Cars, architecture and urban form in the United States. The Sunbelt case

Abstract

This article studies the links existing between the automobile, the architecture and the urban form in the United States. In the introduction explains the social and economic importance of this sector, as well as the road infrastructures associated to it, analyzing the historic records of all this. Afterwards, in a first section, the article studies the two phases that characterize the car architecture. The first is the one of the ‘drive-in architecture’, developed between 1950 and 1970, an architecture with interesting cultural and identity values, as well as very innovative from the typological point of view. All this disappeared in a second phase, the one of the ‘big boxes’, that started in the 1990s. They were the result of the perceptive impoverishment of the drivers when they circulate across the city and the territory. In a second section, the article focus on the link automobile-urban form, using the Sunbelt cities as case study. According to the author, the by-product of this link are ‘scheme-cities’ that follow the logic of the transportation engineering, and that severely condition the way of life of the people, condemning many of them to social exclusion.