June
1995
Car
Culture and the Landscape of Subtraction
By Philip Goff
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In this, the first in a series of articles examining the effects
of the automobile on our culture and landscape, architect Philip Goff
argues that profligate use of automobiles has had a detrimental impact
on many parts of our lives, ranging from urban ecology, to environmental
destruction, to the massive squandering of public funds. Only when we
realize that car-culture is based upon propaganda and government obstinacy
will we make one of the final steps towards a more holistic and sustainable
environment.
Part One: Indoctrinating the Compromise of Public Space
The hit foreign film of the late 1980s, Cinema Paradiso, provides
a marvelous metaphor for our current international predicament. The
movie wonderfully demonstrates how our collective obsession with automobiles
has savaged our cities and diminished our sense of place and community.
The central character within the movie is the “Paradiso”
cinema, located on a generous piazza in a small town in Sicily. The
movie house, along with the church, provide not only the dominant architectural
features of the piazza, but also provide the heart and soul, respectively,
of the community. The piazza of 1954 existed as the hierarchical gathering
space for the town, with its open market, cultural festivals, and even
an outdoor movie screening space. In the movie, people continually traverse
the space by foot, bicycle, and horse-drawn cart. Upon the protagonist’s
return to the town in the 1980s, the once glorious urban space has been
usurped by modern progress. Pedestrians are scarce as cars speed across
the piazza dodging the multitude of parked vehicles. The former projectionist,
turned famous movie director, appears devastated to see the “Paradiso” condemned
for demolition, only to be replaced with a parking lot. In the final
scene, we see the theater blasted to smithereens in the background,
the weeping nostalgic crowds in the middle ground, and, in the foreground,
the rooftops of Fiats and Volkswagens.
Although the film ostensibly presents a general critique of modern
society and its technology, the pallbearer is the burgeoning obsession
with
the machina. The Sicilian town’s identity and sense of community
was lost with the compromise of the piazza. Crucial public space, in
this case, had been handed over, free of charge, to the privileged few
who could afford an automobile. Unfortunately, this is the typical state
of affairs in America’s cities. This (de)evolution in transportation
was not a natural progression. The rise of the automobile’s popularity
was greatly encouraged by obstinate politicians and profit-motivated
corporations. Additionally, the complicity of modernist urban planners
and architects, dehumanized traffic engineers, and demagogic developers
cannot be ignored. Their collective post-war creation has left us with
a mountain of debt, a sprawling suburban ooze, polluted and crumbling
inner cities, and a landscape devoid of farmland and forests. All in
all, ours is the landscape of subtraction. Cars have contributed nothing
to our urban condition, our communities, and our environment. They
have
only taken away. What started out as a promise for a better life based
on unlimited mobility, has become a modern day obsession, as solitary
commuters idle in endless traffic jams wondering where all of the cars
came from.
Riding Along in My Automobile
Owning and driving an automobile has become a prerequisite for conformity
in our culture. Not to drive in America is seen as aberrant behavior.
Mass transit is for people too poor to own an automobile, or for big
city dwellers who deem the auto commute inefficient. Riding a bicycle
is seen as either a recreational act, or only as a method for children
and pre-teens to get around. Walking on a country road or a suburban
strip, where seldom doth a sidewalk appear, immediately elicits suspicion.
Surely only a lunatic or a criminal would do such a thing. In the land
of apple pie, every “normal” citizen gets around by car.
After World War II, buying a suburban bungalow was considered a patriotic
act. William Levitt, the Long Island developer for whom Levittown was
named said, “The suburban homeowner could never be a communist
. . . He has too much to do!” The aphorisms, “no one messes
with a man’s set of wheels,” or “what’s good
for GM is good for America” has incredible power in our culture.
Indoctrination into our auto-dominated culture begins at a very early
age. Children play with toy cars and trucks. They build miniature suburbs
with Tonka trucks and cranes. Every Barbie doll or G.I. Joe figurine
needs the accompanying vehicle to be a complete set. Many children’s
toy vehicles are ornamented to appear like cars, even though mechanically,
they are similar to bicycles. Many young boys build miniature race tracks
of plastic, emulating the stock-car racers seen on T.V. By the time
these children become teenagers, they will have their sights set on
that 16th birthday with the driver’s license soon to follow.
