Drawing the urban highway: mobile representations in design and architecture

The chapter considers mobile utopias in the field of spatial design; looking at the relationship between architecture and corporeal mobilities in urban landscapes, in the context of early twentieth century ideas for the motorised city through the disciplines of civil engineering, landscape design and architecture. These are compared with subsequent changes in focus to walking from urban designers such as Gordon Cullen and his ‘serial vision’ and the evocative responses to, and mapping of, urban journeys as discussed by psychogeographers. The themes that are explored are the relationship between distance, scale and the immobilising tendencies of the diagrammatic macro scale representations of the city in opposition to the micro scale of embodied experience