Car Culture

Abstract: In Malaysia, the rapid increase in the use of own transport prompted by inadequate public transport has resulted in increased traffic congestion, accidents, inadequate parking space and air pollution among other evils. This study sought to identify the factors preventing own transport users from shifting to public transport and to develop model shift from car to public transport in order to formulate the policies to achieve this. A survey was carried out on users of private and public (both bus and urban train transport)(n= 1350). Multinomial legit ...

This article considers the policing of young drivers in Scotland who are known as boy racers. It outlines the ways in which the police addressed the problem of anti-social driving by youths in a built-up urban environment in the context of concern and pressure from businesses, residents, the local authority, media, and government. Policing practices were shaped by the introduction of anti-social behaviour legislation including dispersal orders and seizure of vehicles. This involved behaviours not previously seen as deviant or anti-social now being defined as such, in relation to the perceptions of local residents and businesses. The article considers the success of the use of anti-social behaviour legislation, including dispersal orders and seizure of vehicles, and the impact this had on police relations with young drivers.

Critical Mass is an international, monthly event where bicyclists briefly take over city streets to celebrate bicycling, demonstrate their collective strength and send a clear message to the public: ‘We are not blocking traffic, we are traffic!’ In this essay, I explore how Critical Mass functions as both a performative critique of motorized space and a critical response to
automobility. Rather than offering an empirical account of Critical Mass, I discuss the politics of Critical Mass through the lens of the Situationist International, or situationists – a group of avant-garde artists and architects that developed a unique program of spatial politics in the 1950s. Using the situationists as a reference point, I also explain how Critical Mass impacts the progress of formal bicycle advocacy and I contextualize vélomobility within a paradigm of utopian urbanism.

This article is based on stories about modernization of daily life in Estonia during 60 years, the spotlight is turned on one item – car. It was a time when cars stopped being luxury items and became regular commodities, which brought along changed relationship patterns between people, new ways of organising time and space and new life styles.
Having a car gave rise to individual mobility, facilitated connecting people living in different places and gave more opportunities to travel and lead parallel lives – both in the country and in town. Car-related practices reflected various social processes characteristic to the post-World War II society, like social and physical mobility, urbanisation, and growth of consumerism.
At the same time these practices reflected some personal values which were attached to cars: a car showed its owner’s status in society or ability to cope in various circumstances, enabled to improve one’s economic situation, take care of close ones and entertain themselves. The analysis of car usage gives an overview of the period’s values and features of collective identity which formed a basis for these values and helped to manifest them.

"Although millions of people in the United States love to ride bicycles for exercise or leisure, statistics show that only 1 percent of the total U.S. population uses bicycles for transportation—and barely half as many people bike to work. In his original and exciting book, One Less Car, Zack Furness examines what it means historically, culturally, socioeconomically, and politically to be a bicycle transportation advocate/activist."

For their seminal work Learning from Las Vegas, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour documented a sprawling postwar American city from a moving car. Martino Stierli examines their cinematic methodology against the background of contemporary photography and pop and conceptual art, including the work of artists Ed Ruscha and Stephen Shore, while highlighting Los Angeles as a cultural, urban, and architectural hot spot of the period. He considers how this approach relates to sociological theories and the phenomenology of urban spaces. He also sheds light on the polemics and controversies triggered by Learning from Las Vegas in architectural discourse and discusses them against models of high and low culture. Using both text and image, Stierli assesses the broad intellectual impact of this architectural manifesto and explains why the lessons from Learning from Las Vegas remain relevant for current debates in architecture and the arts.

Both Simmel and Goffman were deeply persuaded that the big things in society, in actual observable reality are made up of a dynamic and complex system of interlocking and interacting small things. In this paper, I wish to examine the online-offline communicative and semiotic practices of one such “less conspicuous” social group: the Saabists. Based on long term digital ethnographic research I will provide a description and analysis of how Saabists discursively and semiotically construct identity on-and offline in a transnational niche. Saabists, I will argue, are a translocal and polycentric micro-population sharing a ‘culture’ – Saab culture or Saabism - and an ‘identity’. I clearly argue in favor of a materialistic approach to identity and group formation. The reasons therefore are evident: Identity should not only be understood in a certain chronotope, but is also embedded in ‘infrastructure’, what Arnaut, Karrebaek and Spotti (2016) call Poiesis-infrastructures.

