An automotive city, also known as a car-centric city, is an urban area that facilitates and encourages the movement of people via private transportation, rather than public transport, cycling, or walking. This is achieved through both 'physical planning'—such as modifications to the built environment including street networks, parking spaces, automobile–pedestrian interface systems, and low-density urbanised areas with detached dwellings, driveways, or garages—and 'soft programming', such as social policy shaping street use through traffic safety and automobile campaigns, automobile laws, and the social redefinition of streets as public spaces primarily reserved for motor vehicles.

Multiple competing views have attempted to explain the rapid dominance of automobile use over alternative modes of transportation in North America in the early 20th century. Two compelling arguments are:

While both arguments are nuanced, the basic principles behind each – advocacy of private transportation and advocacy of automobile production and consumption – informed the American automobile manufacturing boom of the early 1900s. By the late 1920s, the automobile industry was producing millions of cars each year, its surging growth due in part to the sociology of industrial phenomena related to Fordism.

The creation of the automotive city may be due, in part, to an attack on old customs by the good roads movement, seeking to pave the way for the rapidly expanding automobile market—and to the triumph of individual liberties, associated with consumption and the free market, over restrictive governance of the built environment and its use. By the 1930s, the interaction of automotive industry interests, a vocal, growing, minority of city motorists and favourable political sentiment, worked together to reconstruct the city street as a reserved space for the automobile, delegitimising previous users (such as pedestrians) and forging the foundations for the first automotive cities.

This transformative process could not have succeeded, were it not for the development, and deployment, of a system of symbols, codes and laws which would become the language of traffic signs, and infrastructure design.

By the end of the 20th century the automobile, and the land sequestered for its exclusive use (road infrastructure), had become synonymous with formulations of large North American and Australian cities. The label 'automotive city' has been used by academics such as Norton (2008) and Newman and Kenworthy (2000), to refer to the tendency of city design and configuration in many North American and Australian cities during the 20th century to privilege the private automobile above mass transit systems. The creation of the 'automotive city' detailed by Norton in Fighting Traffic, primarily involved the reconfiguration of American city transport infrastructure and services, from the early 1920s to the 1960s, around the growth of modes of private transportation (the automobile).

In the early 1920s this reconfiguration of American city transport infrastructure around the automobile, at the instigation of traffic engineers, resulted in the rewriting of an old English common law (which had previously defined the street as a space where all users were equal) to define the street as a space which privileges cars, allocating them the right of way (except at intersections).

This early and prolonged reconfiguration of the American, and Australian, city around private transportation served to dramatically alter the course of city development within these countries. This is made most tangible through the generally accepted shape the man-made environment has taken in cities such as Melbourne (which never got rid of its tram system), Los Angeles and Detroit, which cater to the needs of automobile ownership (i.e. sidewalks, grid city layout linked with dormitory suburbs, highways and private transport corridors, and the securing of land for car spaces).