Colin Ward, DOPO L’AUTOMOBILE, 2012

“After the car should be recommended to everyone, and especially to all drivers: it is the most intelligent questioning of this twentieth-century fetish that has greatly contributed to alleviating our pains and creating others, even more disastrous ones.”
Goffredo Fofi

Is a different and more effective model of mobility possible? – Colin Ward wonders in this prophetic book that opened the reflection on a totem pole of modernity. Not only is it possible, but it is also inevitable, the author replies together with Franco La Cecla and Giuseppe Onufrio, who contextualize the discourse to the Italian reality. Personal mobility was in fact a precious conquest of humanity, but the exasperated use of individual cars turned it into a calamity: it destroyed the urban environment, it cost more human lives than a world war, it wasted huge quantities of non-renewable energies and has contributed massively to air pollution. Not only that, but within cities it has even registered a movement speed lower than that of a hundred years ago. To overcome the impasse we have found ourselves in, Ward suggests some valid alternatives – individual and collective – to defend the freedom to move, in the hope that after the era of mass automotive fetishism, a happily post-automotive era can open .

Colin Ward (1924-2010) was an architect, journalist, teacher, but above all one of the greatest anarchist thinkers of the second half of the twentieth century.