It is not about the car

Today's debate on the car is a paradox, where the car is absent from its own future. Yet cities appear to be experiencing the opposite; there has been growth in the number of cars. Multiple discourses of the car - self-driving cars, fossil fuel alternative vehicles, a shift to public transit - circumvent or obscure the fact that today people are increasingly reliant on car usage, and this trend domestically and abroad is only increasing. Boston could be seen as an example of this schizophrenic condition; it is identified as being a pedestrian-friendly city, one that at the same time continually experiences more and more cars every day. Over the last ten years, commuting time has increased into Boston by 10%, and is only expected to get worse as up to 80,000 more drivers are expected to join the commute in the coming decade. Cars are somehow seen as a solution of the past, current-time responses to car usage - parking facilities, access, etc. - are lagging behind, as if the city fails to take cognizance of its own behavior. My thesis examines this existential problem of the car. It presumes that the current tradition of vehicle usage will persist and even grow in the future, and sees this as a fundamental challenge to the future of Boston's urban quality. Taking up the wide 'chasm' opened by the i-90 as its site, this thesis proposes to reconnect a fractured city and assuage the surrounding form the congestion of the car. Spanning the freeway, to open new land in the city, it will integrate a separate circulation for the car; aiming to relieve the pressures of an overburdened downtown. The result is a place for the car in the center of the city, but separate from it; a quarantine for the car.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Architecture

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Short, Paul Luis.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Arindam Dutta.

• Architecture.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/121698

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/121698