Kathryn Morrison and John Minnis, Carscapes: The Motor Car, Architecture and Landscape in England, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2012, 448 pages, $ 75.00 cloth, ISBN 100300187041.

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Carscapes is a substantial book on the architectural impact of cars in the context of a single industrialised western country, England. Yet, the book  has wider significance, as nearly every  country is currently grappling with the fundamental unsustainability of mass automobility.  An accessible, readable, non-technical analysis, Carscapes “sets out to illuminate the century-long process that saw the world around us re-engineered for cars” (page 1).

Carscapes is a handsome, heavy, hardback volume that comprehensively chronicles important changes in the English built environment over last century. In keeping with a large-format ‘coffee-table’ ethos, its over four hundred pages are extensively illustrated. However, this is no mere picture book for car obsessives.  The text offers a rich and detailed architectural history narrated through planning challenges posed by this new mode of transport and considers a wide range of contemporary solutions enacted through specific buildings and spaces for the use and occupation by tens of millions of cars. While the tone of the discussion in Carscapes is descriptive rather than conceptual, the book has a scholarly polish, and is full of site-specific details and architectural interpretation. At times the authors do offer broader insights on land-use change, the changing political economy of transportation, developments in construction technologies, aesthetic styles and the processes of cultural assimilation of the automobile into almost all facets of daily life. The result is a book relevant to a good many geographers, whether they are Top Gear fans or not!

Carscapes is arranged narratively into a broad historical chronology. It commences by documenting the early development of petrol-driven cars at the end of the nineteenth century, proceeds through twentieth century changes, and ends with a chapter on ‘carscapes and the future’. The chapters are generally themed around a particular category of space or building type associated with an aspect of the car’s life cycle – be it the development of specialised showrooms to sell them or new kinds of roadside hospitality to sustain hungry drivers. I was particularly drawn to the architectural documentation of banal, background spaces of automobility, evident in the range of unloved but essential facilities needed for what has becomes an almost wholly car-dependent society in Britain – the multi-storey car parks, filling stations and repair garages, scrap yards. As such, the book can be seen as part of a burgeoning array of socio-cultural readings of the ’infrastructural’, including some key informational actants , like Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert’s post-war road signage (now widely recognised as a design classic and element to the everyday iconography of modern Britain).

I did think the authors rather overlooked the degree to which cartographic representations have been steered to the needs of car drivers. This aspect of automobile infrastructure is dealt with effectively in Parker’s (2013) recent book-length treatise on the road map.

While Morrison and Minnis are evidently providing a kind of celebration of the car and its architectural influence, they are certainly not uncritical of automobile dependency and flag its many negative impacts on the quality of life and landscape. We are shown how streets that we once shared as sociable spaces became increasingly dangerous "machine space" (Horvath, 1974) such that it is hard today to imagine places in urban Britain without sight or incessant sound of vehicular traffic. Given the authors’ perspective as professional architectural historians working for the government buildings conservation agency English Heritage, it is not surprising they are particularly concerned with the visual intrusion of the car into valorised pastoral landscapes, and the equally large changes wrought in suburban streets and town centres, particularly in the post-war period when mass ownership and the emergence of a sense of entitlement of private vehicle drivers has meant cars came to dominate roads over and above the rights of all other users.

Again, some of these changes and developments will be familiar to many social and cultural geographers interested in urban form and transport, but this book provides depth of engaging primary evidence. The authors have obviously done a substantial amount of research on all aspects of automobility and the book’s production benefits from ready access to English Heritage’s extensive archives and photographic collection. The book makes particularly effective use of the aerial perspective to reveal the scale of spaces (re)configured for cars (indeed, one of authors has recently published a separate book on roads viewed from historic aerial photographs; see Minnis, 2014). The chosen photographic illustrations are augmented by other visuals, including some original postcard scenes, reproductions of commercial adverts and diagrams from technical brochures, which provide a sense of changing tastes and a degree of authenticity to the narrative. There are also some plan drawings created especially for the book to help communicate the layout of complex buildings.

