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

recreational zones, consisting of vertical architecture with wide open horizontal
areas for cars, cyclists, public transport, and pedestrians vertically separated
from each other (Kohlstedt, 2018).
Other contemporaries, and rivals, like Frank Loyd Wright also made grand
visions for car-use in cities. In his 1932 book, The Disappearing City, and in
the subsequent 1935 exhibition in the Rockefeller Center, Wright presented his
Broadacre City. A plan in which he proposed, having a dislike for dense industrial
cities, spread cities out into low-density neighbourhoods consisting out
of generous plots of land. Wright believed strongly in the car as an instrument
of freedom and said that there should be a “a new standard of space measurement
– the man seated in his automobile” (Robertson, 2018). Conceived
during the Great Depression, Wright never intended to build his city but rather
wanted to use it as a means of addressing social, economic, and environment
issues (Gray, 2018).
Figure 1.35
A 1950s bird’s-eye view sketch of
Broadacre city (Images of Network,
2017).
After the Second World War the influence of the car gained speed in cities
around the world. In post-war United States, the trend of flocking to the cities
during the 1940s and 1950s reversed. Thanks to low housing costs and GI Bill
benefits, even the working-class American – the veterans of the war – could
now afford to own a house. Under the heading of the American Dream,
combined with the baby boom, this development spurred unprecedented suburbanisation;
between 1948 and 1958, 85% of American homes were built
in suburbs (Elliott, 2015a). This enormous cry for houses resulted in the mass
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