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06857_Field_TCUM T422.txt
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1996-04-10
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fields to settlements. Acceleration created larger and larger
centres, more and more specialism, and more intense
incentives, aggregates, and aggressions. So it is that the
wheeled vehicle makes its appearance at once as a war chariot,
just as the urban centre, created by the wheel, makes its
appearance as an aggressive stronghold. No further motivation
than the compounding and consolidating of specialist skills by
acceleration of the wheel is needed to explain the mounting
degree of human creativity and destructiveness.
Lewis Mumford calls this urbanization “implosion,” but it
was really an explosion. Cities were made by the fragmenting of
pastoral modes. The wheel and the road expressed and
advanced this explosion by a radiational or centre-margin
pattern. Centralism depends on margins that are accessible by
road and wheel. Maritime power does not assume this centre-