“Born to Take the Highway: Women, the Automobile, and Rock ‘n’ Roll” provides an alternative construction of the “car song”, a subgenre of rock music that reached its peak during the postwar era when automobiles and rock ‘n’ roll defined youth culture. While the primary literature on the car song – popular and academic - cites its significance as a celebration of male teenage rebellion and sexual awakening, this investigation suggests there are other meanings worthy of examination. It focuses on women’s music from multiple locations to consider how women’s experience has influenced and reconfigured the intersection of automobiles and rock ‘n’ roll known as the car song. It investigates how women’s entrance into both the music industry and American car culture has altered the way we think about cars and popular music. It considers the car song not only as an expression of the multiple meanings women ascribe to cars, but also as a location for the examination of women’s lives. Calling upon feminist standpoint theory, this inquiry not only calls upon women’s experience to uncover alternative relationships to the automobile, but to also suggest new possibilities for women behind the wheel.

On the public roads boy racers are a foreboding presence, viewed with suspicion and derision by the ‘respectable’ motorist. The problem of the young (male) driver is one which has plagued authorities and governments due to youths’ supposed propensity to engage in deviant and dangerous driving behaviours.

Boy Racer Culture sheds light on the boy racer phenomenon through ethnographic research with the notorious ‘Bouley Basher’ culture in the city of Aberdeen, Scotland, and the moral panic on the part of outside groups including the local community, police, politicians and media. This book examines the creation of masculine and feminine identities in a traditionally male-dominated subculture through car-related rituals such as ‘modding’, subcultural media and events, and the quest for celebrity status via public performances.

Boy Racer Culture challenges common misconceptions surrounding the boy racer, the ‘problematic’ young (male) motorist, and the car modifier. It will be essential reading for an international audience including sociologists and criminologists, particularly those with an interest in youth culture, subcultures, moral panics, car culture, anti-social behaviour, and the governance and policing of the roads.

Was verbindet die Erfahrung einer Autofahrt mit der Erfahrung eines Kinobesuchs? Liegen nicht in Wirklichkeit Welten zwischen diesen beiden Bereichen menschlichen Erlebens? Ergibt die Rede von einer Analogie Sinn – über die strukturellen Parallelen zwischen Windschutzscheibe und Leinwand, Projektor und Automotor hinaus?  Dieser Frage soll sich der folgende Aufsatz widmen – mit dem kleinen Vorbehalt, dass das Verhältnis zwischen Kino und Auto hauptsächlich insoweit Gegenstand der Analyse sein wird, wie das Kino selbst es imaginiert. Es soll also nicht darum gehen, aus dieser Analogie übergeordnete Prinzipien abzuleiten und sie etwa auf ihre kulturkritischen Implikationen hin zu befragen, sondern darum, die konkrete Wahrnehmungssituation des Zuschauers im Kino in ihrer Prozesshaftigkeit zu untersuchen.  Dabei soll ein besonderes Augenmerk auf die Art und Weise gelegt werden, in welcher die Gestaltung filmischer Bewegung den Zuschauer emotional einbezieht. Denn, so die Ausgangsthese, es ist diese Ebene der Bewegung, auf welcher sowohl das Verhältnis des Zuschauers zum Film als auch die Tragfähigkeit des Vergleichs zwischen Kino und Automobil sich entscheidet.

This article addresses the failure of studies concerning moral panics to take into account the reaction of those individuals who are the subject of social anxiety. It responds to the suggestion by McRobbie and Thornton (1995) that studies of moral panic need to account for the role played by the 'folk devils' themselves, for a moral panic is a collective process (Young, 2007). The paper presents findings from ethnographic fieldwork with the 'boy racer' culture in Aberdeen, qualitative interviews with members of outside groups, and content analysis of media articles. The societal reaction to the 'boy racer' subculture in Aberdeen is evidence of a contemporary moral panic. The media's representation of the subculture contributed to the stigmatization of young drivers and the labelling of the subculture's activities as deviant and antisocial. The drivers were aware of their negative portrayal in the media; however their attempts to change the myth of the 'boy racer' were unsuccessful. Although subcultural media can provide an outlet of self-expression for youths, these forms of media can also become caught-up in the moral panic. Ironically the youths' own niche and micro media reified the (ir)rationality for the moral panic.

