The City After The Automobile: Past, Present, And Future [Hardcover]

Moshe Safdie (Author), Wendy Kohn (Author), Gerald D Mcknight (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0773729836 | ISBN-13: 978-0773729834 | Publication Date: May 29, 1997 | Edition: 1st

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Reading Moshe Safdie's book The City After the Automobile feels at times like dipping into science fiction, particularly when considering his call for publicly owned electric cars kept in storage depots and rented to the masses. Most of the book, however, is a discussion of how to revolutionize city planning in order to reduce the necessity for cars. Safdie, an architect, uses his own plans for rebuilding portions of cities around the world as the basis for his argument supporting strong land-control laws and restriction of urban sprawl. Instead of suburban shopping malls, Safdie proposes a "linear center," a central area of concentrated development that would serve as a public arena.

By restricting land use and concentrating development in city centers instead of on the fringes, Safdie argues that reliance on gas-guzzling automobiles would become a nonissue. His truly is a revolutionary idea, especially for a culture that idealizes suburbia. Although some of the suggestions in The City After the Automobile might seem fanciful, any argument in favor of better planning, less pollution, and less waste of time, money, and resources makes a lot of sense.

From Booklist

Architect Safdie examines the car's tremendous impact upon our urban centers while arguing for the formation of new cities that incorporate the best of the old model with the open feel of the suburbs. The car's impact on the urban landscape became most pronounced after World War II, with a boom in both auto and highway production. City planning was then formulated around traffic flow and the need for parking. But with mobility, people headed out and away from the urban core, forming a new American city. We see it today in the housing enclaves, office buildings, and strip malls lining our highways. Safdie calls for a revolutionary change in city and regional planning to revitalize cities and give people the connection to nature they currently find in the suburbs. Insightful and thought provoking, the book is required reading for anyone concerned about the decline of the American city. Brian McCombie

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; 1st edition (May 29, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0773729836
• ISBN-13: 978-0773729834
• ASIN: 0465098363
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,853,708 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It might be flawed, but it doesn't shy away from the ideal., March 17, 2000

By 

Nassir Isaf - See all my reviews

This review is from: The City After The Automobile: An Architect's Vision (Paperback)

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.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Life after cars?, November 19, 2007

By 

Cecil Bothwell "Author of "Whale Falls: A... (Asheville, NC USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The City After The Automobile: An Architect's Vision (Paperback)

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 avenues and alleys of the past. Altogether, a very hopeful and practical view of how we might build toward a workable future for our increasingly urban and crowded planet.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting but nothing new in this book, July 18, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: The City After The Automobile: Past, Present, And Future (Hardcover)

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