Manuel de Landa Part 7: Cities and Transportation Technologies

SEVENTH LECTURE: Cities and Transportation Technologies.

The distinction between maritime metropolises and landlocked capitals was intimately related to the speed of transport: for most of the millennium sea vessels were much faster than land transportation, and everything (money, people, ideas, diseases) moved faster by sea than by land. The viscosity of terrestrial motion was overcame by the steam engine coupled to the locomotive and that led to new urban forms, like the bead-like strings of towns that grew around train stations in the nineteenth century. The internal combustion engine and the spread of the automobile, in turn, gave suburbs the impetus they needed to overcome central cities as the fastest growing settlements by the 1920's.

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