this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2025
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traingang

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This is a really interesting study on the psychogeography of car infrastructure and how they flatten space and time in a postmodern way. It's otherwise paywalled so the source is the Masaryk University in Brno, Still-Czechoslovakia.

Abstract:

The social sciences have generally ignored the motor car and its awesome consequences for social life, especially in their analysis of the urban. Urban studies in particular has failed to consider the overwhelming impact of the automobile in transforming the time-space ‘scapes’ of the modern urban/suburban dweller. Focusing on forms of mobility into, across and through the city, we consider how the car reconfigures urban life, involving distinct ways of dwelling, travelling and socializing in, and through, an automobilized time-space. We trace urban sociology's paradoxical resistance to cultures of mobility, and argue that civil society should be reconceptualized as a ‘civil society of automobility’. We then explore how automobility makes instantaneous time and the negotiation of extensive space central to how social life is configured. As people dwell in and socially interact through their cars, they become hyphenated car-drivers: at home in movement, transcending distance to complete a series of activities within fragmented moments of time. Urban social life has always entailed various mobilities but the car transforms these in a distinct combination of flexibility and coercion. Automobility is a complex amalgam of interlocking machines, social practices and ways of dwelling which have reshaped citizenship and the public sphere via the mobilization of modern civil societies. In the conclusion we trace a vision of an evolved automobility for the cities of tomorrow in which public space might again be made ‘public’.

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[–] happybadger@hexbear.net 3 points 3 weeks ago

It's neat how much more connected I am to the landscape when commuting by bike infrastructure versus driving. My city has a great urban forest so there's still greenery, but I'm driving too fast and paying too much attention to the road to appreciate any of it. If I look at the mountains for more than a second, someone dies and I spend a decade in prison if it isn't me. I'm warm when it's cold, cool when it's hot and totally disconnected from the seasons. The entire wildflower season is condensed into a few flashes of the ones that can withstand the toxicity of roads. A river is a bridge to cross instead of some dynamic subject with complex ecology.

Even with limited biking trails, they wind through our natural areas and have purpose-built vistas. A small stream is something I get to watch closely for ten minutes, stopping whenever something is neat, closely observing it over the course of a year. I can photograph any flower that catches my eye and pause to read about it without someone honking at me because they're a minute late to work. I go through the full socioeconomic landscape of the city, pay attention to the pedestrian infrastructure, and have fun. What I lose in time, my sense of space is vastly expanded and enriched by meaningful green space and functional grey. People look forward to new trails because it's something new to explore, while we only treat roadway repair/expansion as fixing the gaps that cost us minutes or kill us.

I get so much more out of bike commuting and a bike/mass transit-oriented design. It's time I remember instead of time I have to decompress from, even if I spend more time doing it.