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  • Die moderne Strasse Planung, Bau und Verkehr vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert ed. by Hans-Liudger Dienel and Hans-Ulrich Schiedt
  • Marcus Popplow (bio)
Die moderne Strasse Planung, Bau und Verkehr vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert. Edited by Hans-Liudger Dienel and Hans-Ulrich Schiedt. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2010. Pp. 388. €39.90.

This collection of essays is devoted primarily to the planning and building of extra-urban roads from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. The third aspect mentioned in the subtitle, namely "traffic," is covered by three contributions on the history of logistics. This structure reflects the origins of this volume in two conferences of the German Arbeitskreis für Verkehrs-geschichte—one devoted to road history, the other to the history of logistics—organized by editors Hans-Liudger Dienel and Hans-Ulrich Schiedt.

The volume forms part of a growing literature on road history, a field briefly sketched in the editors' introduction. In particular, the contributions [End Page 403] complement Road History: Planning, Building, and Use, edited by Gijs Mom and Laurent Tissot (2007), which focuses on a comparable panorama of issues. Taken together, these works give a much more fine-grained picture of the building of highways in the Western world than the common assumption of their somewhat natural evolution from societies' changing transportation needs.

Two contributions first remind the reader that conflicts related to financing and organizing the improvement of roads for overland wheeled transport did not emerge to foster car use, but to facilitate horse-traction. Nicole Longen provides evidence that corvée labor was still common for road building even in the first decades of the nineteenth century in the German region around Trier. Uwe Müller identifies two phases in building overland roads in nineteenth-century Prussia. During the first, stately engagement formed new administrational structures later taken over for railway building. During the second, the stately withdrawal from road building in favor of railways in turn induced administrational professionalization among regional actors building feeder streets. Gijs Mom, in the sole English-written essay, shows how a coalition of road builders, automobile clubs, politicians, and engineers gained weight among the fragmented terrain of actors interested in the improvement of local and regional roads in the interwar period in the Netherlands as well as in other Western countries. His emphasis on these levels of roads is part of the argument that the success of individual motorization cannot primarily be ascribed to the construction of autobahnen, but rather on an emerging road network that, with unobstructed door-to-door-traffic, produced a central advantage for private car use.

Autobahnen themselves, in particular their history before the National Socialists came to power, are the focus of two contributions. Rainer Ruppmann points to the predecessors of autobahn planning in the Frankfurt region and how they fused into schemes advocated after 1933. Bernd Kreuzer discusses autobahn building in Austria, contextualizing it extensively within international developments. One of his main points is that in Austria, related projects were installed from the supply side, often without concrete needs, and that stately initiative in the end was crucial for their successful realization. Jan Oliva discusses planning schemes for overland roads in Czechoslovakia in the interwar period, while Michael Wagner analyzes respective patterns in Mexico between 1925 and 1940 and how they fit into the revolutionary rhetorics of progress and development. Alexander Gall investigates more recent developments in Germany, disclosing that in the 1960s and '70s, planners devised networks so dense that the political debate shifted from planning as such to setting priorities among the wealth of projects suggested.

Jan Ludwig deals with the materiality of road building, investigating the development of basalt-supplying enterprises in the Rhine region. On the [End Page 404] other end of the spectrum, road users feature prominently in Michael Hascher's analysis of the reluctance by the German public in recent decades to accept tolls for private road use. The three contributions on logistics help to overcome the neglect of freight transportation on roads, especially in the twentieth century: Richard Vahrenkamp tackles the decisive shift from railway to truck logistics in the early twentieth century, while Markus Hesse discusses recent...

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