The mistake made by all urbanists is to consider the private automobile (and its by-products like the motorcycle) essentially as a means of transportation. Such a misconception is a major expression of a notion of happiness that developed capitalism tends to spread throughout the society. The automobile is at the center of this general propaganda, both as sovereign good of an alienated life and as essential product of the capitalist market: It is being generally said this year that American economic prosperity is soon going to depend on the success of the slogan "Two cars per family."
2
Commuting time, as Le Corbusier rightly pointed out, is a surplus labor which correspondingly reduces the amount of "free" time.
3
We must replace travel as an adjunct to work with travel as a pleasure.
4
To want to redesign architecture to accord with the needs of the present massive, parasitical existence of private automobiles reflects the most unrealistic apprehension of where the real problems lie. It is necessary to transform architecture to accord with the whole development of society, criticizing all the transitory values linked to condemned forms of social relationships (in the first rank of which is the family).
5
Even if during a transitional period we temporarily accept a rigid division between work zones and residence zones, we must at least envisage a third sphere: that of life itself (the sphere of freedom, of leisure--the truth of life). Unitary urbanism acknowledges no boundaries; it aims to form a unitary human milieu in which separations such as work/leisure or public/private will finally be dissolved. But before this, the minimum action of unitary urbanism is to extend the terrain of play to all desirable constructions. This terrain will be at the level of complexity of an old city.
6
It is not a question of combating the automobile as an evil in itself. It is its extreme concentration in the cities that has led to the negation of its role. Urbanism should certainly not ignore the automobile, but even less should it accept it as its central theme. It should reckon on its gradual phasing out. In any case, we can foresee that the central areas of certain new complexes, as well as of a few old cities, will become closed to automobile traffic.
7
Those who believe that the automobile is eternal are not thinking, even from a strictly technological standpoint, of other future forms of transportation.
8
The breaking up the dialectic of the human milieu in favor of automobiles (the projected freeways in Paris will entail the demolition of thousands of houses and apartments although the housing crisis is continually growing worse) masks its irrationality under pseudopractical justifications. But it is practically necessary only in terms of a specific social set-up. Those who believe that the particulars of the problem are permanent want in fact to believe in the permanence of the present society.
9
Revolutionary urbanists will not limit their concern to the circulation of things and of human beings trapped in a world of things. They will try to break these topological chains, paving the way with their experiments for a human journey through authentic life.
Recommended Reading
Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream. Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.
Automobile Dependence & Denial: The Elephant in the Bedroom: Impacts on the Economy and Environment. Stanley I. Hart & Alvin L. Spivak. Published by New Paradigm Books, 1993.
-- G.K. Chesterton, from Orthodoxy