Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
costs declined, global air passenger volumes exploded ten-fold between 1956
and 1972. These improvements generated cognitive and bodily e
ects, such as
jet lag, or “time zone change syndrome,” the fatigue and disorientation that
re
ff
ect the mismatch between the body's circadian rhythms and those of a
destination arrived at suddenly, or, more poetically, “That disconcerting sen-
sation of time travelers that their organs are strewn across a dozen time zones
while their empty skins still forge boldly into the future” (Winfree, quoted in
Gleick 1999:103).
The improved ability of aircraft to traverse ever-longer distances (their
cruising radius) was a signi
fl
cant part of the changing geographies of acces-
sibility unleashed by the airplane. Prior to WWII, when this radius was gen-
erally less than 300 miles, air networks were largely con
fi
ned to continents or
narrow seas. Trans-oceanic voyages involved a series of hops from island to
island; thus, to cross the Atlantic, planes relied on Greenland, Iceland, or the
Azores, or across the Paci
fi
c, Midway, Wake, Guam, and Hawaii. However,
by the 1950s, four-engine planes expanded this radius to more than 700 miles,
which allowed companies and governments to skip such intermediary steps
with non-stop
fi
flights, often spelling commercial oblivion for locales passed
over. Despite the initial promise of ubiquitous accessibility, the changing
geographies of air transportation reveal a series of networks that mirrored and
reinforced terrestrial relations of power and wealth. An extensive early litera-
ture on air routes, for example, demonstrated that the easiest, cheapest, most
frequent and often most rapid routes typically converged on cities of signifi-
fl
fi
-
cant economic and political importance (Taa
e 1956; Sealy 1957), while rural
and low-income areas are typically poorly served. Far from annihilating pre-
vious geographies of inequality, therefore, airline routes tended to amplify
them, magnifying the inaccessibility of places already marginalized during
prior rounds of time-space compression.
On land, too, the post-war boom accelerated the movements of people,
goods, and information. As the automobile became the de
ff
ning symbol of
twentieth-century mobility, roads displaced rail as the primary object of state
intervention in transportation. As Berman (1982) notes, if the distinctive
symbol of nineteenth-century urbanism was the boulevard, its twentieth-
century equivalent was the highway. The highway system, like the Roman
roads and the railroads, represented a major round of investment in the
infrastructure, a spatial
fi
fix that both facilitated and imprisoned subsequent
rounds of capital accumulation. European highway systems paved the way
for the post-war explosion in automobile tra
fi
c. Italy under Mussolini initi-
ated the autostrada network in 1924, the world's
fi
first roads exclusively
designed for high-speed motor tra
c. In 1930, the Germans undertook the
Autobahn system connecting the country's major cities, an e
ort militarized
by the Nazis (Flink 1990). But it was the U.S. Interstate Highway System, the
largest public works project in history (Moon 1994), which epitomized this
modality of movement. In invoking national defense to obtain legislative
authorization, the interstates also exempli
ff
fi
ed cold war politics. Automobile
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