The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part II: Filtering Tactics
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pivotal role that roads would play in the unfolding of the space/place dialectic.
During most of this century, roads have been the principal means
through which space has been produced. To an extraordinary degree, they
have made possible the spatial expansion and deepening of capitalism.
In his celebrated essay “Notes on the New Town,” Lefebvre portrayed
roads as the outcome of the rational division of space under capitalism.
14 Of course, this is only part of his story, one side of the dialectic—and
one that would carry greater weight in a French context. For places can, and
do, resist the production of space. The British experience has shown that
road building has been fundamentally opportunistic. Roads have gone
where space could dominate place with minimal resistance. And Claremont
Road shows that sometimes the planners have misjudged. But the greater
fault in Lefebvre’s account of the new town is its failure to consider the extent
to which roads have been desired in themselves, not as a consequence of
modernist planning but as a guiding purpose.
The emotional thrill that motorcars offer in terms of speed and mobility,
celebrated to great effect by the Futurists, was a major impetus behind
the modernist schemes of Le Corbusier and his followers. This was
made explicit in the foreword to Urbanisme, when Le Corbusier recalled a
formative encounter on the Champs Élysées:
I was assisting at the titanic reawakening of a comparatively new
phenomenon[,] . . . traffic. Motors in all directions, going at all
speeds. I was overwhelmed, an enthusiastic rapture filled me[,] . . .
the rapture of power. The simple and ingenious pleasure of being
in the centre of so much power, so much speed. We are a part of it[,]
. . . we have confidence in this new society. ... Its power is like a
torrent swollen by storms; a destructive fury. The city is crumbling,
it cannot last much longer; its time is past. It is too old. The
torrent can no longer keep to its bed. 15
And in Britain the view was being perpetuated by the architects Alison and
Peter Smithson—among many other modern urbanists—just prior to the
motorway proposals that eventually destroyed Claremont Road. In their
1957 “Cluster City” essay, the Smithsons quoted Le Corbusier—“when
night intervened the passage of cars along the autostrada traces luminous
tracks that are like the trails of meteors flashing across the summer heavens”—and
acknowledged that they “still respond to this dream.” 16 And in
that vein they later asserted that the “first step is to realise a system of urban
motorways. Not just because we need more roads, but because only they
can make our cities an extension of ourselves as we now wish to be.” 17 These