Rethinking the American City: An International Dialogue

1 Energy

1 1 1 energY DAviD e. nye JuSt five MoMentS provide a capsule history of the role of energy in American urban transportation. Imagine, first, an image of late nineteenthcentury Broadway, in New York City, with parallel tracks, on one of which is an electric streetcar and on the other a horse-drawn car. The second moment is on a busy New York street corner, where cars, pedestrians, and horse-drawn vehicles again share the same space. The third moment leaps three generations forward, to an enormous freeway interchange in Los Angeles. The fourth instance suggests roads not taken: instead of highway systems, cities might have developed mass transit of various kinds, including aerial tramways such as one that operates in Portland, Oregon. Finally, the fifth instance is a high-speed rail station design for Anaheim, California, the station itself powered by solar energy. These five moments together propose a narrative. They move from the densely populated urban city of the Progressive era to the urban sprawl of the present, from collective transport to the individualistic automobile to the current search for mass transit alternatives. In a very real sense, this narrative and these spaces are central to any analysis of the American city’s development since circa 1880. But the story is, of course, far richer than this initial sketch might suggest. I want to embroider on these examples, to write what Clifford Geertz would call a “thick description ” of the energies and processes just described. This analysis relies on the study of American energy regimes laid out in my Consuming Power (1998), where I argued for the primacy of consumer demand rather than taking the usual focus on the industries of supply (coal, oil, gas, etc.) in understanding the path of U.S. development, an argument that rejects technological determinism. It may feel as though technical systems automatically drive events, but the histories of energy and of transportation DaviD E. NyE 2 are better understood as the technological momentum of systems put in place at an earlier time.1 Thus the average American citizen may feel forced to own a car in order to live an ordinary life, but the car itself did not cause this state of affairs. Rather, the transportation choices made generations ago have been embedded in society and are difficult to change. The five historical examples discussed below are highly suggestive when seen in this light, and taken together, they raise two questions. Will the United States overcome the technological momentum of the automobile and redevelop its central cities? Will the United States recover the shared social spaces that once were so common in its urban life? Returning to the opening example, you would see that even a street as important as Broadway was not paved with asphalt, but with wood, at the turn of the century. This was by no means unusual. New York streets first started to be macadamized and then asphalted in the 1870s. Yet it took decades for all the streets to be paved, even in New York. Portland cement roads were also being built after 1894. Sanitary reformers promoted these efforts in order to reduce the mud, dust, and dried horse manure. Pressure to pave the roads also came from bicycle enthusiasts, who numbered over one million by 1900. In 1905, when there were still few automobiles, 161,000 miles of road had been paved, largely inside cities and between the most important centers. During these years, as Clay McShane has shown,2 the definition of what the street was to be used for remained an issue, and city residents struggled to retain the use of the street for activities other than transportation. In residential areas, homeowners regarded the street as an extension of shared community space, where children might play or activities be held. The street was less an artery of transportation than it was a space for the occasional commerce of peddlers and wagons that sold and delivered a wide range of goods, including ice, coal, fish, cheese, fresh fruit and vegetables, and ice cream. In more commercial districts, the street was crowded with people, not vehicles. Stores expanded onto the sidewalks, and peddlers took up part of the street. The role of the street was not merely to move traffic. It had traditionally been part of the commons, and it was not given up to the dominance of ENERGY 3 vehicles without dissent. After...