City Destruction & Automobiles
Traffic arteries, parking lots, and gas stations are called "powerful and insistent instruments" of this.
What are traffic arteries?
This London street in 1890 was described as "the throbbing heart of the people's essential London."
What is The Strand?
The point of cities is the ability to take advantage of this, which is impossible without being able to get around easily.
What is multiplicity of choice?
Widening a street, converting to one-way flow, or cutting an expressway through are examples of this process.
What is erosion of cities by automobiles?
This is the result when city character is "blurred until every place becomes more like every other place."
What is Noplace?
The three blemishes that H. B. Creswell wrote were the "mark of the horse" on London streets in 1890.
What are the mud, the noise, and the smell?
This system of central sorting for all freight deliveries within a zone was proposed by Simon Breines to reduce the number of truck deliveries.
What is "post officing?"
This is the term for a system where an action produces a reaction that intensifies the original condition, like the erosion of cities.
What is "positive feedback"?
The text suggests rebuilding cities according to this image, even without cars, would still lead to their destruction.
What is the project image?
The noise in central London was described as surging like a "mighty heart-beat" due to this type of paving.
What are "granite" sets?
The city for which Victor Gruen devised a plan for an automobile-free downtown in 1955.
What is Fort Worth?
This opposite process of city change is seldom deliberate, but New York's Washington Square Park closure in 1958 is an instance of it.
What is attrition of automobiles by cities?
A downtown neighborhood that is a "marvel of close-grained intricacy" is casually subjected to this action.
What is being disemboweled?
The smell of London was characterized by this aroma, often linked to the multi-storey stables in the city.
What is the aroma of stables?
Gruen's plan included a ring road feeding into six huge oblong structures, each holding 10,000 cars.
What are garages?
Victor Gruen's 1955 calculation for Fort Worth's required roadbed space by 1970, in millions of square feet.
What is sixteen million square feet?