From the section on “Cold War, Disaster Scenarios, and the Fear Factor.”

The solution was decentralization and urban dispersal (Borden, 1969). Forms of limited dispersal did occur such as, remote locations for bomb production, placement of war contracts in small towns, creation of new satellite cities, increased highway construction, and control of inner-city building – policies that are in effect to date (Monson, 1950/51). Urban studies such as Norbert Wiener’s 1950 plan for radial “life belts” envisioned transportation lines and essential services, separated from downtowns by safety zones of agricultural or empty space as protection from nuclear fallout. Cities were seen as the communications node or nerve center. “The metropolis of classical modernity, the centered city of immediately recognizable and recognized spaces,” came to an end with the decentralized geography of highways and suburban sprawl (Edward Dimendberg,City of Fear) . In 1958, Lewis Mumford criticized the effects of highway construction at the time by likening it to having “the same result upon vegetation and human structures as the passage of a tornado or the blast of an atom bomb (From Farish, 2003).”

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