Review: Drive: Journeys through Film, Cities and Landscapes, by Iain Borden; Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940–1990, by Wim de Wit and Christopher James Alexander, eds.; and Car Country: An Environmental History, by Christopher W. Wells

Abstract

Drive: Journeys through Film, Cities and Landscapes London: Reaktion Books, 2013, 280 pp., 40 color and 40 b/w illus. $28, ISBN 9781780230269, by Iain Borden. Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940–1990 Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2013, 320 pp., 112 color and 102 b/w illus. $59.95, ISBN 9781606061282, by Wim de Wit and Christopher James Alexander, eds.. Car Country: An Environmental History Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012, 464 pp., 7 maps and 44 b/w illus. $40, ISBN 9780295992150, by Christopher W. Wells. In July 2013, a New York Times headline proclaimed “the end of car culture.” Though the summer driving season offered plenty of evidence to the contrary, recent data indicate that fewer Americans are driving fewer miles in fewer cars, and even forgoing the adolescent ritual of getting a driver’s license upon turning sixteen. Thus, the Times felt confident in declaring that the country’s century-old love affair with the automobile was finally, inevitably, running out of gas. But if the romance with the car is cooling down, studying its fraught legacy is still plenty hot, as a spate of recent publications makes clear. In fact, in the hundred years since the first Model Ts rolled off the assembly line at Highland Park, Michigan, the car and its social, spatial, and economic impact have been under almost continual scrutiny, producing triumphant Fordist narratives and muckraking antisprawl screeds in almost equal measure. More nuanced, scholarly studies emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century with The Automobile and American Culture (1980; David L. Lewis and Laurence Goldstein, eds.), a notable early example that attempted a comprehensive analysis of what its editors called the “auto-consciousness” of the United States. The continued evolution of that consciousness is fully evident in the three books under review here, each of which tackles a distinct aspect of the culture of automobility. In Car Country , Christopher W. Wells tracks its environmental evolution; in Drive , Iain Borden scrutinizes its experiential representation; in Overdrive , seventeen contributors examine its urban and architectural influence in Los Angeles, the world’s original autopia. Unsurprisingly, all three books deal principally with twentieth-century developments in the United States, though each pushes these parameters in important ways. Car Country begins with the infrastructural consequences of streetcars and railways in the 1880s. Overdrive , which …