I'm reading Janette Sadik-Khan's "Street Fight" -- her book about her time as transportation head of NYC, building bike lanes, bikeshare, and pedestrian avenues
She prints this "city of the future" model from the 1939 World's Fair
Massive highways circling mammoth buildings; virtually no non-car routes; hilariously few trees
I'd love to read about: How did this become the vision of "the future" back in 1939?
What are some good books on that? Any recommendations, I'm all ears!
@clive@mousebot@LaChasseuse For an influential interpretation of what people like Le Corbusier were doing with public space and why, I recommend Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott.
@clive@ktoddbrown@benjamingeer@LaChasseuse lol I've also read and enjoyed it, but I feel like I learned more from against the grain. I must got my corbusier from elsewhere. maybe all that is solid melts into air.
@clive there have been a lot of references to Le Corbusier and Robert Moses in the replies. This article in a book I edited does a good job of making sense of the cultural moment: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2811094.2811124
Yeah — all you want to do is leave one air-conditioned building to get into an air-conditioned vehicle and exit immediately at another air-conditioned building
Watching the promotional film will give you a good sense of the rhetoric and ostensible values informing Futurama.
I can see that other people have suggested readings about urban planning. You might also like to consider Futurama and its vision of the future USA in the context of industrial design - Futurama 'was dreamed up by industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes.
@clive this doesn’t answer your question (looks well covered already), but if you’re not already listening to the 99% invisible podcast series on Power Broker, I highly recommend it. I assume you know the book (about the guy who built nearly all the highways in NYC, among lots of other stuff).
It’s not the answer to your question, but boy howdy is it on topic.
@cliveThe_Power_Broker by Robert Caro explains exactly how - in actuality - it started, was executed, and continued (through ~1975). I don't remember if there was mention in there specifically of the Worlds Fair.
I recall a short-story by Gibson, "The Gernsback Continuum", where the future imagined by SF pioneer Hugo Gernback kept appearing, nothing but those towers and people in white robes.
Check out the movie of Wells' "Things to Come" for an early view of the towers-and-white-cities future.
@clive@LaChasseuse Another thing it's great for is as a jumping off point to primary source material.
The best two things I learned about from it were Toll Roads and Free Roads (1939 Bureau of Public Roads feasibility study on interstates PDF here: https://enotrans.org/eno-resources/1939-toll-roads-and-free-roads-report/ ) and Building the American Highway System: Engineers As Policy Makers (hard to find but you can get it from big university libraries)
@clive I can imagine that someone that close to the invention and sudden industrialization of cars would've thought that we're moving into a glamorous future on four wheels, becoming trans-human
instead of, you know, leaving behind our health, safety, and the democratizationing force of walking and talking and playing in the streets.
"In article 9, war is defined as a necessity for the health of human spirit, a purification that allows and benefits idealism. Their explicit glorification of war and its "hygienic" properties influenced the ideology of fascism. Marinetti was very active in fascist politics until he withdrew in protest of the "Roman Grandeur" which had come to dominate fascist aesthetics."
@clive No book rec, but here's the Anaconda Standard, 1924, via Paul Faerie:
In the city of 2024...there will be three-deck roads; speedways through the heart of town; skyscrapers with entrances for automobiles as high as 15 stories; monorail expresses to the suburbs replacing street cars and motor-omnibuses; ever-moving sidewalks and underground freight carriers which will go in all directions, serving all railroad stations and business districts...
@clive The city of 100 years from now, in fact, will have a good many big and little movements with meanings of their own only dimly intelligible. The Swedish architect is proceeding on the theory that motorcars are going to increase and multiply indefinitely. How can he be sure but that by 2024 aircraft will have relegated the automobile to the limbo where old-fashioned horse and buggy now repose.
@clive It would be fascinating to see a compendium of these for various cities. The Halifax equivalent was essentially still around in the 1960s, and we are in the middle of redeveloping a key component of the downtown expressway that never got built other than one pointless interchange.
@clive strongly recommend the book Roads Were Not Built For Cars for a history of this time period: great coverage of the political and technological forces that took popular support for cycling and later transmuted it to car infrastructure
Aha, yes -- I read that years ago, when I was writing a column for Smithsonian about reactions to the advent of the safety bicycle, and interviewed the author
I'll pull it off the shelf and re-read -- good call!
@clive The book doesn’t say this but my take-away was that we’ll all be subject to the whims of the rich. When they like bikes, we get bikes. When they like cars, we’ll get those instead.
When I spoke to him -- this was back around 2018 I think -- Reid made an interesting prediction, which was that e-scooters and e-bikes would soon bulk up and become more rugged ...
They were jusssst easing into the mainstream back then, and were a bit flimsy
He predicted they'd go the way the bicycle itself went: From a more-slender and janky design to something more rugged
He kind of nailed it -- both categories have produced burly, hefty entrants
@clive also I think this 1893 prediction is interesting: a lot of it comes true though not quite in the way the pre-ICE author believes. It at least gives a hint for why people might have been motivated to try new urban forms
@clive he thinks we’re all going to be pedaling in this future, instead of seated in enormous heated moving chairs surrounded by cup holders and honking angrily at one another. Otherwise it’s pretty dead-on? 🤔🤪
Just a reminder that horses had no trouble with unpaved roads, but bicycles did.
When bicycle riding was a posh thing, the posh people riding bicycles were the ones who pushed for paving the streets. And they got their hard, smooth surfaces.
Add comment