Search Results

Invention and commercialization of automotive internal combustion engines was a multistranded process that began during the 1880s in Germany with design by Benz, Daimler and Maybach, and then received critical contributions from France, the UK, and the United States. Otto-cycle gasoline engines became the dominant prime movers in passenger cars as well as in the first airplanes, while diesel engines were initially limited to heavy-duty maritime and railroad applications. Line assembly introduced by Henry Ford provided a long-lasting solution to the mass manufacturing. The car industry eventually became the leading sector of modern economies and car culture has had a profound effect on many facets of modern life.

Chapter 6 emerged as an irresistible topic which very powerfully augmented many of the points made elsewhere in this book. Whilst acknowledging the significance of the car and the urban myths about the driving habits of young Asian men; this chapter provides at one level an insight into the intensive investment of individuals into a particular interest (in this case their cars), to the extent that it comes to constitute the basis for a very strong sub-cultural identification amongst its practitioners. This chapter is redolent of untrammelled enthusiasms, and of networks of sharing, that constitute an example of an invisible vitality within a community like Manningham. It points to the importance of identifying and acknowledging the potential of such enthusiasms for enriching lives in urban contexts that may to others appear to be without charm. The car also provides an insight into the differential employment of social and economic wealth within and across ethnic communities. This chapter also necessarily notes the unfortunate capacity of the car to provide a particularly potent means of inter-ethnic irritation on the streetscape of an urban area. The car is revealed to be a potent symbolic marker of intergroup relations.

This chapter examines two dominant perspectives on socialist cars, one belonging to the Cold War context and the other to post-1989 Communist nostalgia. What seems to have survived the dissolution of the former Eastern Bloc with regard to cars is either their proverbial bad reputation or a nostalgic patina retroactively added to them. This chapter first traces the parallel advancement toward mass motorization in the German Democratic Republic, the Soviet Union, and socialist Romania. It then considers the car as a vehicle of socialism, with particular emphasis on the characteristic features of the so-called socialist car culture as well as the national context and the specific conditions that allowed mass motorization to spread throughout the entire Eastern Bloc. It also explores various constructions of the Socialist Car and how it gave rise to identical discourses and inspired similar popular cultural movements in all three countries. Finally, it discusses the integrative function of the consumption and social policies of the 1960s and 1970s that homogenized socialist societies.

This chapter examines some of the functions and roles of consumer “activation” in socialist car cultures by focusing on cars and consumers in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from the 1970s, when a specific type of “automobile society” emerged. It considers car tinkering, repairing, and modifying within the context of Autobasteln—the social movement of do-it-yourself, amateur craftsmanship, bricolage, even modeling and home renovation. The chapter discusses Autobasteln in relation to politics, the economy, the individual bonding of man and technological artifacts, and aesthetics. It asks whether automobiles in socialist countries had not only technological but also social specifics, whether the social construction of cars was different in different societies, and whether users needed or developed other practices and skills than those used in the West.

Despite the vast increase in automobility everywhere, the American obsession with cars still stands out. Yet, despite the multicar household, with vehicles aplenty for teens, the lure of the automobile as a transition to adulthood seems to be in decline. By 2005, reports of delay in teen applications for driver’s licenses were common. The Recession of 2008, increased youth unemployment, and education costs, along with higher car prices provide an economic explanation. And, public pressure, backed up by new legislation, made getting the once coveted license at 16 far more difficult. The acquisition of mechanical skills, long the hallmark of the transition from boy to man--especially in the working class—has declined with the computerization of vehicles. Teens today also have substituted digital or “virtual” liberation from the constraints of family for the old mechanical/physical freedom with the car. And liberation from elders has come earlier with the smartphone. Yet not all agree that growing up with cars is over. Millennials especially note the persistence of auto enthusiasm in their generation and insist that their car culture is simply being ignored by self-absorbed elders, unable to look beyond their own youth of Deuce Coups and GTOs.

This chapter discusses the cultural history of the lowriding phenomenon in Los Angeles from the 1960s through the 1970s and how car culture in Chicano and Black communities has involved a re-creation or a reimagining of the city's urban landscape. More specifically, it examines how and why lowriding developed and what it means to Chicanos and African Americans. Focusing on the Ruelas family, the “first family” of lowriding and founders of the Dukes Car Club of Los Angeles, the chapter considers the sociohistorical interconnections between Chicano and Black cultural spaces in Los Angeles through the practice of lowriding. It also explores how this cultural space as well as Chicano cultural identity has been influenced by the politics of bajito y suavecito/low and slow. It shows that the Ruelas family had deep and multifaceted relationship with both African American culture and Black lowriders such as Terry Andersen and Ted Wells.

