The Rampart, The Traffic Artery, and the Park; Designing for the city regions of Antwerp

Figure 1.32
The Ford Model T in its iconic black
rendition (Kirn Vintage Stock, 2015).
3.
Translated into English in 1929 as The
City of To-morrow and its Planning.
4.
Translated into English in 1967 as The
Radiant City.
Utopian optimism
The image of the car and the infrastructure that exists because of it, has had
quite a rocky ride throughout its history. The car started to rise, at large,
around the time Henry Ford started manufacturing the Ford model T; the first
mass-produced car in 1908. The moving assembly line on which the model
was produced, allowed Ford to reduce the prices so that most people could afford
it. In the nineteen years that the automobile was manufactured, Ford was
able to produce over 15 million models and thereby managed to extended its
reach far beyond the United states; putting almost the entire world on wheels
(History.com Editors, 2020; Brooke, 2008).
The entrance of the car in people’s everyday life spurred the imagination
of how cities should function, and what they would look like with this new
mode of transportation. The automobile became a symbol of modernity and
progress, and it became an omnipresent feature in many drawings, like those
of Harvey Wiley Corbett or Hugh Ferriss, and utopian city concepts developed
in the early twentieth century (Lorenzo, 2015, p. 29). Le Corbusier’s Urbanisme
3 published in 1924, was one of the first proposals for a more car-oriented
approach when designing for cities. In his view, cities did not yet tap into
the potential that cars had, in the prementioned book he states that: “A city
made for speed is made for success” (Corbusier, 1987, p. 179). In his 1935
publication La Ville Radieuse, 4 Le Corbusier’s notions about city planning
had matured into a conceptual city, carefully dived into living, working, and
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