Broadacre City
1935 Le Ville Raiuse
Frank Lloyd Wright
Le Corbusier
1939 Futurama
1923 Limited Access Highways
Warren Manning, focused on industry, less on humans
“Power and Mobility”
in Technics and Civilization, by Lewis
Mumford.
Macro scale , long term historic continuum of Technology
“second to improvement and
discovery of electricity was improvement in the steam engine
and internal combustion engine”
1859 1st oil wells drilled in united states then rapidly exploited
1876, gas engine perfected by
Otto. Lightness and transportability of oil, liquidity make oil
easier than coal to hold and
transport.
1884, Parson Steam Turbine,
invented. These improvements
and use of oil make electrification possible when where
access to water power is not
available.
1892 development of diesal
engine (during 1890’s development of combustion engine)
Suburban Development
1931 National Motorway Plan
Norman Bel Geddes Network becomes
intelligent by use of electronic controls, radio
broadcast instructions
1944 Interregional Motorway Plan
The New Orgman
Macro/Regional: How the US highway network
gained momentum, engineering vs. planning
capacity, regional planning effects, alternate visions, + key government documents
Regional Scale: Discussion of organization protocol as
architecture, transition from the suburban house as standard replicated unit of organizing space, to the shipping
container as the architectural unit of virtual marketplace.
The residual sites between systems offer architects new
territory to build and instill intelligence into the simple
“switches” of the intermodal or single use highway system
Government regional planning=highway acts
Toll Roads and Free Roads, 1939: recommended
26,00 miles of free roads connecting and penetrating
major American cities. “It is apparent that the whole interior
of the city is ripe for major change that it must undergo to afford
the necessary relief”
Coeccentric ring theory for implementation of highways (Ex. Boston, Houston, St. Louis)
Interregional Highways, 1944 Key regional planning document (40,000 miles), many key elemnts of
regional freeway systems were established
-Regional authorities are not appointed for implementation, instead freeways penetrate center city,
undeveloped wedges, riverfronts, depressed rings
surrounding CBD (Boston, NY)
Missing from plan were alternate transit modes.
Many proposals put forth by American planners association and the transit association to include transit
as part of urban core
“Conduit Urbanism”
Bureau of public roads final design for interstate
Intercity Network: Equate need for roads/traffic
with fiscal fitness
Interstate Highways, Regional
Planning and the Reshaping of Metropolitan America by Cliff Ellis
City Efficient Planning: super highways to revitalize
downtown, with land use, and modernized circulation. Engineers maneuver better than planners
because of focused task, wealthy constituency
“Conduit Urbanism”
by Keller Easterling
Mobility on Demand,
mapping human movement
THE HIGHWAY
Conduit Urbanism
Mobility on Demand
by Thun and Velikov
by Bill Mitchell
Mega region scale, Infrastructure as Intermodal conduit,
hybrid networks of existing and new. Rethinking the
performance of Infrastructure as a multi-purpose energy conduit at the scale of the megaregion, highway as
regional planning
City scale/human scale of micro transit
networks and everyday operation looks
specifically at the city scale (urban fabric), the new human patterns created by
alternative mobility networks. “Retrofitting the city with mobility
Current predictions forecast a return to small scale city patterns if the automobile collapses. Instead a new peri-urban
condition= increased mobility demands and unprecedented
intensification of urbanization
“Mobility on demand systems should be
able to provide “more attractive combination of costs and latencies than alternaNew organization = the thing that is sold, Real estate product,
tive systems such as private automobiles,
management style, networking protocol
Virtual organization of office/ factory= office/factory. Power of Eisenhower’s Highway act of 1956=1956 totalizing, 50 years taxis, and transit systems”
urban organization = relations between distributed sites
later, a similar totalizing approach is necessary
Management= accomplished with Realtime fine graine sensing, realtime manage“Architects tend managing environments in a totalizing fashThe rise of the megaregion (example Great Lakes) “Such
ment to balance parking, Dynamic pricing
ion”
a vision would opportunistically combine the agendas of
regional mobility and renewable energies with potential new
3 Latencies to Manage (total latency of
Infrastructure Networks: innovation “appear on the cusp of
urbanities centered around the highway infrastructure, and
change from one network to the other” Interchange addresses connect existing urban centers and other modes of transport trip= sum of the 3) 1. Pick-up latencies, 2.
Transit latencies,
change in direction not network mode not switched, assertion such as air, water, and rail with critical resource supply and
3. Drop-off latencies
of singular dominance
strategically differentiated economic clusters, reinforcing
Little provision for intermodal network exchange, even if infra- and supporting the diverse spatial logistics of megaregional
structures were built adjacent
agglomeration economies” Through such a lens,the megare- Dealing with User Congestion: Sensor
system, Peak traffic studies, Reservation
gion becomes a primary sociopolitical unit, overshadowing
system (via cell phone), System operator
Wayside as a new site cleared of dominant built prothe agency of individual state, provincial, and even national
directing vehicles to empty points
grams , overlaid with “topography of terrestrial, legal,
boundaries and structures, enabler for diverse populations
and commercial contours
and economies.
Network forms queuing system analogous
to internet packets
Container intermodality Promoted by network interchange, not CONDUITS = Highways, NODES= Interchange
displacement (mitchell and conduit urb use similar principles) Reconceptualizing the “shed”, or regional territories
○
Urri
Complexity theory + the automobile Systemic spatial
conditions of the automobile and potential transformation in the future
New fuel systems
New materials
Smart car technologies and communications
Deprivatization ( Zip car flex car,
Reduction in scale of parking
Transport Governance: New Realist Policies shift
away from predict and provide models: Multi-modal
transit, Parking freezes, Energy efficient buses
Existing Conditions
Many of these alternatives we see occuring incrementally already
-i-pod chargers
-computerized diagnostics (auto mechanic industry shift
-GPS in car
-hands free wireless
-cruise control
Trends we see now? Will these actually alter our concept of mobility and energy?
Automobile Futures?
how does the heightened awareness of energy consumption
propel mobility?
THE HIGHWAY
Highway Citieis
Houston, Texas, Ring Road
Springfield, MO (Rural to Urban)
Highway as Urban Renewal,
Ring Roads
Boston, MA, New York,
Saint Louis
Highway Hybrid
Los Angeles, CA