Routes, Roads and Landscapes ed. by Brita Brenna et al. (review)

This is an excellent book. It not only introduces the reader to the state-of-the-art in the cultural history of roads, it also opens the field by linking it to art history, geography, philosophy, sociology, literary theory, science and technology studies, and architectural history. The result helps us understand roads and routes as entailing materiality and meaning, discourse and contemporary practice, policy and personal experiences. Most importantly, this collection focuses on the intertwining of roads and landscapes, looking at specific routes through particular landscapes at given times and discussing their relationships and significances. The contributions are divided into three sections: moving through the landscape, the route as an icon, and landscapes of mobility.

The first section, "Moving through the Landscape," discusses pictorial and textual representations of routes and landscapes. Brita Brenna shows how the landscape in the eighteenth century was gradually being seen, depicted, and described in new ways that showed an emerging knowledge and interest in the surroundings in which the Danish king traveled, even more interest than in the figure of the king himself. Vittoria Di Palma sheds light on how movement became important in eighteenth-century landscape experience and representation on the basis of strip maps of British rivers used as routes. Finola O'Kane points out how maps showing roads represented the viewpoint of the gentlemen who owned and started to organize the Irish landscape in the eighteenth century, to their benefit. Torild Gjesvik shows that the road in landscape paintings of the late eighteenth century is not only an aesthetic object but also a political tool, a meeting place, and an arena of different social practices. And Charles Withers adds to the understanding of travel writing by taking a closer look at Captain George Francis Lyon's (1795-1832) "en route" writings to recognize practices of route taking and route making. This section is most interesting for its new insights into the profound change in Western attitudes to the landscape and the movement through it during the eighteenth century.

The second section deals with the modern transportation landscape in which the route becomes an icon not only of progress and modernity but also of the harmonious reconciliation of modern technology with nature in beautiful landscapes. David Nye, proceeding from his research on the American Sublime, shows how railroads, canals, and roads (nineteenth-century), but also highways and their commercialized "landscapes" (1950s), are part of such experiences of a national landscape. Using the photographs of a nineteenth-century Norwegian engineer, Mari Hvattum describes how a new kind of landscape construction bound nature, nation, and technology (bridges, railway tracks) into a fragile balance. Thomas Zeller demonstrates how engineers and governments constructed parkways in Germany and the United States as roads and landscape in one, establishing consumable automotive landscapes that carried political values (American or German qualities) and became a key element of car tourism. Christine Macy and Sarah Bonnemaison find the same desire for a harmonious reconciliation between landscape and built environments in Benton MacKaye's idea of systems of flow (water, products, population) and his plans for the Tennessee Valley dam and development in the 1930s. Only the utopian landscapes of mobility abandon the ideal of a balance between nature and technology, concentrating on infrastructural visions (Even Smith Wergeland). This is an enjoyable section, which may not deliver a lot of new insights but offers a state-of-the-art overview of the current scholarship and entertains even a well-informed reader with a highly stimulating compilation of academic knowledge.

Last but not least, section 3, "Landscapes of Mobility," looks at how mobility is constructed and constrained. It begins with Tim Cresswell's well-known theoretical consideration on mobility. Janike Larsen's study on the Norwegian Tourist Route Project and Lars Frers's research on interactions between those who are en route (in Norway) and the facilities of the route (views, viewing platforms, toilets) inform the reader as to how the government is choreographing...