For thousands of years, humans built settlements scaled to people who walked. Even as inter-city transportation technology changed from domestic animals to trains and cities began to develop streetcar networks internally, the vast majority of daily trips were still made by foot.

This, of course, changed with the advent of the automobile, a technology that became ubiquitous in America following World War II. Over the past two generations, we have reshaped an entire continent to accommodate this new technology, from interstates to connect our cities to the streets within them. We developed new building types, new ways of arranging things on the landscape and new standards for building and financing this new way of building, all from scratch, all within a very short period of time.

If the typical American is asked to explain this transition, they would likely describe it as a narrative of progress. We used to be a people who walked everywhere and so we built cities around people who walked. We are now a people that drives everywhere and so it is only natural that we have built a society around people who drive. At some point in the future we will have jet cars and ultimately we’ll just teleport wherever we go and our cities will look completely different than they do now.

This is a very comforting way to view the changes of the past sixty years. It places us firmly on the path of improvement, of ever-expanding prosperity and opportunity. In a word: progress. There is another way to look at this, however, that isn’t so affirming.