Introduction for special issue ‘The Life of Modern Roads’: Spill-Overs of Automobile Infrastructure To be published in the Journal of Transport History – issue 37/2, December 2016 By Massimo Moraglio and Dhan Zunino Singh Abstract This special issue of the JTH seeks to contribute to road history by including new cases and geographies, and by exploring the analysis that other disciplines or fields of studies are raising, such as ethnography, science and technology studies, and the ‘material turn’. Focusing on the ‘life’ of modern roads (automobile infrastructure), we state that roads constitute a system that reproduces and maintains itself, an autopoietic trend, similar to that of automobility as described by John Urry. Displaying material evidence and symbolic values, the papers in this Special Issue show how the building of nations or regions are key to understanding the life of modern roads. Yet automobile infrastructure is not monolithic: roads are not just an expression of single and centralized political power; rather, they are disputed. Roads have unleashed social forces which, in the long run, have created a complex and unstable system. This complexity confirms how strongly those infrastructures were multifaceted, full of relational effects on human agents as well as on space/territory, mobility (of course), scientific knowledge (engineering), legal norms (safety, municipal norms), and geopolitical issues. Key words Roads, automobility, autopoietic, power of things Historical studies have given a great importance to roads, as an essential part of political and social diachronic analysis. The Roman Empire’s road network is a good example of such a long-lasting approach: the extension of the network to every corner of the empire was linked to the political and military control of the subjugated territories, and thus to its ability to rule such varied and geographically dispersed territories. Roads had, therefore, paramount relevance in building and keeping the Pax Romana, and in spreading its cultural and political values. Despite this central role, roads have been an elusive issue. Up to three decades ago, they remained a sort of black box, created by invisible hands: neither the making of roads (e.g. the process of debating, planning and building), nor the agency, the technology and the uses behind that making were a subject of deep analysis. So, despite being assessed as crucial, up to the 1980s, strangely enough, a more in-depth investigation of the political, economic and cultural values of those road networks was largely avoided by historians. This is even more astonishing once we consider the magnitude of road construction in the past two centuries, and how openly those programs (and their political legitimation) were linked to the key concepts of modernity, progress, economic development and, very soon, to that of nation building. In the mid-1980s the seminal works of Mark Rose, Bruce Seely and later Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr offered a ground-breaking approach, critically analysing the agencies and the experts engaged in road construction. M.H. Rose, Interstate. Highway Politics and Policy Since 1939 (Lawrence, Press of Kansas, 1979); B.E. Seely, Building the American highway system. Engineers as policy makers (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1987). C. McShane, Down the asphalt path. The automobile and the American city (New York, Columbia University Press, 1994); C. McShane and J.A. Tarr, The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2007). Their works have stimulated a new research line within the field of technology history, which reached its maturity with the EU funded project COST Action 340 ‘Towards an Intermodal Transport Network: Lessons from History’ in 2003-2005. G. Mom, L. Tissot (eds.), Road History. Planning, Building and Use (Alphil, Neuchâtel, 2007); H.-L. Dienel and H. –U. Schiedt (Eds.), Die moderne Straße. Planung, Bau und Verkehr vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt Main, Campus, 2010). Those investigations, originally focused on the North Atlantic area, have – more or less openly – stimulated new research paths, which address a wider spectrum of roads-related issues. Roads have also been scrutinized by historians in other geographical regions. For the case of South America see: M. Piglia, Autos, Rutas y Turismo: El Automóvil Club Argentino y el Estado (Buenos Aires, Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2014); B. Freeman, ´Driving Pan-Americanism: The Imagination of a Gulf of Mexico Highway´, The Journal of Latino-Latin American Studies 3:4 (2009-2010), 56-68; A. Ballent, ´Kilómetro Cero: La Construcción del Universo Simbólico del Camino en la Argentina de los Años Treinta´, Boletín del Instituto de Historia Argentina y Americana “Dr. Emilio Ravignani”, 27 (2005) 107-137; R. Booth, ´Turismo, paramericanismo e ingeniería civil. La construcción del camino escénico entre Viña del Mar y Concón (1917-1931)´, Historia, 7:2 (2004), 277-311. Today we can rely on a larger spectrum of research, beyond road history, which includes sociological and anthropological analysis. Among the now vast literature of non-historical long-term investigation, we suggest looking first at the special issue ´Roads & Anthropology´, Mobilities, 7:4 (2012). We are thus witnessing a growing attention to those artefacts, well beyond the experts’ work. Moving from the pioneering works on the road’s technological expertise and their agencies, we can count on more and more works also from users’ perspectives, which underlined the symbolic value of those material networks. P. Norton, Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City (MIT Press, 2008). Summing up the past and current research on roads, focusing on the