I noted a pattern while going through the images by decade. You'll see that the photos go from a pedestrian-oriented streetscape to what at first appears as a modernist-aesthetic influenced one (look at theWedgewood store photo, for eg., in the 1940s section). The modernism, however, seems strictly superficial. What the images really show is how things change in favour of an automobile orientation. I spoke to [another friend] once about this, too: that car culture is like experiencing the city via a giant dildo or a full-body prophylactic. There's no real "exchange," there's a faux interpenetration of person & street because it's all mediated by the automobile. Think of Baudelaire, Benjamin, et al., and the culture of the flaneur, the strolling pedestrian who penetrates the city s/he loves, and who is in turn penetrated by the city. That kind of urbanity was utterly destroyed by the car and by the speed it facilitated. Wham bang it's finished, folks are hurried. It's one of the reasons I truly hate the (newer) bank building at the SE corner of Fort & Douglas -- just try if you will to "possess" that structure as anything other than an image you can glimpse while passing in a car, as anything other than the flat surface of the TV screen. For the opposite to car culture streetscapes, note the awnings and other devices on the buildings in many of the 1940s photos (and earlier) -- devices/ structures that actually embrace and enfold the pedestrian, holding him/her and inviting him/her to linger, enter, touch.

It's interesting that so many height-o-phobes are actually of a generation that was the first to experience the city from an automobile, with perhaps zero body contact on the street. I think a lot of the anxiety around height has to do with (on the one hand) how it threatens the prophylaxis against rupture offered by the automobile and (on the other) displacing legitimate criticism of the dead streetscape onto height instead of where it's due (lack of actual interaction/ interpenetration at street level).

Re. "human scale," the term that comes up often in the vocabulary of [many], and which floats around undefined: take a look at the wiki page onGreens promote denser communities and if you have time, click and read through the link I made to Todd Litman's response to the conservative Heritage Foundation (it's a PDF). He uses the term "human scale"... [but] he's not using the term clearly in relation to buildings. I think, actually, that it's a displacement (again) of criticism of the car onto the built environment (Litman is of course a transportation critic, pro-public transit, hence by definition against exclusive reliance on the individual passenger car). It's the car that's inhuman -- big giant condom, dildo, whatever, ...tool, (hot)rod, offering a (false) sense of protection & superiority. The curiousity is that when we focus on the built environment, we deal with static objects, while cars embody speed (and prowess). So we keep tinkering with protecting the static environment, without doing enough to deal with how it's the technological extension of our bodies (via automobiles) that has wreaked at least an equal amount of havoc.

[City Councillor] Sonya Chandler organised a presentation byJeremy Harris at City Hall yesterday -- he harped on "people first, cars second," and showed how that strategy made a real difference in Honolulu. That was interesting. But then he also, en passant, mentioned that we don't need "high rises," and added that Paris is such an ideal, dense city. (...) What's so ironic of course is that Baron Hausmann utterly destroyed medieval Paris to build that 19th century "ideal" (so much for "heritage preservation"), which was a military plan from the get-go, with huge boulevards designed to allow mobilisation of troops. As for those Paris apartments, they're typically tiny little places. Modern buyers wouldn't go for it. And besides, late 20th century Paris was utterly destroyed (again), this time by the car. With the kind of traffic that city has to contend with, I don't know how anyone can find it "charming."