The City After The Automobile: Past, Present, And Future

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.