Who can blame them? With many living in suburbs spread so thinly, bicycle
trips become impractical, and mass transit is non-existent. Those privileged
enough will receive a car from their parents as a gift. Most others
though, will need to work to support their new, used cars. Surely,
some
will argue that they need a car to get to work... so that they can
have money in order to maintain their cars... so that they can get
to work...
From there, one’s adult life becomes a constant barrage of images
to reinforce the “normalcy” of car ownership and use. Psychological
reinforcement comes heavily from our media sources. One third of all
T.V. advertisements are for automobiles and a great deal of newspaper
space, including the weekly “automotive section,” is appropriated
to present images, statistics, and commentary based on cars. This prohibits
a reasonable debate on our collective auto obsession, since the media’s
finances are so tied in with the auto industry. The government, too,
is saturated with lobbyists representing the interests of the auto,
oil, tire, and road construction industries, thus prohibiting major
promulgation of alternative transportation funding. Subtle apparitions
also occur in other ways, e.g. the glorification of winning a “new
car” as the top prize in a T.V. game show or at the New York
Marathon, auto company sponsorship of bicycle races, etc.
Death on the Streets
While the media continues to glorify accidents involving airplanes,
trains, subways or buses, over 40,000 people a year die in car accidents.
That’s close to a Vietnam War death count every year. (According
to the U.S. National Safety Council, the death rate per mile traveled
in a car is 18 times greater than in a train and 97 times greater than
in a bus.) This does not include pedestrians; in New York City alone
283 pedestrians were killed and 15,600 were injured by motorists in
1993. Within the developing world’s chaotic mix of motorized and
non-motorized vehicles, the driver and pedestrian fatality rate is close
to 20 times greater than in the United States. Car use also adversely
affects human health by promoting a more sedentary lifestyle than, say,
that of someone who gets around by bicycle. The ethos of the car oriented
suburbs, says the social critic Lewis Mumford, “creates an encapsulated
life, spent more and more either in a motor car or within the cabin
of darkness before the television set.” Urban commuters who drive
to and from work increase their levels of stress and hypertension, as
they long to escape traffic and arrive at work or at home. Being stuck
in traffic will subsequently affect worker’s morale and productivity,
and, along with delayed delivery of goods, costs the American economy
$100 billion a year, according to the General Accounting Office.
Culturally, the ubiquity of cars has had the largest impact on our
street culture, the common bond of communities. The “public space”
of the urban and suburban street has, for the most part, been compromised
for the express purpose of moving and parking cars. This relinquishes
public space to the favored car owners of our society. Street space
incubates social interactions, and these become much more difficult
when streets are filled with noisy, polluting, and speeding motor vehicles.
According to the late architectural historian Spiro Kostoff, “the
street stands as the burial place of a chance to learn from one another,
the burial place of unrehearsed excitement, of the cumulative knowledge
of human ways. We lose this because we would rather keep to ourselves,
avoid social tension by escaping it, schedule encounters with friends,
and happily travel alone in climate controlled and music injected glossy
metal boxes.” In some large cities, streets have become so chaotic
and polluted that separate planes of pedestrian movement have developed.
Rather than confronting the real epidemic, cities and private sources
have built extensive systems of bridges and underground concourses,
keeping the public off of the ground plane, where social intercourse
traditionally occurred. These ersatz public spaces fail to bring together
urban society in all of its diversity. The quasi-public nature of the
bridges and concourses are undemocratic, in that they allow the often
private controlling body to eliminate certain undesirable elements,
such as the homeless or demonstrations.
Sadly, many have forgotten or may never know the true vitality of an
authentic street culture. Disneyland’s Main Street or the local
mall will never be appropriate substitutes. Instead, much of the built
landscape is a pathetic malaise of squalor and dysfunctional planning,
yet most of us feel that it was an organic process that could not be
ameliorated. We have been brainwashed into demanding a table in the
non-smoking section and then, after the meal, either driving home or
walking along noisy, chaotic, and polluted streets. The daily bombardment
of automobile images and our government’s obstinate attitude
towards alternatives has allowed us to accept the auto-dominated landscape
that
surrounds us all.
Next issue: Taxpayer subsidies and the government’s encouragement
of car culture.
Philip Goff is an architect in Manhattan who is
deeply committed to issues of public space. He is also a dedicated environmentalist
and animal rights activist.
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