Automobility and the City in Twentieth-Century Britain and Japan
Produktdetaljer
Biographical note
Simon Gunn is Professor of Urban History at the University of Leicester, UK. He is the co-editor of the journal Urban History and has published articles on automobility in Twentieth Century British History (2011), Social History (2013), and Historical Journal (2017). Susan C. Townsend is Associate Professor of Japanese History at the University of Nottingham, UK. She is the Principle Investigator on the Leverhulme Project Motor Cities and the author of Miki Kiyoshi 1897-1945: Japan's Itinerant Philosopher (2009).<i>Automobility and the City</i> is an unusual and rewarding work of comparative history,
Journal of British Studies
<i>Automobility and the City in Twentieth-Century Japan and Britain</i> is an exciting and thought-provoking piece of scholarly research. It discusses the realities of automobilisation in Britain and Japan by focusing on their representative motor cities, Birmingham and Nagoya, providing readers with the insight necessary to consider the future of automobility.
Dr Junichi Hasegawa, Keio University, Japan
Cars transformed cities around the globe: Gunn and Townsend illuminate this worldwide phenomenon by looking in depth at the “motor cities” of two very different automotive powerhouses. Even as their careful analysis of ideas, plans, and controversies in Birmingham and Nagoya highlights the differences between Britain and Japan, it reveals the cross-cultural sway of the automobile with their stories of how cars conquered cities and divided citizens.
Dr Brian Ladd, University of Albany, USA
This book […] offers a temporally, geographically, and conceptually expansive study of the origins, ascendance, partial displacement, but ultimately lasting–and, alas, possibly terminal–legacy of what the authors label the ‘modern car system’. Though grounded in this pair of second cities, Birmingham and Nagoya, the authors’ arguments extend beyond either particular case. By historicizing an object of study that should be as striking as it is familiar, the ‘modern car system’; and by analysing that system in a frame that reaches not merely across the Channel or Atlantic, but indeed across the hemispheres; this book enables historians, sociologists, planners, engineers, and policymakers to better understand a defining feature of the present: our cities’ organization around a system linking drivers in Birmingham to commuters in Nagoya, and both to an oil economy stretching from Dallas to Riyadh.
Guy Ortolano, Professor of History, New York University, USA for Reviews in History (2020)