Traffic Logic and Political Logic

Abstract

This article reviews three books that make important contributions to our understanding of how city streets and sidewalks are structured, and thus what their social and political potential might and might not be. Each of the books shows how streets and sidewalks are produced through the operationalization of what one of the authors calls “traffic logic.” This traffic logic, the three books together show, is vital to understand if we are ever to see it supplanted by a more progressive “political logic” for the governing of city space.