Destiny, Manifest.

From the very beginning, the American mentality has been largely influenced by the vast amount of space that we are able to inhabit. In our first years as a colony, if we wanted to expand our cities or our farms or our industry we simply moved west. Once we got past the Appalachians, there was nothing but an endless expanse of (seemingly) virgin land stretching all the way to the Pacific. So it is an interesting coinicidence (if you believe in those) that at the same time that America is beginning to come of age at the turn of the 20th century after enduring a bloody civil war and getting its industrial revolution underway (lagging the British by about 50 years), the automobile is invented. It was a potent match: new high-speed mode of personal transport coupled with a seemingly infinite amount of land and space upon which to make use of it. Obviously, the city most impacted by this new technology was Los Angeles, an impressionable infant city, already growing out of its training wheels. With tons of space, affordable cars, and lack of existing infrastructure, Los Angeles became the built paradigm of the 20th century with its drive-in markets, the precursor to still-prevalent strip-malls, quickly dominating the landscape. The parking lot was the new piazza (as Venturi as said about the parking lots on the strip of Las Vegas), the logical form to occur at major intersections, replete with fountains and Spanish theming, not unlike the proposed historical pastiche of Destiny's Italian hilltown scheme. In the 20th century, Manifest Destiny was realized, with the glory of America stretching uninterrrupted from coast to coast. And now in the 21st century, the west having been won for a century now, "Destiny" is moving back east, perhaps embodying the new American paradigm.