Christof Mauch, Thomas Zeller, eds. The World beyond the Windshield: Roads and Landscapes in the United States and Europe. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007. 312 pp. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8214-1767-6; $22.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8214-1768-3.
Reviewed by Corey Ross (Department of Modern History, University of Birmingham)
Published on H-German (February, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher
One for the Road: The History of Automobilism beyond the Car
The construction of motor highways during the twentieth century and the myriad effects they have had on society and the landscape are matters to which few of us give much thought. The daily commute, the trip to the relatives, and the summer holiday journey have become an unconscious part of normal life in the automobile age. The view "beyond the windshield" onto the millions of miles of roadscapes is something with which Europeans and North Americans are all familiar, in many cases much more so than we would like. But it is precisely such seemingly banal and universal everyday experiences that, when probed skillfully, yield some of the most valuable insights into the societies in which we live and how they got to be that way. Undoubtedly the automobile has become a crucial--perhaps the single most crucial--factor shaping lifestyles, mentalities, and built environments in the industrial world, from commerce and transportation to leisure and environmental concerns. But unlike the automobile itself, which boasts a vast historical literature, the creation of new kinds of roads specifically designed to accommodate it has attracted far less attention. This collection of essays is the first to trace the development of highway building and design in Europe and the United States in a broad and comparative manner. In the process, it offers a remarkably interesting account of how the various interests, priorities, and perceptions among both highway builders and users interacted in different historical contexts to produce the particular kinds of roads that we see today and so often take for granted.
One of the premises of the volume, as the editors highlight in the introduction, is that roads should not be conceived as a foreign intrusion into the "natural" landscape but as part of the landscape itself: "[T]he dichotomy between unspoiled nature and human intervention is a cultural construction" (p. 3). This approach reflects recent trends in environmental history away from a focus on "wilderness" and preservation towards recognition of the extensive, long-term human impact on the environment, which is never ecologically static but continually changing. Of course, one might object that such an approach downplays the scale of modern intervention: clearing trees for arable land is rather different from moving millions of tons of earth and then paving it over permanently. But it is nonetheless a useful and necessary methodological starting point for thinking about the relationship between humans and their physical surroundings, especially if one wants to explore how cultural orientations and aesthetic sensibilities helped shape the environment around us.
The ten chapters, though focusing on a wide array of topics, revolve around several core themes: the ways in which highway planners in the early twentieth century sought to meet the various requirements--many of them necessarily based on assumptions about the future--of different road users, landowners, and state authorities; how the relationship between these factors differed from country to country and how planners, especially during the early innovative phase of road building, borrowed ideas from abroad; the attempt to define new aesthetic principles of highway architecture and landscaping; and, finally, how motorists used the roads for their own, sometimes subversive, purposes--regardless of what planners had in mind.
This latter question of everyday usage, what one might call the "social life" of roadways, is the subject of the first chapter by Rudy Koshar on driving cultures in the United States and Germany. Koshar focuses in particular on the many discrepancies between the presumed practices of drivers that shaped road design and the actual patterns of use that developed over time, which he categorizes according to three different driving practices: a "pioneering" mode which characterized the early years, when a small number of elite motorists, largely unencumbered by regulations or conventions of driving etiquette, often had to determine which roads were suitable for cars at all; a "democratic" mode of mass participation necessarily bounded by certain rules of behavior, which first emerged in the United States and then gradually in Europe (including not least Hitler's Germany, as Koshar argues); and an "oppositional" mode of hot-rodders and joy-riders that mocked the behavioral norms governing most drivers. Jeremy Korr's fascinating chapter, "The Physical and Social Constructions of the Capital Beltway," which encircles Washington DC, similarly emphasizes the unintended social and cultural consequences of road construction. Over the years, the perennial traffic jams on the beltway have reorganized not only the physical but also the mental geography of the DC area, altering property values and demographic patterns, heavily influencing people's choice of residence and jobs, and even creating a widely perceived cultural watershed between a more liberal and urban area "inside the beltway" and more conservative suburbs beyond. Yet, as Korr also notes, residents have had little real say in the beltway's construction, despite the putative consultation processes undertaken by transportation officials who ultimately proved reluctant to alter their own designs.