In less than half a century automobilism in socialist Yugoslavia expanded rapidly; from the least developed European country in that aspect immediately after the Second World War, to a country on the verge of a stable motorized society by the late 1980s, comparable to the level of West European countries. At the same time, Yugoslavia was far ahead of all other socialist countries in Europe. Constructing an original model of a society somewhere on the crossroads between the "capitalist" West and "socialist" East, Yugoslavia achieved a little bit of both worlds, supporting the development of private motorization and automoblism, but at the same time keeping all the characteristics and the problems of the socialist system. Nevertheless, with many successes and failures along this original "road to communism" the achieved results are impressive: the automobile became a member of an average Yugoslav family, and the socialist period can be truly understood and explained as the "golden age" of automobilism in former Yugoslav countries.

The popularity of motels in the 1950s triggered a mini publishing boom for novel-length accounts of motel life. Through a close reading of two memoirs by female moteliers, this article reveals the motel space to be a microcosm for the changes happening in the lives of American women around the country. By considering the nature of work, family relationships and the treatment of the “hot pillow trade” within the texts, this article argues that the liminal space of the motel, at once a commercial venture and a quasi-domestic “home on the road,” brought the contrasts and contradictions of women’s position in the postwar era into sharp relief, whilst also allowing new understandings of personal identity to emerge.

Twelve social-theoretical theses on the destructive nature of automobile.

Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “Cars Can Never Run Cleanly: The Automobile as an (Anti–)Social Form.” Carbusters.org, Nov. 8, 2010. (Originally published online; no longer accessible.) Also published in Slovak in Nové slovo, No. 9, 2010.

Denne artikel handler om et spil, der er blevet lidt af en myte, nemlig Gran Turismo, et bilspil udviklet af Polyphony Digital til Sonys PlayStation. Myten om Gran Turismo handler om et bilspil, der overgår alle andre bilspil. Det saerlige ved spillet er angiveligt, at det skildrer biler og racerbaner med en hidtil uset realisme. I artiklen forsøger jeg at vise, at bilspillets realisme i høj grad også handler om bilen som myte og kulturobjekt.

This paper grapples with the ethical dilemmas of youth research and more specifically, ‘edgework’, via an experiential account of fieldwork with ‘boy racers’ in Aberdeen, Scotland. ‘Edgework’ is ethically problematic for those who wish to conduct fieldwork with youths. By engaging in ‘edgework’, the researcher can find themself unwittingly drawn into the deviant activities of youths, as ‘deviance’ slowly becomes ‘the norm’ through prolonged immersion in their social world. ‘Edgework’ also blurs the line between insider and outsider status, threatening the researcher’s ability to step back from the field and critically reflect on their experiences. Furthermore, the experiential aspect of the ‘edgework’ method is called to the fore since the researcher’s experiences of risky behaviours (in terms of discomfort) differed from those of the researched (in terms of pleasure).

This paper explores the policing and regulation of young motorists known in the United Kingdom as ‘boy racers’. It demonstrates how police officers’ definitional decisions in relation to driving behaviours were influenced by a range of exogenous and endogenous factors, which subsequently shaped the landscape of enforcement and interactions with the community and drivers. A shift over time in the nature of the problem due to urban regeneration, innovations in the technology of the motor car, and the availability of anti-social behaviour legislation impacted upon the policing of urban space. The strategies employed in order to police the culture and the related urban space were reminiscent of a deeper policing tradition wherein managing incivilities and local problems is part of the community policing perspective. Data is presented from semi-structured interviews with police, residents, and ‘boy racers’, and ethnographic fieldwork with the drivers in the city of Aberdeen, Scotland.

