Ancient Web: Carfree City Designs Were Drawn One Street at a Time

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

A car-free city is easy to endorse in the abstract. J. H. Crawford's website asks a harder question: where does the market square go, how narrow can a street be, and what should a pedestrian see through an archway?

Explore the Carfree.com City Design library.

The collection is labelled a sketchbook draft and bears a 2002 copyright notice. Its entrance page groups drawings into gates, streets, squares, and other elements. The individual links are wonderfully specific: enclosing gates, framing gates, high places, monuments, boulevards, quiet streets, intersections, curved streets, arcades, courtyards, waterfronts, and canals.

This is a design vocabulary, not just a manifesto. The list imagines a city built around human movement and visual experience, where traffic engineering no longer dictates every arrangement.

A book made from connected pictures

The author describes this early design library as preliminary material subsequently revised for Part III of the Carfree Design Manual. The parent website presents Crawford's two books, Carfree Cities and Carfree Design Manual, with sections on moving people and freight, possible conversions, and objections to the proposal.

A print-resources page dates the first book to 2000 and the later manual to 2009. It connects the site's visual experiment to a sustained publishing project rather than a one-off image gallery. Crawford's biography discusses experience in public transport, design, and software and recalls his interest in communities built around walkable quaysides.

The sketches are proposals by their author, not evidence that every design element was adopted, economically viable, or accepted by contemporary urban planners. Visitors should distinguish the artistic argument for a certain city form from empirical claims about transport systems.

The surviving navigation itself is historically revealing. Dozens of separate short HTML documents are connected through a manually composed illustrated index, with an optional thumbnail overview. It resembles the way a designer might lay sketches across a table for discussion.

A proposal for whole cities can sometimes be understood best by looking at one well-placed doorway.

Browse the original sketchbook and the larger car-free planning project.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.