past 150 years, we can define the overarching issue as the irresistible relevance given to roads. Roads fulfil (and fulfilled) multiple purposes, matching the most variegated range of targets, from economic growth to cultural development. In other words, through the 20th century, roads have been a quintessential factor of modernity, becoming its material evidence as well as one of its symbols. Additionally, roads have a territoriality, not only due to the physical connection to the land but also because the roads layout creates networks that connect (and disconnect), integrate, expand and shape places. This is a crucial aspect of their modernity in the 20th century, because that network aspect offered an asset to automobilism that enabled the invention of automobility as a system. G. Mom, Atlantic Automobilism: Emergence and Persistence of the Car, 1895-1940 (New York and Oxford, Berghahn, 2015). And here we can indeed claim that the roads network and automobilism have triggered each other in motion. John Urry´s insightful concept of automobility as autopoietic, a system able to reproduce and maintain itself, has strong potential for investigating road construction. J. Urry, Mobilities (Oxford, Polity, 2007). We also see a self-fulfilling prophecy for road construction, a self-catalysing mechanism, which, once put in motion, asks for more roads. This self-propelled development and progress can be quantitative: according to the CIA’s website, today, worldwide, roads total approximately 30 million kilometres of length. Behind that number there is what we call ‘the power of road to mobilize’: to mobilize efforts, money, experts, politicians, industry and consumers. This is what makes roads a 20th century icon of modernity and prosperity. The autopoiesis of roads fits in the theoretical landscape we aim to shape, since autopoiesis is fruitful in explaining roads as having their own ‘lives’, actant among other actors. Roads, like other systems and networks, have a multitude of social, symbolic, material and spatial relationships with other human and non-human actors including their surrounding landscapes. Being relational artefacts (as Susan Leigh Star defines infrastructure, in general), they have different meanings for the different agents involved in their production, operation/maintenance and usage, including the state and politicians, engineers, the police, the press, tourists, drivers, pedestrians and animals. The power of roads does not imply a deterministic role or an autonomous life. On the contrary, the life of roads is only understood within these relationships and the forces involved in them. The trajectory of roads – their life within specific socio-material networks – must be the subject of a historical enquiry. In this Special Issue, roads are examined as fundamentally automobile infrastructure. Roads for motor vehicles were not the first types of roads that shaped a power territory, nor the first ones to mobilize and materialise the idea of modernity. Railways did all this and were even more iconic. But many of the last centuries ideas and values such as freedom, nation, leisure, and so forth have been embedded in roads, and they surely deserve a closer investigation. Naturally, airports have also been strongly attached to 20th century modernity. However, in our view, roads fit our goals better, for two main reasons. Firstly, roads are open to a wide range of users: even the most restricted roads (e.g. expressways) are porous to an extent that airports are not. Secondly, they have a geography, a physical and spatial layout that encompasses a large territory, thus impacting physically and not just symbolically from the sky on people and other social, political and economic networks. In addressing the ‘modern’ road issue, the papers tackle the ways in which roads have been planned and built, showing similarities and differences around the world in the last two centuries. We can state that modern roads have their own ‘lives’ and singularities to be historicized but, at the same time, we can observe common actors (State, politicians, automobile clubs, engineers, tourists), events, and consequences related more and less to the construction of modern nations, and to the development of engineering, tourism, national and regional economies, and the car and oil industry.. The universal model of the ‘modern’ road, here considered as the infrastructural backbone of automobility, has been expanded around the world by international networks through which capital, experts, ideas, technologies and materials circulate. However, we face a tension between a global archetypical model and the local or national implementation. This is to say that the way in which roads were consumed and re-signified locally has produced singularities. Even more, like the automobile, the influential roads models are plural, emerging almost simultaneously in different countries, rather than a single locus from which the road spreads. Moreover, while such a global spread is a sign of the power of roads to mobilize political will, economic interests, technological ideas, social forces and cultural representations, this occurs via regional political, social and even technological and regional mind-sets. Moreover, the scaling up of road implementation and its shifts in usage has been accompanied by tensions, contradictions and side effects. The idea that the road is just a social construction has ignored how the road has also produced societies, as Actor-Network Theory (ANT) points out. To recognize the road as a co-producer of modern societies implies paying more attention to its power to affect other actants. