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Urban Transport and Mobility in Technology and Culture
Technology and Culture ( IF 0.7 ) Pub Date : 2021-01-07
Peter Norton

  • Urban Transport and Mobility in Technology and Culture
  • Peter Norton (bio)

In the quest for a more sustainable future, we have much to learn from relatively sustainable practices of the past. In January 2020, Technology and Culture published "Sustainable Urban Mobility in the Present, Past, and Future," by Frank Schipper, Martin Emanuel, and Ruth Oldenziel.1 The authors distilled the conclusions of a series of workshops in the history and future of sustainable urban mobility, culminating in the publication of A U-Turn to the Future?—a collection that questions the neglect of valuable experience from historical efforts to find less energy-intensive urban transportation.2 In its interest in the future and in a usable past (the practical application of history), the article at first appears to be a departure from the typical contribution. A closer look, however, reveals that it unites diverse threads of scholarship that have been developing in Technology and Culture since the 1960s, and that are worth pursuing more deliberately in the years ahead.

The study of transportation as a field within the wider realm of technology and society has been so completely reconceived in recent decades that the vocabulary has had to change too. Scholars of transportation had attended primarily to vehicles, hardware, invention, commerce, and production. But for most people, most of the time, transportation includes but is not confined to vehicles. It is more personal, subjective, and experiential. It encompasses means of getting around that are of little commercial significance but still of great importance by other worthy measures. It is rich in a kind of inventiveness that has been excluded from conventional definitions of invention. [End Page 1197] It is dense in its interconnections with matters of culture, power, gender, and race. As a word, transportation, with its inherited legacies, was inadequate to the job of accommodating such more inclusive perspectives. Hence scholars turned to mobility as a more inclusive and versatile alternative.3 This development is still evolving and perspectives are diverse; even among its scholars, usages of mobility and mobilities vary widely. Technology and Culture has had an important place in this creative reimagining of transportation studies, as the work reviewed here demonstrates.

When Technology and Culture was established in 1959, urban mobility was the subject of intense controversy in the United States. An attack on car-centric urban modernism, best exemplified by Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities, was already well underway. Nevertheless urban mobility was practically absent from the journal until 1967, when W. David Lewis reported on a conference on technology and urbanization jointly hosted by the Society for the History of Technology and the Organization of American Historians in Cincinnati.4 Work presented there included papers by Roy Lubove on "Urbanization, Technology, and the Historian" and by Sam Bass Warner on "Transportation and the City." According to Lewis, Warner cautioned the audience against historically naïve notions of progress and advised them to look beyond vehicles and artifacts of urban transportation to consider "altered living patterns, the shifting locations of economic, occupational, and residential complexes, the results of the increasing physical mobility of working-class and immigrant groups, and so on."

Slow to adopt Warner's advice, contributors to Technology and Culture wrote about inventors and artifacts in the 1960s and 1970s, primarily in the United States. But in his 1977 study of street railways, Michael Massouh warned that history is "not merely the chronicle of heroic accomplishment, nor is it merely the story of hardware."5 Though Massouh's interest was in inventors, he included dead ends and failed innovations. In 1976 Ruth Schwartz Cowan was already proposing much more illuminating ways of investigating technology, integrating the social with the technical. Until then, the tables of contents may have left readers wondering why "and Culture" was included in the journal's name. In articles published in 1976 and 1979, Cowan introduced gender into technology history, bringing attention to matters of users, class, and power.6 Articles featuring inventors and inventions continued, but no longer to the exclusion of sociotechnical studies.7 [End Page 1198]


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The photograph above evokes mobility: it features people...



中文翻译:

城市交通与技术和文化的流动

  • 城市交通与技术和文化的流动
  • 彼得·诺顿(生物)

为了追求更可持续的未来,我们需要从过去相对可持续的实践中学习很多东西。2020年1月,技术与文化出版了Frank Schipper,Martin Emanuel和Ruth Oldenziel撰写的“当前,过去和未来的可持续城市交通”。1作者提炼了一系列关于可持续城市交通的历史和未来的研讨会的结论,并最终出版了《 U-Turn to the Future?-一个集合质疑人们对寻找能源消耗较少的城市交通的历史努力的宝贵经验的忽视。2出于对未来和可用的过去(历史的实际应用)的兴趣,本文最初似乎偏离了典型的贡献。但是,仔细研究后发现,它融合了自1960年代以来在技术和文化领域不断发展的学术研究的多方面线索,并且值得在以后的几年中更加认真地追求。

在最近的几十年中,对交通作为更广泛的技术和社会领域中的一个领域的研究已经被完全重新认识,以至于词汇也不得不改变。交通学者主要研究车辆,硬件,发明,商业和生产。但是对于大多数人来说,在大多数情况下,交通运输包括但不仅限于车辆。它更具个人性,主观性和体验性。它包含的绕行手段对商业意义不大,但通过其他有价值的措施仍然非常重要。它具有丰富的发明创造力,已被排除在常规发明定义之外。[结束页1197]它与文化,权力,性别和种族之间的联系十分紧密。简而言之,运输业具有悠久的遗产,不足以适应这种更具包容性的观点。因此,学者们将移动性视为一种更具包容性和多功能性的替代方案。3这种发展仍在发展,观点各不相同。即使在学者中,流动性和流动性的用法也有很大差异。正如本文所回顾的那样,技术和文化在交通研究的创造性重新想象中占有重要地位。

技术与文化于1959年成立时,城市交通成为美国激烈争论的主题。简·雅各布斯(Jacobs Jacobs)的《美国大城市的死亡与生活》就是最好的例证,对以汽车为中心的城市现代主义的攻击已经在进行中。然而,直到1967年W. David Lewis在辛辛那提市由技术史学会和美国历史学家组织联合主办的技术与城市化会议上进行报道之前,该杂志几乎一直没有城市流动性。4在那里展示的作品包括罗伊·卢博夫(Roy Lubove)的论文《城市化,技术和历史学家》和萨姆·巴斯·华纳(Sam Bass Warner)的论文《交通与城市》。根据刘易斯的说法,华纳警告听众不要在历史上过分幼稚地理解进步,并建议他们超越车辆和城市交通文物,考虑“改变的居住方式,经济,职业和住宅综合体位置的变化,这是不断增长的结果。工人阶级和移民群体的身体流动性,等等。”

缓慢采纳华纳的建议,技术和文化的贡献者在1960年代和1970年代(主要在美国)写了关于发明家和人工制品的文章。但是,迈克尔·马苏(Michael Massouh)在1977年对街道铁路的研究中警告说,历史“不仅是英雄成就的编年史,也不只是硬件的故事”。5尽管Massouh对发明家感兴趣,但他包括死胡同和失败的创新。1976年,Ruth Schwartz Cowan已经提出了更多具有启发性的技术研究方法,将社会与技术结合起来。在那之前,目录可能使读者想知道为什么期刊名称中包含“和文化”。在1976年和1979年发表的文章中,Cowan将性别引入了技术历史,引起了对用户,阶级和权力等问题的关注。6继续以发明人和发明为特色的文章,但不再将其排除在社会技术研究之外。7 [第1198页结束]


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上面的照片让人联想起流动性:它以人为特色...

更新日期:2021-01-07
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