ABSTRACT
At the heart of modernity is the connection between speed, the machine, and the city. In his 1909 Manifesto of Futurism, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) glorified the man at the wheel and the beauty of speed. He associated speed with courage in action and slowness with stagnant prudence. His glorification of the speeding automobile in the city prefigures its subsequent centrality to urban development. Cities were reimagined and then re-engineered to promote high speed. Virilio (1986, 1995, and 2005) tells a story of the destruction of the sociability of the city by the logic of acceleration. In a more nuanced interpretation, Latham and McCormack (2008) explore the ways in which speed and the “countervailing eddies of slowness” define the experience of the city. However, in terms of urban traffic and the marginalization and displacement of the self-propelled human body, Virilio's image of the city as a site of acceleration seems closer to the mark.
