CITIES OF
ground” for attempts by planners and architects to
TOMORROW
9. The City on the Highway
By: PETER HALL
Published: April 17, 2014
ACCORDING TO H.G WELLS:
This segregation of motor traffic is probably a matter that
may begin even in the present decade. Not a great
homogeneous mass with a pyramiding of population and
squalor in a single center, but a federation of
communities coordinated into a metropolis of sunlight
and air.
A WELLSIAN PROPHECY:
According to Wells:
the world would be laced with a network of rapid transit
railways, with trains traveling at speeds of 200 or 300
miles per hour, as well equipped and comfortable “as a
good club.” Wells had speculated on the possibility that
“the motor omnibus companies competing against the
suburban railways will find themselves hampered in the
speed of their longer runs by the slower horse traffic on
their routes,” and that they therefore would “secure the
power to form private roads of a new sort, upon which
their vehicles will be free to travel up to the very limit of
their possible speed.” Though Wells was wrong in many
predictions. this was one he got uncannily right. He said
that “Almost insensibly, certainly highly profitable longer
routes will be joined up. they will be used only by soft-
tired conveyances; the battering horseshoes, the
perpetual filth of horse traffic, and the clumsy wheels of
laden carts will never wear them”; that “They will have to
be very wide” and that “Their traffic in opposite directions
will probably be strictly segregated”; that “where their
ways branch the streams of traffic will cross not at a level
but by bridges,” and that “once they exist it will be
possible to experiment with vehicles of a size and power
quit beyond the dimensions prescribed by our ordinary
roads – roads whose width has been entirely determined
by the size of a cart a horse can pull.”
THE AUTOMOBILE SUBURB
Automobile suburbs are neighborhoods designed
for residents to commute into the city via
automobile. As can be seen from the photograph,
these neighborhoods are sparser than
neighborhoods designed for walking or for streetcar
transit.
Los Angeles was a rehearsal, a laboratory, for the
late twentieth-century urban future: what architectural
historian Richard Longstreth calls “a seminal proving
accommodate the car.
1915, Los Angeles already had one car for every eight
residents, compared with a national average of one per
43 people;
1920, one to 3.6 against one to 13.1;
1930, one to 1.5 against one to 5.3.
So from 1920 Los Angeles began to experience the
impact of mass car ownership, in a way that would
remain unknown in other American cities until the 1950s,
and in European cities until the 1980s.
with the rise of car ownership, the pattern of
development changed. Before 1914, developers would
rarely dare to build houses more than four blocks away
from a streetcar line; but by the 1920s, new housing was
being built in the interstitial areas, inaccessible by rail.
They now spread more than 30 miles from the center of
the city: outside the range of Hollywood’s pistol shots.
This was decentralization on a scale quite inconceivable
before the age of mass car ownership – that is, only 15
or 20 years earlier.
By 1930, Los Angeles City had 93.9% single-family
homes, an extraordinarily higher proportion than older
eastern or midwestern cities.
The solution of the problem of providing adequate
facilities for through traffic will be found in providing a
network of traffic routes for the exclusive use of motor
vehicles over which there shall be no crossing at grade
and along which there shall be no interference from land
use activities. It is recommended that a network of
motorways be constructed to serve the entire
metropolitan area of Los Angeles as defined in this
report. These motorways should be developed upon a
right-of-way of not less than 360 feet in width through
residential territory and not less than 100 feet in width
through established business districts.
Frank Lloyd Wright and the Soviet Deurbanists
In America, long before that, automobile-oriented
suburbs were being consciously planned, even on a
large scale. I am flatly rejecting the contention that there
is an overriding universal spatial or physical aesthetic of
urban form. New communications technologies, he
argued, had broken down the age-old connection
between community and propinquity: the urban place
was being replaced by the nonplace urban realm. Later
in the decade, Reyner Banham wrote his appreciative
essay on Los Angeles; three years after that, Robert
Venturi and Denise Scott Brown published their
celebrated exercise in architectural iconoclasm, boldly
proclaiming across its dust jacket, “A Significance for
A&P Parking Lots, or Learning from Las Vegas. As the
commercial architects stood traditional urban forms and
designs on their heads, the great intellectual reversal
had begun with a whole series of studies from American
social scientists, fundamentally questioning many of the
basic assumptions that had underlain the previous
criticisms of the suburbs and the suburban way of life
Planning and related forms of public intervention, could
improve the process somewhat; but fundamentally, it
gave the mass of people what they wanted.
SUBURBS ARE COMING
There were four main foundations for the suburban:
1. They were new roads, to open up land outside
the reach of the old trolley and commuter rail
routes;
2. Zoning of land uses, to produce uniform
residential tracts with stable property values;
3. government-guaranteed mortgages, to make
possible long-repayment low-interest mortgages
that were affordable by families of modest
incomes;
4. and a baby boom, to produce a sudden surge in
demand for family homes where young children
could be raised.
The first three of these were already in place, though
sometimes only in embryonic form, a decade before the
boom began. The fourth triggered it.
CONTROLLING SUBURBAN GROWTH IN
EUROPE
That conclusion was of more than strictly American
interest. For, in varying degrees, European governments
after World War Two had succeeded in controlling and
regulating the suburban tide to a degree that would have
been unthinkable in the United States. It encapsulates
the change that came over Sweden during the 1980s, as
the long held Social Democratic consensus unraveled It
is repeated on a far larger scale north of Stockholm,
where the visitor passes from Kista – the last of the great
satellite developments, completed only at the end of the
1970s – into another world, the creation of the 1980s
and 1990s: a vast linear Edge City of business parks and
hotels and out-of-town shopping centers, stretching
along the highway, for 20 kilometers and more towards
the Arlanda airport.
All these were private speculative developments pure
and simple. They were designed to make money and
they did. They owed their outstanding success to the
quality of their design and to the use of private
covenants to guarantee that this quality would be
maintained. But there was also a highly idealized version
of the automobile city, and a rationale for it.
Appropriately enough, the most complete formulation of
it came from America’s outstanding native architect,
Frank Lloyd Wright. But another, uncannily similar
version came from a source as unlikely as could be
imagined: The Soviet Union.
THE GREAT FREEWAY REVOLT AND
AFTER
 The critical point remains: neither Stockholm in 1945,
nor Paris in 1965, succeeded in weaning Europeans
from their cars. After huge fights between the
construction lobby and the environmental lobby, the
California legislature, in 1972, passed a comprehensive
law that effectively stopped all development along the
coastline Such measures did affect the shape of the
suburban flood: effectively, the San Francisco Bay Area
is surrounded by a green belt almost as effectively
protected as London’s, and the result – according to
David Dowall – has been the same as that reported for
London: housing land scarcity and higher housing land
prices. But it has not affected the general fact: beyond
the green belt, in the corridor followed by Interstate
Highway 680 from Concord to Fremont, 20 and more
miles from downtown San Francisco, the suburbs
continue to sprawl and the jobs are moving out too.
COUNTERPOINT TO EARLIER CLAIMS:
Bad for industry, it is bad for utilities, it is bad for the
railroads, it is bad for the recreation groups, it is bad
even for the developers.
The question is, shall we have “slurbs,” or shall we plan
to have attractive communities which can grow in an
orderly way while showing the utmost respect for the
beauty and fertility of our landscape? If present trends
continue, we shall have slurbs.
KEYPOINTS:
1. “Suburbia,” a suburban child of the turn of the century
later recalled, “was a railway state of existence within a
few minutes’ walk of the railway station, a few minutes’
walk of the shops, and a few minutes’ walk of the fields.
 
