190 PracticeBut what started as shared enjoyment and conviviality in the era
of public transport rolling stock, changed with an individualized
discretionary use of the automobile into isolation, separation and
anomie. After World War II this situation worsened as suburbs
patterned into residential street layouts, often without sidewalks,
but with road pavements wide enough for a garbage truck
(Australasia), or a speeding fire appliance (North America). The
houses in these suburbs were often contrived also to ensure that
the in-front garage was positioned to avoid eye-contact between
neighbours.
Up to the end of the nineteenth century ‘the city’ almost every-
where was compact, of high density, and comprised mixed uses.
Urban life had been insanitary, but the technical solutions for
trash disposal and sewer reticulation were well in hand by the
beginning of the twentieth century. Then, at around the same time- the early 1900s – there occurred a surge in two mobility inven-
tions of profound significance. One of these, the elevator, enabled
the corporate fortresses and city-centre apartments to grow up;
the other, the mass-produced automobile, enabled the residential
fringe of these same cities to grow out. The major urban ‘fractal’
components (residential pods, schools, churches, civic realms,
offices, shopping areas, open spaces, factories, hospitals) led
the conditioned urban citizenry to behave in accordance with the
dictates of a divide-and-control authority pattern. Later conse-
quences of this authority were the large modern-era urban struc-
tures (malls, stadia, office towers) which have largely replaced the
church and school as the social foci of communities.^4
Tracked rolling stock and then the rubber-tyred automobile
provided the mobility-mode for subur-
banization. But that physical mobility fails to
plumb the social motivation to give up on a
compact Euro-urban tradition. One practical
explanation was that suburban railways
were available before sanitary sewers;
another that for average soil types it was
necessary to set free-standing houses on
quarter-acre plots (approximately a tenth of
a hectare) this being the area of land consid-
ered necessary to cope with a septic tank’s
through-flow.^5 A Fordist explanation would
have it that the commodification of plots
houses and automobiles was being simply
customized and ‘jobbed’ as packaged enti-
ties, exemplified by the post-World War II
Levitt housing projects in the United States,
built rapidly with no architectural overview.
A pattern of self-
organization for
expanding New World
cities goes some way to
clarifying the inexplicable- the emergence of Los
Angeles and Phoenix, as
examples, beyond the
bounds of climate
geography and resources.
Local government is
never in full control of
the situation or ‘calling
the shots’ as thematically
established in William
Fulton’s Reluctant
Metropolis(1997).
Researchers into city
growth, at a loss for an
explanation as to ‘why?’
can look to the self-
organization swarm
phenomenon ascribed
evenly to human-peopled
cities and to termite-
populated anthills in
Steven Johnson’s
Emergence: The Connected
Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities
and Software, 2001.
Refer also to Mike Davis,
City of Quartz (1990) and
Dead Cities (2003).
Although Levitt houses may not have been individ-
ually designed, the pattern was thoughtfully engi-
neered, for by 1950, according to Avi Friedman
(Planning the New Suburbia2002: 30): ‘traffic engi-
neering studies revealed that the accident rate was
substantially higher for grid-pattern subdivisions
than for limited access [collector roaded] subdivi-
sions...evidenced in the switch from grid to hier-
archical road networks for reasons of safety.’