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

by Moshe Safdie, Wendy Kohn, Gerald D. McKnight

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.

Genres: Urban Planning, Architecture, Design, Art, Cities, Urban Studies

208 pages, Hardcover

First published May 29, 1997

About the author

Moshe Safdie was born in Haifa, Israel to a Syrian Jewish family. His family moved to Montreal, Canada, in 1953. In 1959, Safdie married Nina Nusynowicz. The couple had two children, a daughter and a son. His son Oren Safdie is a playwright who has written several plays about architecture including Private Jokes, Public Places.[2] His daughter Taal is an architect in San Diego, a partner of the firm Safdie Rabines Architects.[3]

In 1961, Safdie graduated from McGill University with a degree in architecture. In 1981, Safdie married Michal Ronnen, a photographer, with whom he has two daughters, Carmelle and Yasmin. Carmelle Safdie is an artist, and Yasmin Safdie is a social worker. Safdie is the uncle of Dov Charney, founder and former CEO of American Apparel.

Reviews

[Bex · Rating 2 out of 5]

I feel like this perspective, while valuable, only provides part of the story. It’s clear that Safdie largely only considers Western nations when conceptualizing his ideas for the future — which is unsustainable in the long run. His “Urbana,” in the way he describes examples in the epilogue, can only exist at the expense of developing nations via resource extraction. I’d recommend reading this book alongside books that discuss the impacts of displacement, neocolonialism, and capitalism/individualization in order to gain a more holistic idea of a car-free world.

[kimberly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Safdie has the kind of imagination needed to confront our automobile addiction. Safdie is an architect, and so a creative who dreams up all kinds of solutions - some highly practical and others wholly impractical. Also, he starts from the assumption that we'll never abolish the car, and argues that manage our car problems (pollution, space, mortality), we have to accept that.

[Marc Caswell · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first 1/2 is good for orienting yourself in the pedestrian realm, but the latter 1/2 is basically a pitch for car-sharing or the pod-people of PRT. The word 'bike' appears twice, and isn't really thinking of the car post-auto, but post-privately owned auto. Too bad they wasted such a good title on a mediocre book.

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Concise and well-rounded summary of the problems facing our cities and towns due to their organization around the movement and storage of cars. The outline of the problems is the strength of the book. Some solutions for reorganizing our public places are offered near the end of the book, but many of those ideas seem incongruent to the the problems outlined earlier, or are simply infeasible.