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, Duke University Press, 2010). In this sense, road systems can naturally have spill-over effects, in which the different actors involved take action to deepen or constrain, limit or exalt those elements not envisioned by the proponents. Moreover, new approaches have stressed that failure and disruptions have been analysed as a ‘natural’ effect of infrastructure rather than an exceptional moment or abnormality. In this vein, the geographical and ethnographic methodologies developed in the past decade of road research is a goldmine for historians. Those approaches open up issues and angles of scrutiny that invite historians to (re)visit the histories of modern roads. Considering these new accounts, although not necessarily following ANT methods, this Special Issue collects papers which examine the production of road systems through different political regimes, planning discourses, or national contexts in order to understand the relational, the unexpected and the complexity of automobile infrastructure as much as its power to mobilize and shape society, nation, landscape, culture, space/territory and social practices. Reconstructing and investigating the process of the production of roads helps us to further discuss the classical rhetoric of road implementation (modernity, efficiency, connection, speed) and to avoid seeing road production as a linear, transparent, clearly planned process. Rather, this Special iIssue focuses on the ‘tension field’ among the different actors, and how this tension transformed or even transfigured the original purposes of roads. The papers making up the Special Issue address the role, the concept and the value of roads, according to different geographical and temporal specificities. In doing so they help us to better tune both the global narrative of roads and their particular regional and historical characteristics. Focusing on the ’ebullient’ development of roads in the 20th century to accommodate motor vehicles, the four papers presented here the overarching thesis of a self-propelled trajectory of road history. Looking at the human actors involved in the production of roads, the four articles confirm entangled and overlapping technological and political spheres, and show how many different agendas relied upon road networks. Indeed, roads mobilized different actors, which in the four cases published here were mainly, but not exclusively, ‘producers’ of roads. the papers show how roads developed and shaped (and conversely were developed and shaped by) ideologies of national and regional integration, by concepts of safety and risk in mobility, and by the rhetoric of modernization.. The different instances of roads compiled here also reveal paradoxes which demonstrate the power of infrastructure, its openness and the limits of human-manipulation: roads provoked localism despite being planned for continental integration; they disconnected territories which they were intended to unify; they enabled practices of individual consumption despite being imagined as a symbol of communist society; they generated risks where they were called to avoid them; they consumed all the national resources for creating an elitist consumption within limited space. The research paper on the Pan-American motorways, conducted by Rosa Ficek, helps us to frame those elements, showing us its continental character, accompanied by a shift in significance, values and approaches during its implementation. The final twist of this story is indeed emblematic of the past century meta-narrative. The Mexican road landscape, at the turning point of the 1930s and 1940s, is the focus of Michael Bess’s paper. His research studies the momentwhen automobilism got momentum and re-shaped road rules and practises. His work specifies how safety was an essential element of building and legitimating modernity, thus favouring roads as traffic lanes and no longer as social arenas. The building of a control apparatus, the road police corps, therefore openly limited traditional usage of urban and rural streets, but it also changed drivers’ habits, controlling them too. The third paper is also devoted to the 1930s and 1940s, although it addresses just a 10-km national motorway built in Lisbon. Luisa Sousa's paper presents the Lisbon motorway as a smaller replica of Fascist Italian and Nazi German mammoth road programs, but here scale does not matter. Crucially, ‘modern’ road construction encompassed nation building, mass entertainment (the motorway connected Lisbon with its brand new stadium) and elite tourism. Such a mish-mash of users and purposes was accompanied by huge pressure on the technical agencies which built the motorway, thus offering us an appealing historical reconstruction. The final contribution to the Special Issue focuses on the Yugoslavian 1945-1980s motorway programs. Relying on a growing literature of automobilism in the socialist countries, Lyubomir Pozharliev analyses the inner contractions of a communist regime using classical tools of nation building (as roads are), but also in investigating two other aporiae: the clash between driver’s individualistic attitudes and communist artefacts, and the failure to use the motorway network to even out geographical and economic disparities within the country. These four case histories show that automobile infrastructure is not monolithic – it is more than just the mere expression of political power. While the building of nations or regions emerge in all those papers, it is also true that roads unleashed social forces which, in the long run, created a complex and unstable socio-technical system. All this confirms how much those infrastructures were multifaceted, full of relational effects on human agents as well as space/territory, on mobilities on scientific knowledge (engineering), on legal norms (safety, municipal norms), and on geopolitical issues. 8