Lawson’s concept actually begins with his Hub Cities proposal, which would restructure the country’s urban environment by stringing a network of planned cities across the country “to create better living through less densely-populated cities and safer, more efficient transportation,” according to a description by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian’s Design Museum.

Lawson’s utopian vision of better city living required a network of Hub Cities to be built across the country, each accommodating 50,000 residents and their sites of employment. For the ease of construction, Hub Cities would feature mass-produced and pre-fabricated buildings that could be implemented in a similar plan in a range of geographic sites. A building at the city’s center would house all utility and service offices, commercial retailers, and business offices. Perhaps most importantly, the central building would also house a parking lot for private cars and a marshalling yard for all subsurface transportation equipment.

To prevent traffic from bogging down the Hub Cities with congestion, he envisioned placing industrial areas at the peripheries of the cities to keep trucks and other large vehicles off the city streets. But people still needed to get around within the cities, he reasoned, so he designed the Mini-Max car system.

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