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The self-destruction of the urban environment is already well under way. The explosion of cities into the countryside, covering it with what Mumford calls "a formless mass of thinly spread semi-urban tissue,'' is directly governed by the imperatives of consumption. The dictatorship of the automobile-the pilot product of the first stage of commodity abundance-has left its mark on the landscape with the dominance of freeways, which tear up the old urban centers and promote an ever wider dispersal. Within this process various forms of partially reconstituted urban fabric fleetingly crystallize around "distribution factories" -giant shopping centers erected in the middle of nowhere and surrounded by acres of parking space. These temples of frenetic consumption are subject to the same irresistible centrifugal momentum, which casts them aside as soon as they have engendered enough surrounding development to become overburdened secondary centers in their turn. But the technical organization of consumption is only the most visible aspect of the general process of decomposition that has brought the city to the point of consuming itself.