00 - Course introduction - LC

00 - Course introduction - LC

What makes a place a great place:

The aim of this course is:

Mobility integration - a tale of a neverending conflit

Henry Ford made the first car in ht e1906: "We build a car for the people, and we want to build a universal car".

Before the car, cities were already in conflict. Streets were already crowded. At one point they had a car every 2 families.

To make space for cars, Americans started moving people outside of cities.

With cars, people started having the possibility to move very far from the center of a city. So they started building huge metropolitan areas.

At the same time, in Europe, in Germany in 1930 invented the highways. They wanted to move cars as fast as possible. At that point, only 10% of the population had a car. In England, the first highway was at the end of the 50s.

The disappearing city by Frank Lloyd Wright - Low density development, everyone with 1 acre of land. Mobility would be super easy thanks to remote work, flying cars etc.

There were many cool ideas but the result in the USA was a little different.

There was a National Interstate and Defense HIghway Act. There was a mixture of militar and space needs. Also there was a baby boom, meaning there was a need for housing. They started building suburban developments.

They developed house that could be built in 1 day by 36 workers.

The city centres started to become abandoned, and people, getting reacher, started to move to the suburb. In the center, only poorer people remained.

For highways, there were big discussions on wether to have highways going around the centres, or cutting straight through them.

Robert Moses. He was one of the most influential men in his time, especially in New York. He had a lot of power. Especially, he was:

He built parkways but put bridges so low taht would only allow cars, and not buses, basically segregating neighbourhoods.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs