Car or no car? Which is better?

Arhitectura magazine innocently pretends it doesn't already know the answer. Over the years I've written about both instances of the city that are the direct product of the automobile, as in the United States, and their opposites, new and old alike. So I set out to bring together both ways of imagining the city here.

First, I'll write about America's circulatory system. I've driven nearly ten thousand miles through it, disemboweling Chicago at the foot of the Sears Tower, crossing the Rocky Mountains, the Appalachians, bathing in both oceans and the Gulf of Mexico. I knew, at their end, nothing more about America, nothing lasting: so much had changed between 1993-1994 and then 1996, when I first returned, that I was already unsure of many of my memories, almost as much as I was unsure of my European habits (for I had just come from a year at Oxford) when I grasped that the American city has its living center on the periphery and its geometric center in the dead core i