In the mid-20th century streets were this machine of growth and industry; Robert Moses
couldn't imagine a city without traffic, as that they were inexorably linked, the same
and one of each other.
In the 21st we commiserate with Jane Jacobs -- we understand streets as places for people, rather than conveyors of machines.
Asphalt is this bubbling thing, the life-blood and artery of the 20th century city, fascinating in its heterogeneity. At the pedestrian scale, it's iced rock soup, hazardous mainly by way of the things it carries; at the vehicular scale it's a sleek extension of tire-rubber, hazardous by way of its faults. Which are many—asphalt being never so cleverly designed as to withstand even the force of daily nature, much less the impact of humans & human capacity for destruction. It's a low-bid thing, dumped and forgotten, ripped, smashed, torn up again like a skin for surgery on the city's vitals, patched with scar-work patches, left to bake, left to freeze, cracked, painted... nothing else in the city is as close to a pure Urban Material than the asphalt that forms its streets.
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