The highway is a new public space for the city. In the old city, the public park was to be the place for public interchange among social and economic classes and for freedom from the confining structure and congestion of the industrial city. Olmsted's great American public parks, reproduced across the United States, made memorable public places to promote a gregarious democracy. In the new city, highways and wide arterial roads are the locations of a new, barely understood, motorized gregariousness. The highway is a space for movements within a structure of flows. The park is for movements within in a specifically bounded place. The highway's promise of increased mobility is a promise of expanded freedom from a different, but still confining, structure of the new city. And, every hour is not rush hour. Richard Dagenhart (1994) "Visible and Invisible Cities" in Jordi Bernado and Ramon Prat ATLANTA, Barcelona: ACTAR
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Flows
J.B. Jackson writes about the parts of cities that we often ignore or don't look at carefully. Front yards and garages and how they change. Flea markets as sort of home grown community meeting places. Highways and the influence of trucks on the form and the economy of the contemporary city. His observations point to what he describes as the declining importance of "political spaces" and their replacement with "inhabited spaces" -- the places and activities of everyday life. A gregarious democracy existed on main streets and courthouse squares a generation ago, but today it largely occurs within automobile spaces -- the spaces of flows --
like the highway, the PARKING LOT, the PEDESTRIAN BRIDGE, and LAND BAY.
Atlanta Essay
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