The City After The Automobile: An Architect's Vision

Safdie is most famously known for his revolutionary high rise design for the 1967 Montreal World's Fair, "Habitat." An entirely new way to create urban housing, Habitat consists of private garden apartments, each enjoying three or four directional views, pedestrian access to shopping, dining and other amenities, and yet still providing the high density necessary to modern city population dynamics. In the years since, he has turned to larger projects -- even whole cities -- attempting to address the failures of our automobile age and design a post- auto future. This book is a brief summary of his thinking. Though his title includes "after the automobile" his answer is more accurately, "after our relationship to the automobile has changed." He sees no possibility that we will let go of the freedom of movement permitted by passenger cars, particularly since we have built cities around the world which preclude function without that mobility. His means to a cure for the pollution, sprawl, anti-pedestrian downtowns, and ugliness we have created since WWII, lies in re-thinking what we need and what we think we need. For example: do we need to own cars? He envisions a utility car, a U-car, part of a system like a rental fleet. Your key will be a credit card, which lets you use the vehicle and charge it to your account. When you get to a mall, an airport, a train station, or an office complex, you will turn it in. No parking problem, short or long term, no tickets, no maintenance, no worries. Later, you check out another vehicle when you need it. Parking U-cars in rows (since the next user takes the next car instead of recovering a specific one) will permit three or more times as many cars in a given parking area. The lots full of parked cars at businesses and mass transit centers will largely disappear. Such autos will be the perfect units for new smart highways (almost operational in California right now), which automatically guide cars while occupants read or work en route to their exits. Electric cars now on the market can fill the need. How about pedestrian access? Safdie observes that elevators enabled building heights to exceed four or five stories, and sees the future city with similar horizontal transport systems. Just as moving sidewalks and trolleys make vast modern airports more pedestrian friendly, his conveyors would allow foot traffic throughout a city center. With parking garages largely eliminated from downtown areas, more green space can be included. He envisions roofed shopping districts, with hinged domes that permit fresh air and sunlight in fair weather, and office buildings without interior offices (lacking contact with the real world outside). Safdie has designed cities of 200,000 (for Singapore) which feel open and friendly instead of boxed and boring, and has demonstrated that new construction in an old place (Jerusalem) can be marvelously modern and yet merge seamlessly into the a

Flaws there might be. Logistical errors there might be. Totally impractical aspects there might be. But none of it detracts from what this book is. Some architects build to the practical present, and some build to the ideal future. Safdie does the latter. Genius does not require anything more than vision, and this book glows with that. A new way to live; a better way to exist. Humankind has never, in all the spans of history, moved forward. It has always been dragged by a few farsighted and great individuals. Buy this book. Read this book. And see an apsect of our future that will one day be a reality. It won't be Safdie's vision through and through. But it will be Safdie's vision. Leap in on the ground floor now, as humanity prepares to embark on its next stage of growth - without even realizing it.

Persons interested in finding ways to get cities out of the auto and rail transit mess will be disappointed - because Safdie doesn't know anything about urban transportation. He does know about humane architecture and his thoughts on this subject are very good. He suggests two new urban transportation modes. One is the Utility-car, a small rentable probably electric car that is sitting around everywhere ready for you to use - if you have the right smart card to make it go. This is not a new idea as it is already being done widely in Europe and even in the U.S. The other is the Conveyor which is highly similar to Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) which has been worked on by many people around the world since the early 1970's. The Raytheon Company is building a U.S. version right now called PRT 2000. Beyond transportation, Safdie suggests we need the New Cardo, a linear downtown that has lots of street life. This idea appears in a plan for the Urban Detroit Area prepared in the 1960's by Doxiadis and Associates for the Detroit Edison Company. The book highlights the fact that architects and urban transportation planners never talk to each other. Apparently, architect's don't read the literature either. Persons interested in a advanced transportation technologies can see what is available and learn the history of this field at a website called Innovative Transportation Technologies: http://weber.u.washington.edu/~jbs/itran