Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
rural areas to cities. On the urban periphery, automobiles allowed the radial
trunk lines extending from urban cores to be supplemented by networks of
circumferential trips. Early conceptions of suburbanization, such as Burgess's
concentric ring model, ignored the prevailing star-shaped form of time-
space compression induced along rail and streetcar lines (Knowles 2006).
Suburbanization for the middle class became synonymous with upward social
mobility, home ownership, and mass consumption. The low residential dens-
ities of suburban areas in American cities were typically one-quarter of those
found in European ones (Newman and Kenworthy 1999). However, the free-
dom of choice of
ered by the automobile came at the price of depriving
others: the decentralization of people and economic activities rendered pub-
lic transportation systems, and those who depend on them, signi
ff
cantly
disadvantaged, a cleavage marked by race/ethnicity as much as class. The
result was that even the poor became heavily automobile-dependent.
Janelle (1986) of
fi
ers an explicit theorization of suburbanization as time-
space compression, representing the growth of the metropolitan periphery in
terms of the longer absolute distances involved in the journey-to-work but
shorter relative ones as the highway network allowed large numbers of com-
muters to shuttle to and from urban cores. In this view, centered upon utility-
maximizing commuters attempting to make the most out of their limited time
budgets, the growth of the urban periphery arises from the multitude of
choices in which suburbanites, blessed with steadily rising incomes, substitute
longer commuting distances (but not travel times) for increased quantities of
residential space at relatively a
ff
ordable prices. Such behavioralist explan-
ations of urban structure and change are not necessarily wrong, for they
speak to the complex subjective processes involved, but do so at the expense
of neglecting broader issues of class, power, and con
ff
ict, as well as the social
forces that generate individual preferences and choices. Time-space compres-
sion, therefore, is neither reducible to individual behavior nor independent
of it.
Concomitantly, the automobile led to numerous cultural, perceptual, and
psychological changes. Driving combined Western notions of freedom, mob-
ility, privacy, and e
fl
ortless mastery of enormous power, immersing drivers
and passengers into a series of ever-changing spaces that rushed by rapidly.
Ensconced within their private bubbles, the auto rea
ff
rmed and deepened the
deeply individualistic character of bourgeois life. Indeed, automobile driving
spawned a cottage industry concerned with the feeling, perception, and cul-
ture of driving the car, its kinesthetic engagements with the landscape, and
how all of these are enmeshed in racialized, gendered, and national feelings
of movement, mobility, identity, and embodiment (Brodsly 1981). Many of
the skills and practices of driving became so deeply internalized as to be
unconscious. For many people, driving a car merged human and machine
into a cyborg (Haraway 1991). Indeed, the rise of the single family home and
all that it represents in many ways can be attributed to the shift to an auto-
oriented culture (Flink 1988). Some observers attribute the decline of dense,
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