This theme recurs throughout the volume, for the interests of road planners and residents frequently clashed, and not only in the usual not-in-my-backyard fashion. Anne Mitchell Whisnant's account of the construction of the Blue Ridge Parkway demonstrates the wide variety of resident grievances (land acquisition, access rights, and so on), most of which were brusquely overlooked in the political wrestling matches over where and how best to open up the southeastern Appalachians to tourism. Adding insult to injury, the entire Blue Ridge project revolved around prevailing stereotypes of locals as backward hillbillies. The overall concept of the parkway was to showcase Appalachia and its residents as a living testament to America's rugged pioneering spirit. Even so, the end result was a beautiful road by any standard, a prime example of the American parkway ideal, according to which driving was done for its own sake. Other notable examples were the scenic roads built in South Dakota's Black Hills, which quickly became tourist attractions themselves. As Suzanne Julin shows, the builders of the Needles Highway and Iron Mountain Road were explicitly encouraged to prioritize stunning views and panoramas over everything else. The outcome was an interesting paradox: the very sense of exhilaration and free-wheeling adventure felt by unsuspecting motorists on these wild-looking roads was in fact carefully planned down to the smallest detail.
Much of the attraction of the parkway genre lay, as Timothy Davis argues, in its seeming reconciliation of the modern and the traditional, cloaking mass motorization in the garb of nostalgia. This was especially the case during the interwar era, which witnessed the construction of numerous parkways around major metropolitan areas (especially New York City) and in historical regions (such as the Mount Vernon and Colonial Parkways in Virginia). Parkway design was as international as it was popular at the time: much of the initial impulse came from the European boulevard, and American parkways were quickly emulated throughout Europe. Yet as early as the 1930s, recreational and commuter parkways diverged, and after the Second World War it was the latter, built for speed, that drivers wanted most. But if speed became the essence, road aesthetics were not wholly ignored in the postwar era. Carl Zimring's chapter on the U.S. Highway Beautification Act of 1965 shows that the "vernacular landscape" (a term coined by John Brinckerhoff Jackson) of restaurants, gas stations, and motels itself became the object of aesthetic concerns, as various groups, backed by Lady Bird Johnson, lobbied against the blight of billboards and scrap yards along American roads.
Disputes over the appearance of roads also frequently erupted among road builders themselves, whether on aesthetic, professional, or political grounds. The two main camps in these struggles were often civil engineers and landscape architects. As Thomas Zeller demonstrates, the construction of the Autobahn and the knowledge that underpinned it changed significantly from the attempted marriage of technology and nature under the Nazis to an emphasis on more utilitarian, rational designs during the early Federal Republic. In the process, landscape architects forfeited much of the influence they had previously possessed, and civil engineers benefited greatly from the shift in focus to safety and efficiency as motorization skyrocketed in the 1950s and 1960s. Meanwhile, road builders in the German Democratic Republic made the typical attempts to demarcate their efforts from those of the Federal Republic and the Third Reich, only to borrow heavily from both in the end. Axel Dossmann's chapter shows that the result was none too impressive by international standards, and certainly not to the many East Germans who continually complained about the appalling, ever-worsening state of the roads. In Britain, too, no shortage of debates erupted between civil engineers and landscape architects when high-speed motorway construction finally expanded in the 1950s. While both parties sought to design roads befitting the "national character," they had very different ideas about what this was. Whereas civil engineers appealed to the essentially "British" values of orderliness and efficiency, landscape architects invoked the long-standing (mainly English) tradition of landscape design. Intriguingly, little such debate erupted in Italy. As Massimo Moraglio shows, the autostradabuilders were largely uninterested in beautification, and landscape architects played no role in their construction. Rather, the autostrade were generally designed with only speed and efficiency in mind, regardless of the aesthetic consequences. Moraglio argues that this outcome reflected the wider disregard for the landscape in twentieth-century Italy, whose leaders--Fascist and democratic alike--tended to prize the hypermodern over gestures to tradition as part of the country's attempt to catch up to other industrialized nations.
Taken together, these chapters tell us much about how and why the roadscapes we encounter everyday became what they are. Generously illustrated, accessibly written, and commendably cohesive, the volume recounts an important story about the process of motorization that is often obscured by our fascination with the automobile per se. As irresistible as this process (and its consequences for the landscape) may seem with hindsight, there was nothing inevitable about the outcome. As The World Beyond the Windshield clearly demonstrates, in road building as in other spheres it is the choices people make--framed, to be sure, by cultural orientations, political ideas, and structures of power--that shape our engagement with technology and the physical environment.
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Citation:
Corey Ross. Review of Mauch, Christof; Zeller, Thomas, eds, The World beyond the Windshield: Roads and Landscapes in the United States and Europe.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
February, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=23436
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