The rise of the automobile changed the geographical quality of suburban growth. What began as “finger-shaped” extensions along rail and trolley lines began to “move laterally or perpendicularly” (181). This represents the second permutation of decentering to occur. First the movement is straight outward (radial), and then turns circumferential. Suburban growth since WWII has the quality of cloud-bursts. In this sense, it follows the mathematical qualities that Benjamin noted in Baudelaire: the suburban imperialism of the Levitt brothers envisioned blank spaces which were filled in with mass-produced individualism.

(Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Print.)