Abstract
With transportation deeply implicated in the human environmental footprint, urban mobility arrangements have emerged as the focus of much scholarly interest. In this light, the continuing dependence on the personal automobile has been a key conundrum egging on much of this curiosity. American historians (of different convictions) have been notably at the forefront of a critical examination of the deep entrenching of the automobile in USA. The overwhelming dependence on the automobile in USA, according to its many interlocutors, is visible in how cities were reshaped in playing host to the automobile 1 ; is a facet of widespread environmental terra-forming 2 ; is entangled within deep cultural strains 3 ; is an outcome of strategies by automotive interests to re-shape streets. 4 While the particular instances of how automobile dependence in America was wrought is novel, the storyline in each of these above examples is familiar – the mobility constellation surrounding the automobile has instantiated a vast and formidable engine of transformation through which dependence on the automobile became embroiled in multiple social, cultural, and environmental layers.
Peter Norton in his latest offering marks a refreshing break from this well-trod originary narrative of American automobility and adopts conceptual and methodological directions to articulate a novel argument – how is automobile dependence sustained in America over time and what are the conceptual threads that allow us to grasp the perpetuation of this dependence. For Norton, the story of continuing automobile dependence is inseparable from its periodic renewal effected by the seemingly infallible promise that technological advances offer to engineer congestion-free and safe urban travel. A key conceptual device that embeds this promise of technology is the technofuturistic vision. Spanning a period of about 80 years from the circa 1940 to 2015, Norton distinguishes four episodes (each separated by 25 years) when technofuturistic visions were evoked, modelled, demonstrated, and deployed to maintain the dominance of the automobile. Each of these visions reified as dioramas at major public exhibitions employed spectacle to convince consumers that technological advances of the time would usher in a desirable future of urban mobility. Referred to as futuramas, they “depict utopian futures of about twenty years hence: soon enough to be relevant to consumers, but sufficiently distant to avert distrust and disillusionment when reality disappointed – as it always did” (p. 37). The four futuramas depicted form the throbbing core of the book and Norton's academic brilliance and analytical acuity really shines through in their exposition. It would, however, have been more useful for an academic reader if there had been more scholarly development of the concept of futurama, especially its linkages to similar concepts such as sociotechnical imaginaries, speculative fabulations, and futurisms. Such development would assist in giving the notion of futurama greater analytical clarity.
Building upon his previous work, Norton proposes that the futuramas that have guided and entrenched American automobile dependence were authored purposefully by motordom – an analytical shorthand for a loose coalition of automotive interests including automobile manufacturers, industry, researchers, academic and research agencies, and government. While the cast of actors that constitute motordom change periodically based on the particular constellation of technologies and businesses implicated in each futurama, a constant is the intention with which the promise of technological advances is mobilized to putatively render obsolete congestion, accidents and other ills of an automotive orientation. However, the analytical purchase of motordom as a concept deployed across different periods could benefit from greater emphasis. As it stands currently, we know that motordom has coalesced together anew every 25 years or so to marshall the promise of high-tech automotoring. However, how has the concept evolved over time? Some attention to its diachronicity would allow us to appreciate if motordom ebbs or flows and if its actions are re-calibrated and if so how? Such analysis would be crucial to any praxis for an escape from the futuramas, which America appears doomed to re-enact with depressing regularity. Without such analysis, escape from futuramas are usually limited to borrowing best practices from other contexts, often reinforcing automobile dependence in unforeseen ways.
The truly astounding contribution that Peter Norton makes is the book's methodological novelty of crafting a longue durée narrative that spans about 80 years. Where other monographs might have been content with depicting one futurama of high-tech automotorism, Norton has deftly strung together a compelling narrative that spans four sequential futuramas. In so doing, he has achieved to tell a tale whose pedagogical potential far exceeds that of a single futurama. For one, it allows Norton to demolish the promise that contemporary autonomous driving holds to transform urban mobility in America and elsewhere. It does so by exploding the myth of exceptionalism, so carefully cultivated through association with tech giants like Tesla and Google, by equating autonomous driving with (failed) past efforts at high-tech driving. However, by far the more impressive achievement of this book is its ability to hold the metaphorical historical mirror to an American society that appears doomed to repeat and renew its contract with automobile dependence every 25 years or so. By doing so, this book, in the best traditions of public history, embodies the cautionary Churchillian aphorism – those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Norton has now spoken, will America read this book, learn from history, and escape the repeat loop of automobile dependence.
