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  • Bilsamhället: Ideologi, expertis och regelskapande i efterkrigstidens Sverige
  • Finn Arne Jørgensen (bio)
Bilsamhället: Ideologi, expertis och regelskapande i efterkrigstidens Sverige. By Per Lundin. Stockholm: Stockholmia Förlag, 2008. Pp. 406. SKr 143.

During the years after World War II, Sweden faced mounting problems with traffic congestion and accidents as a result of the rapid increase in car ownership. Per Lundin’s book Bilsamhället (“The Car Society”) examines the sometimes violent meeting of cars and cities. Swedish urban planners faced a dilemma: should the car be made to fit into Swedish society, or should Sweden adjust to the car? They looked at America and chose the latter.

Like Americans, in the 1950s the Swedes loved their cars. Cars represented freedom, they opened up the entire country for leisure traveling, and they promised efficiency. Lundin convincingly describes the utopian, almost parodic 1950s visions of the car society of tomorrow. The car society seemed a force of nature, something unavoidable. Yet, two major problems blocked the road to this society.

First, the old Swedish cities were not well-suited for cars. Narrow, winding streets induced congestion, and parking turned out to be particularly problematic. One of Lundin’s more entertaining examples of this is the way in which the parking needs for Norrmalm, a section of Stockholm, were calculated. On the basis of the number of residents and businesses, and estimates of future traffic, Swedish city planners decided that Norrmalm needed 36,000 parking spaces. Had there actually been that many, parking lots would have covered almost all of Norrmalm, leaving no room for houses and businesses. Today, there are “only” 8,000 parking spaces, but Norrmalm certainly provides a case study in how Sweden’s larger cities were reshaped to accommodate the car.

Second, as the number of cars increased, so did the number of accidents. This sparked a controversy between two sets of experts. Were accidents a system error that could be prevented by means of a properly planned infrastructure, or were they a social and psychological problem that required restrictions on peoples’ behavior, such as speed limits? While some compromises were made, the city planners won the discussion. They decided that the only way to reduce accidents was to physically segregate pedestrians from autos, further reshaping Swedish cities to support the car.

One of the major strengths of Lundin’s book is his close focus on the role of experts in addressing these two problems. A small group of engineers, architects, and bureaucrats joined forces—and occasionally clashed—in creating new, rational guidelines and standards for planning the car society. Much of the statistical information on which they relied was imported from the United States, despite questions about its validity. Even though the experts themselves revised their knowledge and values in the interim between the car-friendly 1950s and the more car-critical 1970s, their guidelines [End Page 714] became frozen ideology that represented a belief in the inevitability of the car society.

Lundin’s narrative is concerned with several major historiographical issues—technology transfer, technological determinism, and the evolution of technological systems—and his book should be essential reading for anyone interested in the role of human actors and knowledge in technological development. But these issues are addressed directly only in some of the endnotes. The reason can be found in the book’s format, which American readers may find strange. Bilsamhället is Lundin’s Ph.D. dissertation, and in Sweden dissertations are often published in unrevised form. Clearly it was written with a general Swedish audience in mind, and here is the explanation for the absence of an explicit theoretical discussion. This is not necessarily a bad thing, however, for Lundin’s authorial voice is clearly present throughout, and this makes Bilsamhället a pleasure to read, at least for those of us who are able to read Swedish. Although Lundin has provided a thirteen-page English abstract, I recommend that those who do not read Swedish look at some of his articles that have appeared in various English-language journals.

Finn Arne Jørgensen

Dr. Jørgensen, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture, Norwegian University...

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