Jane Jacobs warned us about this more than a half-century ago.
Call it nerding out or droppin’ knowledge, but in the early years of mass highway-building and suburbanization, the great urbanist Jane Jacobs warned us that cars were going to destroy cities. Her analysis was complex and subtle in the way she paired failed concepts of city planning to the need for the automobile to make these planning schemes even feasible. When she said we blame cars for too much, she meant we can’t blame them for our lame ideas and lack of imagination about how to live better.