Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design Since 1880, 4th Edition

The City on the Highway

This segregation of motor traffic is probably a matter that may begin even in the present decade … And the quiet English citizen will, no doubt, while these things are still quite exceptional and experimental in his own land, read one day in the violently illustrated popular magazines of 1910, that there are now so many thousand miles of these roads already established in America and Germany and elsewhere. And thereupon, after some patriotic meditations, he may pull himself together.

H. G. Wells, Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (1901)

Las Vegas takes what in other American towns is but a quixotic inflammation of the senses for some poor salary mule in the brief interval between the flagstone rambler and the automatic elevator downtown and magnifies it, foliates it, embellishes it into an institution. For example, 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. One can look at Las Vegas from a mile away on Route 91 and see no buildings, no trees, only signs. But such signs! They tower, they revolve, they oscillate, they soar in shapes before which the existing vocabulary of art is helpless.

Tom Wolfe, The Kandy Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby (1966)

9The City on the Highway: The Automobile Suburb: Long Island, Wisconsin, Los Angeles, Paris, 1930–1987

“Suburbia,” ...