Consuming Landscapes: The Impact of Technology on Roadway Design in the US and Germany, 1920-1970

在20世纪，体验自然世界越来越多地成为一种技术缓和的活动。工业和后工业的经验是将环境和技术交织成交叉和混合的区域，而不是生活在一个可以将明确划定的技术空间留给划定的自然空间的世界。分析这个过程的工作可以帮助理解技术制品的历史和未来的意义以及环境。作为对环境与技术交叉领域的一个研究，本项目将探索自20世纪20年代以来，美国和德国的道路被重新设计为汽车车道的方式，它们获得了什么意义，以及司机和乘客如何体验它们。这些道路构成了自然，规定了一种观看自然的方式，并将风景变成了一种视觉商品，可以像其他大规模生产的人工制品一样消费。然而，这是一个有争议的过程，在这个过程中，土木工程师、景观设计师和这些道路和景观的消费者——汽车司机和乘客——在专业知识、意义和正确使用的问题上相互竞争。本研究分析了这些流动景观的规划、竞争、建造和使用方式。作为这些道路中最突出的样本，美国的蓝岭公园大道和德国的德意志阿尔彭大街将以比较的方式进行分析。该项目依赖于历史方法，包括在德国和美国的档案馆和图书馆进行研究。它将产生会议论文、文章和一本书。这个项目的广泛影响是三重的。首先，它旨在促进技术史和环境史在方法论上的部分趋同。直到最近，这两个领域的学科界限都阻碍了使用任何来源的方法论工具的研究。其次，项目中分析的案例研究将技术的环境历史直接整合到消费研究中，消费研究最近被认为是现代社会的一个决定性特征，尽管存在意识形态、政治和文化差异。最后，历史比较希望克服许多研究项目固有的国家边界，将“民族风格”的概念历史化，并追踪技术和环境知识的形成和交流。

Increasingly, experiencing the natural world has become a technologically mitigated activity during the 20th century. Rather than living in a world where one may leave clearly delineated technological spaces for demarcated natural spaces, the industrial and post-industrial experience has been one of meshing environment and technology into zones of crossover and hybridity. Analyzing the workings of this process can help in understanding the history and future meaning of technological artifacts as well as of the environment. As a study of one particular field on the intersection of the environment and technology, this project will explore the way roads have been redesigned for the automobile as parkways since the 1920s in the United States and Germany, what meanings they acquired, and how drivers and passengers experienced them. These roads constituted nature, prescribed a way of seeing it, and turned the scenic view into a visual commodity that could be consumed akin to other mass-produced artifacts. However, this was a contested process, in which civil engineers, landscape architects and the consumers of these roads and views--car drivers and passengers--competed with each other over questions of expertise, meaning, and proper usage. This study analyzes the ways in which these landscapes of mobility have been planned, contested, constructed, and used. As the most prominent specimens of these roads, the Blue Ridge Parkway in the United States and the Deutsche Alpenstrasse in Germany will be analyzed by way of a comparison. The project relies on historical methods, including research in archives and libraries in Germany and the United States. It will produce conference papers, articles, and a book. The broader impacts of this project are threefold. First, it aims to contribute to the partial methodological convergence of the history of technology and environmental history. Both fields' disciplinary boundaries have discouraged studies utilizing methodological tools from either source until very recently. Secondly, the case studies analyzed in the project integrate the environmental history of technology squarely into the study of consumption, which is recently being recognized as a defining characteristic of recent societies, despite ideological, political, and cultural differences. Lastly, the historical comparison hopes to overcome national boundaries inherent in many research projects, historicize notions of "national styles," and trace the formation and exchange of technological and environmental knowledge.