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![Asphalt Nation](/assets/artwork/1x1-42817eea7ade52607a760cbee00d1495.gif)
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Asphalt Nation
How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back
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- USD 3.99
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- USD 3.99
Descripción editorial
Asphalt Nation is a major work of urban studies that examines how the automobile has ravaged America’s cities and landscape, and how we can fight back.
The automobile was once seen as a boon to American life, eradicating the pollution caused by horses and granting citizens new levels of personal freedom and mobility. But it was not long before the servant became the master—public spaces were designed to accommodate the automobile at the expense of the pedestrian, mass transportation was neglected, and the poor, unable to afford cars, saw their access to jobs and amenities worsen. Now even drivers themselves suffer, as cars choke the highways and pollution and congestion have replaced the fresh air of the open road.
Today our world revolves around the car—as a nation, we spend eight billion hours a year stuck in traffic. In Asphalt Nation, Jane Holtz Kay effectively calls for a revolution to reverse our automobile-dependency. Citing successful efforts in places from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, Kay shows us that radical change is not impossible by any means. She demonstrates that there are economic, political, architectural, and personal solutions that can steer us out of the mess. Asphalt Nation is essential reading for everyone interested in the history of our relationship with the car, and in the prospect of returning to a world of human mobility.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kay, architecture critic for the Nation, argues forcefully here that the automobile holds America in economic, emotional and physical gridlock. The car--and the highways it rides on and the gasoline it burns--has debased our architecture, ruined our health, polluted our environment, undermined our public transportation systems and isolated the nation's poor and infirm. With an eye for memorable phrases and startling facts (every car on the road costs its "user and society" between $9000 and $11,000 a year), she not only defines the problem but also traces how she believes it was created, from the Model T Ford, through the suburban boom, to our current "three-car culture" in which the largest percentage of time and mileage is not devoted to commuting to work but to running errands. Kay's solutions are controversial. Stop highway construction (new and wider roads don't end congestion, they spread it); divert highway money to improving train and streetcar transportation; change zoning laws to encourage small apartments (for the young and the elderly) in downtown areas, which, she thinks, would encourage walking and biking; make cities more walker-friendly; cut down on the number of parking lots; increase the cost of car registration. This is an unabashed polemic; the problems Kay portrays so vividly in the first two thirds of the book are more convincing than the solutions she suggests in the last third. Illustrations not seen by PW.