1. Getting to the Other Ride
2. Dividually Driven
3. Carporeality/Carhesia: the Road to Erewhon
4. Motorised Flânerism
5. Guides to the Uncanny-Scapes
6. Thumbbuddies on the Auto Ban
7. The ‘Carthulucene’ at the End of the Road
8. Fine: Waiting for Volvo

Data at several levels of aggregation and spatial resolution show that
mobility (measured by different outcomes such as vehicle miles traveled
and automobile ownership) increases with income. It is equally
likely that, in turn, investments in mobility (purchase and operation of
private automobiles, consumption of public transportation services)
allow greater quality of life in general and the ability to increase one’s
income. This possibly circular relationship is explored by using the Consumer
Expenditure Survey (CEX) data set. Single-equation Tobit models
of annual household transportation expenditures are posited with, in
the first case, annual before-tax income and, in the second case, annual
total household-level expenditures as a proxy for permanent income.
With a variety of demographic, community and spatial, economic, family,
and life-cycle conditions of the household controlled, it is found that
permanent incomes explain mobility investments better than annual
incomes. However, mobility investments and ability to pay are likely to
be endogenous since it seems that a greater investment in mobility would
lead to positive economic outcomes such as the ability to travel to distant
but higher-paying jobs, better and more productive integration of
social and household activities into one’s work life, and flexibility in job
search and ability to change employers to obtain higher wages and benefits
without having to make residential location changes. This potential
reverse causality is explored by means of a two-stage model in which the
censored mobility investment variable and the household’s ability to pay
are jointly modeled.

“Women with Muscle: Contemporary Women and the Classic Muscle Car” examines the growing participation of aging boomer women in classic muscle car culture. It investigates why women own and drive classic muscle cars, the meanings they ascribe to them, and how women construct themselves as participants in muscle car culture. It suggests that women drive muscle cars not only to celebrate a lifelong passion for the automobile, but also as an important social experience that strengthens family relationships. This research – developed through participant-observation and interviews at classic car events in Southeastern Michigan - not only provides an alternative understanding of the American muscle car and the “woman driver,” but through the lens of conservative feminism, also considers how women call upon the muscle car to negotiate membership in a historically masculine fraternity.

Heute vor genau 100 Jahren führten die Automobilwerke von Henry Ford im US-amerikanischen Detroit das Fließband als Produktionstechnik ein. Diese Entwicklung in der Rationalisierung kapitalistischer Produktion revolutionierte nicht nur bis in ihre Kapillaren die Arbeits- und Lebensweise der Massen, weshalb manche Marxisten alle nachfolgenden kapitalistischen Phasen nach ihm benannten (Fordismus/Postfordismus), sondern mit ihr wurde Ford noch zu Lebzeiten zur Ikone der Bourgeoisie, und zwar weltweit: Als Selfmademan des American Dream, vermeintlich guter Kapitalist und - insbesondere nach der vier Jahre später siegreichen Oktoberrevolution - Künder eines scheinbaren Wegs zwischen Kapitalismus und Kommunismus, dem „weißen Sozialismus“. Mithilfe von Karl Marx' "Kapital" wird dieser anläßlich des Jubiläums zunächst re- und anschließend dekonstruiert. Dabei wird die Relevanz der Marx'schen Entfremdungstheorie und mithin die Einheit von jungem und altem Marx behauptet. Abschließend wird sich auf die Suche nach dem Verbleib des Fordismus im 21. Jahrhundert begeben.

Fuelled by media coverage of reckless, irresponsible and anti-social driving, young (male) motorists are an area of concern for politicians, police and citizens more generally. In media and popular discourses the symbol of the boy racer has come to represent deviance, anti-social behaviour, criminality and risk on the roads. This paper focuses on a local moral panic concerning boy racers in the city of Aberdeen, Scotland. Five elements, which characterise a moral panic, are identified and include: concern, hostility, consensus, disproportion and volatility (Goode and Ben-Yehuda 2009[1994]). Urban regeneration played a key part in this particular moral panic in terms of class, cultural and intergenerational clashes between racers and outside groups. The moral panic was further institutionalised through the use of measures such as anti-social behaviour legislation. Moreover, it was symptomatic of wider societal concern regarding the regulation of young (male) motorists and the related governance of urban space and incivilities. The discussion draws on data collected via participant observation with the drivers, semi-structured interviews with members of the outside groups and content analysis of media reports which focus on the culture.

