimore to San Francisco. Anyone who could afford to get out, did.
    The System That Reproduces Itself
    Cities, like many systems, are prone to a phenomenon known as autopoiesis, which can be compared to a viruslike process of entrenchment, replication, and expansion. The dispersed city lives not only in the durability of buildings, parking lots, and highways, but also in the habits of the professionals who make our cities. Once the system of dispersal was established in early suburbs, it began to repeat itself in plan after plan—not because it was the best response to any particular place, but because of the momentum of autopoiesis. It was simply easier for city builders in communities with modest budgets to repeat what worked before, and their habits gradually hardened into the building and zoning codes that dictated how new places would be built. Thus, a segregated land zoning system created to keep industry from creeping into an Ohio village back in 1926 evolved into a national tool and eventually was distilled into standard, downloadable codes sold by the private online purveyor Municode. Cash-strapped towns can now simply download their property-use laws. Meanwhile, road-design laws developed by Motordom-funded engineers were entrenched in the Federal Highway Administration’s Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices , or MUTCD , a traffic bible guiding most urban road projects in the country. Dispersal infected the operating system of city after city, and those cities in turn replicated dispersal’s DNA.
    The rapid, uniform, and seemingly endless replication of this dispersal system was, for many people and for many years, a marvelous thing. It helped fuel an age of unprecedented wealth. It created sustained demand for the cars, appliances, and furniture that fueled the North American manufacturing economy. It provided millions of jobs in construction and massive