Automatic for the City

Preface

The analogy of the city as human body has endured since the Renaissance, sustained by designers and theorists like Leon Battista Alberti or Francesco di Giorgio Martini to give sense and structure to the city’s different parts, functions and interrelations.

Using this analogy we imagine the city’s mobility system as a human skeleton, providing support, movement, and regulation to the other parts of the body such as muscles and organs. As technologies for urban mobility evolve, so too does the body. With the revolution of the private automobile after World War I, for example, the world witnessed a rapid and unprecedented transformation of cities – the body mutated beyond recognition. Today, we are on the verge of a similar revolution. ...