Emergent Urbanism

Rediscovering Urban Complexity

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The collapse of rural cities

Submitted by Mathieu Helie on Wed, 06/11/2008 - 18:31, last updated Sun, 11/06/2011 - 01:19

The advent of low-cost motoring and extension of expressways through rural areas made possible a form of urbanisation that few people had foreseen. Le Corbusier had dreamed the automobile to allow the working man to live in the country and work in the city. The suburbs made that dream real, or at least as far as the suburbs were a pastiche of the country. What the automobile did to radically transform rural landscapes was make it possible for someone to live in the country and work a hundred kilometers elsewhere in the country.

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