Watching the Traffic Go By
Subtitle: Transportation and Isolation in Urban America
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: March 1, 2007
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 254
ISBN-13: 9780292714250
Subjects: American history; American studies; Urban & municipal planning; Social Science; Transportation; Sociology; The Americas; General; Sociology - Urban; Social Science / Sociology / Urban; Film & Video - History & Criticism; City and town life; Popular culture; Transportation engineering; United States
Description: As twentieth-century city planners invested in new transportation systems to deal with urban growth, they ensured that the automobile rather than mass transit would dominate transportation. Combining an exploration of planning documents, sociological studies, and popular culture, Fotsch shows how our urban infrastructure developed and how it has shaped American culture ever since. Fotsch emphasizes the narratives underlying our perceptions of innovations in transportation by looking at the stories we have built around these innovations, and juxtaposing contemporaneous critiques by Lewis Mumford, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer, he argues that these narratives celebrated new technologies that fostered stability for business and the white middle class. At the same time, transportation became another system of excluding women and the poor, especially African Americans, by isolating them in homes and urban ghettos. [From publisher description].