Research Catalog

Watching the traffic go by : transportation and isolation in urban America

Title: Watching the traffic go by : transportation and isolation in urban America / Paul Mason Fotsch.
Author: Fotsch, Paul Mason, 1965-
Publication: Austin : University of Texas Press, 2007.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan Not available - Please for assistance.	Text	Use in library	TA1023 .F68 2006	Off-site

Details

Description

xi, 240 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

Summary

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].

Subject

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Acknowledgments -- Introduction : Stabilizing mobility -- pt. 1. Transportation as antidote to modern city -- ch. 1. The trolley, the automobile, and autonomy -- ch. 2. Townless highways and highwayless towns -- pt. 2. German critical theory meets America cartopia -- ch. 3. The building of a superhighway future at the New York World's Fair -- ch. 4. Film noir and the hidden violence of transportation in Los Angeles -- pt. 3. The public's fears of urban gridlock -- ch. 5. Stories of the MTA : contesting meanings of subway space -- ch. 6. Urban freeway stories : racial politics and the armored automobile -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Works cited -- Index.

ISBN

9780292714250
0292714254
9780292714267
0292714262

LCCN

2006008602

OCLC

ocm66392522
66392522
SCSB-1419522

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library