Auckland 2012: Building form and use changes that can typify one-way arterials
One way streets “one-ways” came hand in hand with the radical transformation of western cities with the advent of the automobile, superhighway, and associated suburban development patterns. City designers used the combination of highways and one-ways to increase travel efficiencies into the city centres of many large cities. While much of the work was conducted throughout the 5o’s and 60′s, the inspiration is most regularly cited as starting with the 1939-1940 New York City World’s fair exhibit called Futurama and the popularisation of a modern vision of cities as proposed by Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Mies van de Rohe. Both Futurama and Le Corbusier imagined a city free of congestion and its associated noise, smells and dirt, and a place where citizens were wisked to their destinations via a series of wide expressways in private motorcars.
The one-ways in many ways were disasters for cities as Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs told us they would be. The mono-functional nature of the streets tended replace the prime purpose of the city in the first place — proximity and connectivity of people (not cars). Instead, one-ways became economic dividing lines working much the way inter-city freeways do today to choke cities of their vitality.
