The World beyond the Windshield: Roads and Landscapes in the United States and Europe (review)

Just as Christ of Mauch and Thomas Zeller claim, the contributors to this anthology “teach us . . . to read the world beyond the windshield,” mindful of the “historical processes that have jointly helped to shape . . . roads and landscapes” (p. 13). Automobiles and highways have received substantial attention elsewhere, but as a comparative study of roadscapes this book is a contribution to scholarship on anthropogenic landscapes. It is also an answer to those who contend that the highway is a “non-place” (p. 34) and to those who limit “the world beyond the windshield” to roadside vernacular architecture.

Because the authors’ historical studies include cases from the United States, Italy, Germany, and Britain, they have together uncovered diverse cultural responses to the problem of setting the road in the land. Except for Britain, which fully joined the motor highway club relatively late, these countries were the pioneers. Like other innovators, they had to sort out just what their innovation was, and how to fit it into existing systems. Is a motor highway a response to traffic demand, or a means of stimulating it? Is it a celebration of modernity, or an accommodation of the motor age to tradition? Is it transnational, or an expression of nationalism? Is it a sinew of commerce, or a means of access to nature’s restorative powers? Although the contributors’ particular interests vary widely, these questions lend The World beyond the Windshield a cohesion that is rare and admirable among scholarly anthologies. Perhaps the book’s most valuable contribution lies in its comparative presentation of the exceptional highway development cases under diverse authoritarian regimes: Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany, and the German Democratic Republic.

In America disparate conceptions of the motor highway found expression in asphalt and concrete. Timothy Davis shows us that the American parkway was an internationally influential model of the “harmonious integration of engineering and landscape architecture” (p. 35). Davis does not mean to say that American parkways subordinated utilitarian values to aesthetics. As road designers left behind the European boulevard model in favor of designs adapted to motor vehicles, parkways were also “safer, faster, and more efficient” than conventional roads (p. 36). By 1940, highway engineers had abandoned landscape architecture on the grounds of those practical aspects.

Four other chapters on American subjects more clearly depict the competition between social groups that lay behind such trends. In studies of the Blue Ridge Parkway and of roads in South Dakota’s Custer State Park, Anne Mitchell Whisnant and Suzanne Julin give readers a much closer look at the competing interests that shaped scenic routes. Carl Zimring and Jeremy Korr examine American highways’ social history after their completion. Zimring’s study of the highway beautification struggle of the 1960s pits those for whom roads were commercial arteries against the descendants of parkway advocates, for whom they were also vistas; Korr shows how local residents and motorists have continued to shape the social construction of Washington D.C.’s Beltway in recent years. Like some of the American chapters, Peter Merriman’s chapter on the British case documents struggles between rival social groups to shape the design and aesthetics of motorways.

The Italian case was remarkably distinct. Italy was a true pioneer; its autostrada linking Milan to the northern lakes—a dedicated, limited-access motor highway—opened in 1925. Massimo Moraglio skillfully reveals Italy’s exceptional path to this accomplishment. Like nineteenth-century railroads and canals, motor roads there were private business ventures chartered by the government; all autostrade were toll roads funded by automotive industry groups and sustained by the tiny motorist minority. In Italy highways were built like railroads, with almost no regard to landscaping or scenic vistas. To Moraglio’s plausible explanations for this indifference, some readers may want to add Italy’s long auto-racing tradition; the autostrade did not serve...