Published by a specialised architectural press, the book’s overall design is well conceived with clearly laid out pages and appropriately scaled images.  The authors are not afraid to let illustrations speak for themselves. Where needed generous full pages and the occasional double page spread are used do justice, for example, to the engineering sublime of ‘Spaghetti Junction’ (pages 266-67).

One criticism though is that there are relatively few photographs of people and of the wider social practices associated to driving – perhaps not surprising, given that English Heritage is primarily about preserving the built environment and the authors are architectural historians. More generally, there is a lack of documentation of the more personal meanings bound up with driving and familial impacts of car ownership. The result is that the book tends to resemble the distanced eye of the planner,  the technocratic gaze looking down upon buildings, streets and static cars, as objects to be managed. We are not granted access to the more visceral experience on the ground, for example,  through the first person perspective of drivers or pedestrians, nor to scenes that capture the dynamism – and danger – of fast moving vehicles.  We are asked to dispassionately consider the concrete architectures of cars and the sweeping new tarmac highways, without confronting those that have to suffer most of the consequences – often people on low incomes without cars dependent on second-rate public transport – of the noise, the vibration, the smell, dirt and the danger. Cars have got much safer for drivers and passengers in recent decades, but road vehicles are still a major killer of pedestrians and cyclists. It is interesting to speculate what the book would be like, if told consciously from the perspective of all the non-drivers:  the pedestrians, bus passengers, children playing, the cyclists.

Cars are everywhere today such that it’s all too easy not to question them or the rationality of the private, petrol-driven ‘system’ of automobility. As sociologist of mobility John Urry (2004) has asserted, car owners and occupants are ‘locked-in’:

“this is a self-organizing autopoietic, non-linear system that spreads world-wide [and] generates the preconditions for its own self-expansion” (page 27).

Like it or not, many people are dependent on their cars. Cars facilitate  their convenient lifestyles and perpetuate activity spaces that are dispersed and would otherwise be inaccessible. Such automobile dependency seems permanent, despite its costs and unsustainability, but perhaps Morrison and Minnis’ Carscapes book has actually recorded the apogee of automobility? Perhaps we are beginning to see past the period of ‘peak car’ and towards a time of transition to ‘altermobities’ in the coming decades (Urry 2013). For example, there is evidence that fewer young people now desire a driver’s license and are less concerned to get their own car as soon as they can. Other people argue that the ‘share economy’, powered by online social networks and pervasive mobile communications technology, will upturn the selfish logics of private car ownership and ushering a more sustainable personalised transport. It will be interesting to see the how far and how rapidly the current carscape will shift from permanent seeming architecture to more archaeological memories.

In conclusion, while Carscapes is not a classic academic book, in that it does not advance an overarching explanation for the power of the automobile (see Urry, 2004), nor does it offer a new cultural reading of modern roads and motoring practices (see Merriman, 2007), Morrison and Minnis have nonetheless assembled a finely crafted and comprehensive chronology of the car in British culture and document in readable detail the types of building enacted and the changes to the environment that were needed to accommodate millions of moving cars and vast numbers of parked vehicles. The book is not a slavishly pro-car elegy, nor anti-roads rubbishing of drivers; instead it steers a course that both celebrates the best built forms that the automobile brought into being, while acknowledging the destructive social changes and environmental impacts of our relations with the car. 

References

Horvath RJ (1974) Machine Space. The Geographical Review 64: 167-88.

Merriman P (2007) Driving Spaces: A Cultural-historical Geography of England's M1 Motorway. Oxford: Blackwell.

Minnis J (2014) England's Motoring Heritage from the Air. Swindon: English Heritage.

Parker M (2013) Mapping the Roads. London: AA Books.

Urry J (2004) The ‘System’ of Automobility. Theory, Culture, and Society 21: 25-39.

Urry J (2013) Is Post-automobile Mobility Possible? Mobile Lives Forum, video podcast, 10th June, http://en.forumviesmobiles.org/video/2013/06/10/post-automobile-mobility-possible-875.