Technological change converted necessary urban walking into private transit cocooning

Evidence

Finally, some note should be made of the reduced necessity for walking in the modern city. This particular activity remains legal, but the extent to which it is approved is questionable. Like other historic necessities (for example, cooking over fire), it has, in the modern world, become largely a recreational activity, indulged in by masochistic cultists. Those people who still indulge in it for a living, such as mail carriers, beat-policemen and night watchmen, are frequently punished with low status, poor pay and the continual threat of attack by unfriendly dogs and people. Who or what are killing walking is a complex matter. The mass-produced automobile is usually assigned the major responsibility, but it is surely being aided and abetted by the areal expansion of the city (making possible wider, straighter streets, and itself engendered by the railroad and trolley), the telegraph, the telephone, and the establishment of relatively reliable government postal systems. As an aside, it might be mentioned that one of the more fascinating characteristics of the automobile is its ability to surround its occupants in a cocoon of privacy as they move through the public space of the city. As we shall see in Chapter Six, it thereby enables them to avoid for long stretches of time any necessity to confront the world of strangers. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 395

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to Julius’s flâneur-wandering in the reader’s stated cross-reading: the automobile cocoon is the anti-flâneur device, enabling avoidance of exactly the stranger-confrontation Julius seeks. — connects to: Suburbanization restructured space to make car and oil consumption a necessity — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 577
• ADDENDUM: Supports the trees/city infrastructure essay angle: the ‘areal expansion of the city’ caused by transit technology is the physical substrate that makes stranger-world contact avoidable.