Transfers

At Eindhoven University of Technology, which has a modest reputation for collecting contemporary art, an exhibition of large machines and poetic video clips by father and son Van Bakel invites passersby to reflect on mobility. Gerrit van Bakel, who died more than a quarter century ago, became known for his Tarim Machine, a vehicle that moves at such a low speed that it almost does not matter whether it moves or not. The propulsion principle—for those who love technology—rests on the dilatation energy of oil in tubes propelling (if propelling is the right word …) the contraption a couple of centimeters over a hundred years or so, as long as there is change in temperature to trigger the dilatation. Emphasizing his father’s insights, Michiel van Bakel, exhibits a video clip of a horse and rider galloping over a square in Rotterdam, where the position and camera work are operated so that the horse seems to turn around its axis while the environment rotates at a different tempo. Mobility, these Dutch artists convey, is often not what it seems to be.

The nomads traditionally studied by ethnographers have a sense of place and territory, a sense of time and of return. This nomadism is thus different from the metaphorical nomadism of our current mobility; that is, “overmodern” (surmoderne) mobility. The meaning of “over” in the adjective “overmodern” or “supermodern” has to be read in the sense that it has in Freud’s and Althusser’s expression “overdetermination,” where it indicates the profusion of causes in a particular phenomenon that complicates the analysis of its effects. Overmodern mobility expresses itself in the movements of population (migrations, tourism, professional mobility), in immediate general communication and in the traffic of products, images, and information. It corresponds to the paradox of a world where we can, at least in theory, make everything without moving and while moving all the time.

Drawing from sensory ethnography, the present multimodal writing—accompanied by photography and digital video—documents and interprets the mobilities of off-grid living on Lasqueti Island, British Columbia, Canada. The data presentation focuses in particular on the embodied experience of off-grid inhabitation, highlighting the sensory and kinetic experiences and practices of everyday life in a community disconnected from the North American electrical grid and highway network. The mobilities of fuel and energy are presented in unison with ethnographic attention to the taskscape of everyday activities and movements in which off-grid islanders routinely engage. The analysis, based on Tim Ingold's non-representational theory on place, movement, and inhabitation, focuses on how the material and corporeal mobilities of off-grid life body forth a unique sense of place.

This article focuses on the process of the design of airports and how in particular the urban context has shaped their specific histories. Far from being merely pure technical or functional equipment, they have been mirrors for contemporary expectations, just as they informed the modern urban imaginary. According to this perspective, an urban history of airports can be traced from the first aerodromes dedicated to large urban publics to the development of spectacular airports driven by the massive recent routinization of air transport so intricately bound up with globalization. Based on research on specific cases of the design and building of New York and Paris airports, this article aims to resist the temptations to dehistoricize the airport topic, and to introduce a narrative mode of thinking about these specific and concrete spaces.

Roads matter. They define spaces, spur economic development, provide ways of seeing cities and countryside, and enable generally faster forms of moving around. While the history of mobility and transportation has paid lots of attention to automobiles, trains, and airplanes, fewer scholarly accounts of streets, roads, and highways exist. For one, roads, unlike cars, almost never become individually owned objects of personal consumption. While some iconic highways such as the myth-laden “Route 66” in the U.S. exist, the majority of roads are nameless except for combinations of letters and numbers. As is the case with so many other everyday technologies, most observers only notice roads when they are dysfunctional: during traffic jams, when they contain potholes, during periods of construction and maintenance.

This paper investigates the conception and construction of the Belgian highway network since 1945. It focuses on the formative decades of the 1950s and 1960s, when the network was designed and an important financing mechanism established (the 1955 Road Fund). A distinguishing characteristic in the construction of the network is the use of highways as a vector of urbanization for economic development purposes. Combining long-distance traffic with local access to adjoining services, these highways fulfill a twofold role defined at the conception of the network in 1951. Incorporating ring roads, expressways, regional highways, and a high density of exits into a transnational system, the Belgian network is a "hybrid" highway system.

Looking beyond motorways plans, this essay focuses on the role of the Italian "road" lobby in the 1920s in shaping the national transport policy. Contractors like Puricelli were the driving forces of surface transport modernization, with visionary plans but also facing a lack of sympathy by the automobile industry. Those programs were nevertheless carried out with the strong support of the Touring Club and provincial councils. In this context, it seems that the fascist dictatorship, with its hesitance, slowed—rather than hastened—road modernization. Only in 1928, feeding off the ideas of Puricelli and others, did the Mussolini government develop a proper road renewal program. Finally, framing the Italian experience in the European contexts, it emerges that despite the extreme success of American car culture, England is depicted as a more suitable model.

