Chapter 19 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet begins the book’s exploration of the Cold War-era Urban Planet when both the USA and the USSR turned to a rising international “modernist” school of urban planning to contend with housing crises and the advent of the automobile. As the peripheries of cities everywhere expanded due to the global population explosion, city-ward migration, and oil-burning private transport, rapid acts of pre-fabricated urban construction took contrasting forms on the peripheries of American and Soviet cities. In the United States, low-density automobile suburbs sprawled outward from historic cores as the American state and financial and real estate capitalists forced growing populations of color into segregated “ghettos” in older urban neighborhoods deprived of investment. In the Soviet Union, the regime sought, only marginally successfully, to solve its housing crisis with state-built peripheral tower block housing that intensified density on the urban outskirts. Elsewhere in the “First” and “Second” Worlds, mixtures of these two approaches produced still other “modernist” urban forms.

As an anatomist of socially inculcated identities, DeLillo deploys a recurring motif of automobility, which helps to dramatize and often satirize some common white American male inclinations. Propelled by a sense of something missing in their routinely plotted lives, DeLillo’s protagonists often lurch into escape mode in an archetypal white American male way, by jumping in a car and hitting the road. However, their clichéd and encapsulating choice of vehicular transport itself signals how difficult it can be to escape an identity largely formed by negation, that is, by white masculinity’s self-defining exploitation of others. Given the conceptual emptiness that DeLillo finds at the heart of white American male identity, pursuits of a seemingly more genuine self usually result in such protagonists driving themselves right back to where they more or less began.