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06670_Field_TCUM T235.txt
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1996-04-10
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16 lines
speeding wheels of the new industrial production. The railroad
was needed to cope with mechanized production, as much as
to span the great distances of the continent. The steam
railroad as an accelerator proved to be one of the most
revolutionary of all extensions of our physical bodies, creating a
new political centralism and a new kind of urban shape and
size. It is to the railroad that the American city owes its
abstract grid layout, and the nonorganic separation of
production, consumption, and residence. It is the motorcar
that scrambled the abstract shape of the industrial town,
mixing up its separated functions to a degree that has
frustrated and baffled both planner and citizen. It remained for
the airplane to complete the confusion by amplifying the
mobility of the citizen to the point where urban space as such
was irrelevant. Metropolitan space is equally irrelevant for the
telephone, the telegraph, the radio, and television. What the