This article examines British attitudes to motorway construction during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, stressing the importance of international events to Britain's motorway building policy. It shows that while national social, political and economic imperatives, movements, and contexts were clearly of primary importance in debates about motorway construction in Britain, these often emerged amidst discussions about road-building developments abroad, particularly in mainland Europe and North America. The article focuses on British reactions to the construction of the German National Socialist Party's Autobahnen in the 1930s, examining how the Autobahnen became embroiled in a spectacular propagandist performance of the modern German nation. Finally, the paper examines the attention paid to European and U.S. motorways in postwar Britain, as engineers, landscape architects, designers, and civil servants undertook research to help inform their plans and designs for British motorways.

A motorway is universally defined as a road specifically provided for motor traffic, with dual carriageways separating oncoming traffic, with all intersections grade-separated, and with no access from abutting properties.1 However, these three papers on motorway history will suggest that this definition is not nearly as simple and straightforward as we might previously have assumed. The papers are each significant contributions to our understanding of European motorway development and usefully present the planning and development of motorways from very different perspectives.

From June 17 to August 21, 2011 the University of Innsbruck (Austria) hosted the group exhibition “L’Italia alla finestra: Außen- und Innensichen” (Italy at window: Outside and outside views), commemorating the 150th anniversary of the unification of Italy. The bilingual title focuses on the necessity to consider a country from several perspectives. Seven artists from Italy and Austria, belonging to different generations, were invited to the baroque cellars of the Imperial Palace of Innsbruck to give their perspective and present their work.

Collecting old cars, like a cocaine habit, seems to be one of nature’s ways of telling you you are making too much money. Think of Pink Floyd’s drummer Nick Mason and his private collection of Ferraris. Think of the American pharmaceutical heir Josiah K. Lilly III and his vintage automobiles displayed in an imitation Shaker barn-house at a heritage park on Cape Cod. Or remember Hans and Fritz Schlumpf, Alsatian textile magnates unable to resist another Bugatti. Indeed, the brothers’ passion helped lead their firm into bankruptcy and their collection––more than 500 vehicles, including 150 Bugattis––ended up as France’s national motorcar museum, the Cité de l’Automobile, opened at Mulhouse in 1982.

“Where can I see this Vietnamese movie?” Try sitting on board a Vietnamese Airlines jet to Hanoi. In Vietnam, movie theaters have been replaced by multiplexes showing the latest American blockbusters. Foreigners are most likely to encounter Vietnamese cinema for the first time on the move, as they travel to the country, by selecting the World Cinema category of their in-flight entertainment system. Watching a Vietnamese movie will both distract them from the long-haul and give them a taste of their destination culture as they make their way there. Twice the displacement, experiencing Vietnamese cinema has become a vehicle for representations of mobility and an integral part of contemporary travel practices. This review will consider a variety of ways the mutual relationship between cinematic figurations of movement and processes of mobility have shaped Vietnamese cinema.

The mechanized mobility practices that came to dominate road use in the twentieth century—using cars, motorbikes, and bicycles—have been notable for the concurrent development of accompanying print literatures in the form of magazines and newspapers. The developmental history of each mode can be told through a number of distinct lenses, each revealing a part of the story of the mobility technology in use. In the context of a renaissance in cycling, there is an emergence of a new style of bicycle magazine that breaks the mould of previous journals.

Richard Vahrenkamp, The German Autobahn 1920-1945: Hafraba Visions and Mega Projects Peter Merriman

Alexandra Boutros and Will Straw, Circulation and the City: Essays on Urban Culture Fabian Kröger

Ted Conover, Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today Rudi Volti

Pradeep Thakur, Tata Nano: The People's Car Thomas Birtchnell

Emmanuela Scarpellini, Material Nation: A Consumer's History of Modern Italy Massimo Moraglio

Kuntala lahiri-Dutt and David J. Williams, Moving Pictures: Rickshaw Art of Bangladesh Tracy Nichols Busch

Patrick Laviolette, Extreme Landscapes of Leisure: Not a Hap-Hazardous Sport Carroll Pursell