2. Las Vegas is the only town in the world where the
landscape is made up neither of buildings, like New
York, nor of trees, like Wilbraham, Massachusetts, but
signs
 
3. In Anticipations, first published in 1901, Wells had
speculated on the possibility that “the motor omnibus
companies competing against the suburban railways will
find themselves hampered in the speed of their longer
runs by the slower horse traffic on their routes,” and that
they would “secure the power to form private roads of a
new sort, upon which their vehicles will be free to travel
up to the very limit of their possible speed.”
 
4. Though Wells was wrong in many predictions in this
book, this was one he got uncannily right. He said that
“Almost insensibly, certainly highly profitable longer
routes will be joined up,” though the Americans and
Germans would move much faster than the staid
English. He predicted that “they will be used only by soft- PREPARED BY: AURORA MAE DUMAS BS AR – 4A
tired conveyances; the battering horseshoes, the ARCH 423
perpetual filth of horse traffic, and the clumsy wheels of
laden carts will never wear them”; that “They will have to
be very wide” and that “Their traffic in opposite directions  
will probably be strictly segregated”; that “where their
ways branch the streams of traffic will cross not at a level
but by bridges,” and that “once they exist it will be
possible to experiment with vehicles of a size and power
quite beyond the dimensions prescribed by our ordinary
roads – roads whose width has been entirely determined
by the size of a cart a horse can pull.

5. Not the obvious way, which is to tear down Paris and

begin again, as Corbusier suggested in the 1920s, but
another, more tolerant way; that is, to question how we
look at things.” They studied Las Vegas “as a
phenomenon of architectural communication”; because
people moved in cars at high speeds and often in
complex patterns, a whole new architecture of signs had
arisen to guide and to persuade: “the graphic sign in
space has become the architecture of this landscape,”
while the building itself is set back, half hidden – like
most of the environment – by parked cars: The A&P
parking lot is a current phase in the evolution of vast
space since Versailles .

6. After huge fights between the construction lobby and

the environmental lobby, the California legislature, in
1972, passed a comprehensive law that effectively
stopped all development along the coastline. Such
measures did affect the shape of the suburban flood:
effectively, the San Francisco Bay Area is surrounded by
a green belt almost as effectively protected as London’s,
and the result – according to David Dowall – has been
the same as that reported for London: housing land
scarcity and higher housing land prices.