ABSTRACT
In the early 1970s, the architect Alison Smithson documented her experience of several car journeys as she travelled from London to her Wiltshire cottage in the English countryside. The documentation featured in the book is an embodied attempt to capture detailed impressions of a modality that had been so seamlessly adopted by the generation at that time that few had stopped to consider the spatial and environmental changes as well as the new behaviours which were unconsciously developed as a result. After a century during which the car dramatically reordered city streets, urban form, and land use, not to mention society at large, it became increasingly obvious that it was not the future of urban mobility. Outlandish fantasies or not, the autonomous vehicle is a future that nearly every major car company is betting on. If there has been one paradigm that has defined urban development throughout the twentieth century, it has been the car.
