Passage
Urban planners frequently cite the mid-twentieth-century shift toward car-centered design as the decisive moment in the modern city's development. This transformation, marked by vast highway networks and suburban sprawl, has been interpreted as a triumph of engineering efficiency. Yet the very features that enabled mobility also fragmented social space, severing neighborhoods and eroding local forms of community. Advocates of "new urbanism" argue that the built environment must be understood less as inert infrastructure than as an apparatus that shapes patterns of human association and exclusion, a view that casts doubt on interpretations that treat postwar design simply as a response to population growth.
The recurring motifs of plazas, shopping malls, and gated enclaves tempt critics to read the late-modern city as coherently organized around consumption. Such readings need not imply a conspiratorial urban designer, but they do facilitate arguments about structural uniformity. Still, efforts to impose such unity often collapse, not because the evidence is weak, but because cities generate experiences that defy a single narrative frame. The most revealing instances are not the monumental freeways or shopping districts, but the marginal, unpredictable encounters—street markets, graffiti, improvised performances—that elude incorporation into comprehensive theories. In this respect, the modern city can best be compared to a jazz composition, in which moments of improvisation provide meaning precisely through their resistance to subsumption under a fixed score.
