The City: Where the Cars Are

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It has become a cliché of city planners to blame the woes of the urban world on the automobile. But the much-abused automobile is beginning to find a few champions in important places. New York City's new Planning Commission chairman, Architect William F. R. Ballard, 58, celebrated his appointment by sounding off loud and clear in defense of the auto. "The better and fuller life includes the free use of the automobile," he said. "Planners who try to discourage its use make me sick. I believe in direct transportation."

In its current issue, ARCHITECTURAL FORUM disassociates itself from the notion that the automobile should be banned from the city as a public nuisance. Instead, FORUM suggests, the road itself can be used "to reshape—and thereby revive—the core [of the] city," and discusses some current proposals. Some simply involve the exercise of taste, others a more radical rethinking of the nature of the city in the age of the automobile.

Into the Core. Urban freeways should be made part of the city and not simply corridors through it. They should go between neighborhoods, not across them. They should be multilevel, depressed or elevated to take up as little space as possible. Buildings may be built over them and across them, parks and playgrounds under them, restaurants and parking garages integrated into their structure. These principles were laid down by Landscape Architect Lawrence Halprin after studying the sad case of San Francisco, whose citizens finally rebelled when they discovered that the state's new expressways ran spang across the view of the hallowed Ferry Building and the city hall, and organized a protest so impressive that all building was halted while the city fathers took second thought.

Freeways can be fed into a loop road that swings around but does not cross the city's core. In the core itself, vehicles can be given their own level, restoring the surface to the pedestrian. The argument here is that modern city streets, crowded with trucks, buses, cars and through traffic, are more of a hazard than a convenience to the urban native or even the visiting shopper. British Critic Gordon Cullen once characterized them as rushing rivers between the city's buildings, carving urban land into isolated islands.

An early effort at this separation of pedestrian from vehicular traffic was City Planner Victor Gruen's proposed (but never executed) plan for Fort Worth, in which the ring road fed autos into vast parking garages penetrating the downtown area, while trucks were shunted into an underground network that would allow direct access to basement delivery rooms. Only pedestrians would be allowed on the surface streets, except for slow-moving shuttle cars like those used at world's fairs. A more sophisticated version of this separation of car from pedestrian was projected for Dallas two years ago by a team of Columbia University planners. It achieved the separation by stacking them vertically in a single, six-layer sandwich combining roads and buildings.

Street-as-Building. Most radical is the theory that the street itself should be a building—or at least a garage. This abandons the whole concept of a central core and instead stretches the elements of urban living—shops and department stores, theaters, auditoriums and community buildings—along the superhighway.