Staging the Driving Experience: Parkways in Germany and the United States
What do we see when we drive? The view from the road has been one of the important ways of grasping, understanding, and changing landscapes in the 20th century. Landscape architects, planners, and automotive enthusiasts tried to adapt the automobile to the landscapes surrounding it, and also altered landscapes to make them more amenable to the automobile. The paper focuses on efforts in the United States and Germany to build roads with the prime goal of providing pleasant landscape vistas for drivers and passengers. The politics of designing and building these roads were as contested as the ways in which drivers appropriated them.
Staging the Driving Experience (PDF 690.25 KB)