8
" Although a new highway program was politically very contentious, President Eisenhower appointed an advisory committee of executives linked to General Motors, Bechtel engineering, the trucking lobby, and the Teamsters Union (to which truckers belonged) to negotiate the various special interests involved.In 1956 Eisenhower signed the Interstate Highway Act providing for 42,500 miles of a 'National System of Interstate and Defense Highways' across the country at an estimated cost of $27 billion. . . . Journalist Helen Leavitt thought that Congress had been bought and bullied. In her brilliant book Superhighway--Superhoax, she noted that there was no real concern for national defense, since overpasses designed for fourteen-foot vertical clearance were too low to permit the passage of many Army, Navy, and Air Force weapons loaded on transporters, including Atlas missiles. The highway builds had never even consulted the Defense Department. "
― Dolores Hayden , Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000
12
" What is most dystopian about all of the digital houses designed for customized consumption is the implication that the entire landscape could be covered with new houses lacking any social or economic neighborhood context. Designers minimize the need for family or neighborhood interaction if they plan for digital surveillance as a route to ordering mass-produced commodities as well as handling work and civic life. If many external activities, such as paid work, exercise, shopping, seeking entertainment, and voting, are able to be done in-house through the various electronic communications systems, reasons for going outside decrease. The residents become isolated, although the house continues to function as a container for mass-produced goods and electronic media. In a landscape bristling with tens of thousands of digital houses and cell towers, where the ground is laced with hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber-optic cable, neighborhoods may not exist. Car journeys involving traffic problems may disappear, although the roads will be clogged with delivery vans. "
― Dolores Hayden , Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000
