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City Innovations: Can Cities Favor People over Cars?

What if we altered our perspective on how cities were designed? It’s clear that most are built with auto-transit at the forefront. But, Autotopia presents an alternative. What if we designed cities so that they favored people and not cars? Early memories of cities with skywalks were always exciting. As a kid it seamed like these innovations screamed futuristic. They removed the complication of cars, smog and waiting to cross the street and replaced them with the feeling of living in a Jetson-like era. Even if it’s only an aspiration, it’s an interesting concept.

From Autotopia: “Los Angeles and countless other cities – Phoenix, Houston and Atlanta come to mind – are far more friendly to cars than people, having been built according to land use policies that all but put people behind the wheel. It’s an unsustainable model, and it must change. That was the message transportation planner Timothy Papandreou brought to Expanding the Vision of Sustainable Mobility a symposium sponsored by the Art Center College of Design. The school could be called the Harvard of transportation design, and two-day conference drew experts in fields as varied as urban planning and aerospace engineering to discuss where the future of mobility lies.”