Conceived as a reaction against the pernicious sprawl of American suburbia, Arcosanti was planned as a dense, car-free development, in which curvaceous organic dwellings were linked by a network of winding footpaths.
Portland has a dense street-car and light-rail network, and the city has the country's highest per-capita ownership of Toyota Prius hybrids, according to George Beard, a manager in the Office of Research and Strategic Partnerships at Portland State University.
Throughout the city, wide avenues and highways are dense with cars at all hours.
This model of denser, less car-dependent cities is becoming the accepted wisdom across the developed world.
"In a dense city, the car can't be the favored transportation mode," he said.
Dense clouds -- cars nose to tail on the Garden State Parkway -- clouds -- pleasure boats bobbing in Egg Harbor -- clouds -- beach houses crammed into Margate City.
But it was too dense for the cars to penetrate, and the distinctive red berets of the military police were not in sight.
Los Angeles's transition to being denser and less car dependent is unquestionably a good thing, resulting in a more liveable and sustainable city.
Campbell's suggestion that there are dense connections between cars, identity and gender comes closest to expressing what seems to be the heart of the book: that there is a "supercharged poetry" to be found in the "perfect symbiosis between car and driver"; that for Campbell, too, there are ways in which, as his Cadillac-loving friend says of cars, "they're almost like an extension of my own body".
Anita Tietjen, a tall woman with a broad, thoughtful face, who is selling from a van parked in front of her friend Sue Crowell's house, gestures toward the road, where lines of slow-moving cars trickle between rows of parked cars while dense streams of pedestrians move purposefully, if sluggishly, along the narrow bluestone-flag sidewalks.