This chapter examines the relationship of women to cars and society in Russia and the Soviet Union since 1990, with particular emphasis on questions of automobility, gender relations, women’s emancipation, daily life, and consumption. In order to understand car culture from a feminine perspective, the chapter analyzes the meaning of cars for women and the extent to which these meanings have changed over time, especially in recent years, as the number of women drivers has risen dramatically. It also explores whether women, like men, cherished the Soviet dream of consumption, owning a car, and whether they made the usual connection between driving and freedom or independence. Finally, it discusses the relationship, if any, between women’s driving and the emancipation of women, along with women’s attitudes about automobiles and driving.

This chapter assesses the role of transportation and street environments in people's lives and how reliance on the automobile has shaped the United States and other parts of the world. The century-long evolution into a car-dependent culture has had its benefits in terms of commerce and regional mobility, but has also had devastating effects on people's health and safety. Rather than discuss the negative impacts of cars on air pollution, the chapter focuses on the place-based health impacts of reducing people's reliance on the automobile by increasing the walkability of areas and expanding access to public transit. Younger adults are increasingly ambivalent about whether they should even own a car and are moving to cities in search of more efficient and human-scale mobility options. These options include having access to a street network with safe and efficient pedestrian and bike infrastructures as well as public-transit options. Meanwhile, public officials in numerous cities are talking about the benefits of expanded transit systems and walkable street grids to encourage more active lifestyles and attract tourists, families, and entrepreneurs who are tired of traffic congestion and car commuting and interested in a lively street experience that is not simply seen from behind a windshield. The chapter then highlights case studies showing how new place-based transportation and streetscape changes can be a tool for improving health and safety.

Chapter 2 considers the aesthetics of petroleum in California and the United States as the freeway-suburban complex develops through the mid-twentieth century, producing as many reasons for loving oil as for fearing it.

American teen car culture reached its peak in the 1960s and early 1970s with the era of the muscle car, cheap gas, and well-paying factory jobs awaiting high school graduates. This story (at least the white part of it) is romanticized in American Graffiti, celebrating the end of a presumed golden age of the cruise in the early 1960s. Nevertheless, the cruise culture went on, only to begin its decline in the mid-1970s with the high fuel costs of the oil crisis of 1973 and 1979 and the subsequent downturn in the American manufacturing economy, especially the American auto industry. But there was also a little recognized trend: law enforcement was beginning to crack down on cruising and kids and their cars intruding on public space, resulting in the eclipse of cruising by the end of the 1980s. The story is part of the decline of the white largely working class greaser and is also about the clash of race and age, an assault on the Latino low rider, and a reversal of the permissive attitude of adults toward autonomous youth.

This chapter features “homework” conducted in American Sāmoa that illustrates how the intensification of transnational flows of goods, people, and ideas in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have transformed local values about cars, mobility, and social status. The mobility that the car has introduced makes a big difference between having one and not having one, enabling access to different consumer items for wider swaths of local people. In addition to accessing consumer goods more easily, car culture has enabled the transformation of everyday patterns of movement for many on the island. Because of these shifts in daily patterns of movement and consumption and their link to the cash economy, they also suggest changes in local social organization, where one's social status is not always primarily determined by one's relation to ranking titles (although clearly this is still very important).

This chapter traces the popularization of self-service and the uneven ways in which it shed its original association with the department store and consumerist prestige. It suggests that as self-service spread into less exclusive sectors, it often retained an association with the aristocratic which, in turn, created anxieties about the fact that it also, as a new system of shopping, required customers to do much of the work that had once been done by clerks and others.

The chapter introduces the ideas of Bruno Latour in order to identify the shopping cart as what Latour would call a “nonhuman actant,” which shapes human behavior in crucial and active ways. Above all, the cart completes a circuit of nonhuman machines in the new system of industrial food flow, ensuring foods that are produced on an unprecedented scale keep moving and reach the private home far more quickly and on a greater scale than previously.

This chapter discusses the privacy issues raised by the film 21 Grams (2003). The film explores the notion that human lives and fates are interconnected. Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu uses contemporary automotive culture to move his characters into position, to show that they are connected and what they value. One of the consequences of car culture—the car crash—functions as plot hinge, forcing different lives into relationship with one another. While not initially situated within a medical environment, a car crash can be of bioethical significance because automobile accidents and other human tragedies may also produce commodities that Western society considers good: donated organs. The character Paul's receipt of a donor heart is interwoven with events dealing with the fallout from a breach of physician-patient privilege and breach of donor-recipient confidentiality.