Historically, youths have presented challenges to the authorities via their appropriation of the automobile and related inversion of mainstream motoring values. Recently, this has been demonstrated in the contestation concerning boy racers in the United Kingdom and their engagement in deviant driving and car modification. Drawing on Elias’ civilizing process ([1939] 1994) and work on technization (1995), this paper demonstrates how various measures targeted the emotive heart of this car-based community, thus attempting to (re)civilize young drivers. Data is presented from ethnographic research with boy racers and societal groups in the city of Aberdeen, Scotland.

CONICET  and University of Buenos Aires researcher studies the road behaviour of Argentine people, using the conceptual tools of social and cultural anthropology.
In this interview I refer to an applied research projec to study road culture and practices. A conceptual convergence is weaved between symbolic, interpretive and phenomenological anthropology with a political economy of cultural practices within modern nation-states. In this case, the Latin American region is taken as a starting, historical horizon of analysis to understand the road behavior, embedded in the historical processes that shaped the "cuerpo vial" ("road body"").  The whole idea of  a Bourdiean "campo vial" ("road field") nurtures the conceptual field of an "antropología vial", which can be roughly translated in the English as "road anthropology". My analysis intends to link actual road behavior with the history of the Argentine state and its public policies to construct "ciudadanos viales" ( road citizens), and cultural values and imaginaries associated with these issues.

"«Non solo un mezzo di trasporto, come spiega Carmen Morenilla, ma di incredibile cultura, l'auto è protagonista di splendide pubblicità ispirate ai classici antichi e moderni. «Io sono Giulietta» raccoglie questi microcosmi di «raffinata semanticità», come li definisce Ruggiero Stefanelli, e li commenta uno per uno, passandoli in rassegna in un agile saggio iniziale. Il volume è arricchito da illustrazioni e appendici iconografiche con manifesti, loghi e mascotte.
La 'Giulietta' del titolo è quella che dà il nome alla più femminile delle Alfa Romeo, l'azienda dell'ingegnere napetano dal cognome shakespiriano, Nicola Romeo. Giulietta è la più nobile fra le tante sirene e sirenette pubblicitarie chiamate in causa per aggiungere femminilità ad un oggetto il cui nome 'automobile' in origine era - e in alcune altre lingue è rimasto - maschile.
Come mostra Delio De Martino, nei popolari ma raffinatissimi spot si concentra il fior fiore dei classici antichi e moderni da 'suggere' per trasformare un'auto in un mito e il suo acquirente in un novello Ulisse, Gulliver, Romeo o appunto in una novella Giulietta, in un o una protagonista di una fiaba e di un incanto, specie quando la vera 'impresa' è proprio comprare e riuscire a pagare una macchina.
Nell'imperialismo globalizzante del cost presunto sempre low, davvero senza prezzo è questa produzione multimediale, fitta di allusioni, richiami, riprese anche nel naming di classici delle letterature e delle arti antiche emoderne, che si riaffermano come memoria collettiva della civiltà umana. Nel loro insieme formano un 'canone' per antonomasia dei classici mediterranei di tutte le epoche, attualizzati perché ancora attuali e capaci di parlare di nuoco e a tutti, con ironia e con straniamento.
Questi piccoli film su moderni 'carri' trainati da invisibili cavalli motori sono stati girati in luoghi speciali, ricchi di memoria, come quelli danteschi o come il Colosseo (o le sue tante 'controfigure' come quella in Tunisia), in assoluto il più pubblicitario al mondo. Sono prodotti preziosi e costosi della più intrigante tra le arti brevi. Ma gli sponsor, facoltosi eredi degli antichi mecenati, sono pronti a pagare anche molto per garantirsi questi nuovi piccoli 'capolavori'."