There’s one thing I find incredibly interesting around Schivelbusch’s reading; the fact that this has all played out to a larger and perhaps counter intuitive extent after his time of writing. Clearly with the internet, now we don’t even have to take time to travel to a place, rather we can extend ourselves through it to get to a there; in a way. So we’re back to lacking perception of space, time and travel as was Schivelbusch’s sort of ray of light in automobile transportation. That being said though, my focus will be on the reurbanization of cities. Sprawl and suburban life have played themselves out. We did do everything Schivelbusch said; we moved away from our jobs while still being able to get to them as if we lived right down the street, but yet, the trend is still reurbanization!

It’s counter intuitive, but maybe worth a look; perhaps the internet drove this. Everything became available to us at our fingertips. Everything was a far less than a second away. We don’t want to get in the car to get a slice of pizza anymore. We want to take a five minute walk down the road and grab a slice. Now I’m cognizant there are many other factors as to why we want to do this and that play into this, but hear me out. The generation of speed doesn’t want to waste time in a car as much as they don’t want to wait for dial up internet to connect. We want to be actively doing something at every second. Counter intuitively then, the walk to the pizza shop is an active process, rather than a passive drive.

I propose we have extended ourselves so far spatially, that we no longer even want to be far from things that are actually spatial. That the generation of speed has counter intuitively created a generation of people who want to be close to everything for speed. So though we can reach out to the Great Pyramids at Giza (and do!), we want the same convenience in our habitat; something the car centered suburb very clearly doesn’t offer. Because of this speed, though we could be far, we chose the active, urban option because of the very quickness of extending ourselves so far. This farness has again brought us close.