Chapter 19 - Gathering Velocities I: Tailpipe Tracts and Tower Blocks

Summary

Chapter 19 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet begins the book’s exploration of the Cold War-era Urban Planet when both the USA and the USSR turned to a rising international “modernist” school of urban planning to contend with housing crises and the advent of the automobile. As the peripheries of cities everywhere expanded due to the global population explosion, city-ward migration, and oil-burning private transport, rapid acts of pre-fabricated urban construction took contrasting forms on the peripheries of American and Soviet cities. In the United States, low-density automobile suburbs sprawled outward from historic cores as the American state and financial and real estate capitalists forced growing populations of color into segregated “ghettos” in older urban neighborhoods deprived of investment. In the Soviet Union, the regime sought, only marginally successfully, to solve its housing crisis with state-built peripheral tower block housing that intensified density on the urban outskirts. Elsewhere in the “First” and “Second” Worlds, mixtures of these two approaches produced still other “modernist” urban forms.