Consuming Landscapes: The Impact of Technology on Roadway Design in the US and Germany, 1920-1970

University Of Maryland, College Park, College Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

Increasingly, experiencing the natural world has become a technologically mitigated activity during the 20th century. Rather than living in a world where one may leave clearly delineated technological spaces for demarcated natural spaces, the industrial and post-industrial experience has been one of meshing environment and technology into zones of crossover and hybridity. Analyzing the workings of this process can help in understanding the history and future meaning of technological artifacts as well as of the environment. As a study of one particular field on the intersection of the environment and technology, this project will explore the way roads have been redesigned for the automobile as parkways since the 1920s in the United States and Germany, what meanings they acquired, and how drivers and passengers experienced them. These roads constituted nature, prescribed a way of seeing it, and turned the scenic view into a visual commodity that could be consumed akin to other mass-produced artifacts. However, this was a contested process, in which civil engineers, landscape architects and the consumers of these roads and views--car drivers and passengers--competed with each other over questions of expertise, meaning, and proper usage. This study analyzes the ways in which these landscapes of mobility have been planned, contested, constructed, and used. As the most prominent specimens of these roads, the Blue Ridge Parkway in the United States and the Deutsche Alpenstrasse in Germany will be analyzed by way of a comparison. The project relies on historical methods, including research in archives and libraries in Germany and the United States. It will produce conference papers, articles, and a book. The broader impacts of this project are threefold. First, it aims to contribute to the partial methodological convergence of the history of technology and environmental history. Both fields' disciplinary boundaries have discouraged studies utilizing methodological tools from either source until very recently. Secondly, the case studies analyzed in the project integrate the environmental history of technology squarely into the study of consumption, which is recently being recognized as a defining characteristic of recent societies, despite ideological, political, and cultural differences. Lastly, the historical comparison hopes to overcome national boundaries inherent in many research projects, historicize notions of "national styles," and trace the formation and exchange of technological and environmental knowledge.