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Henry Ford and the Rise of the Car

 

In 1903 Henry Ford put the world on wheels. With the invention of the automobile he changed the way of life for people around the world. After the first World War the period of mass production began. Due to new technology, industries started to manufacture with industrialized and standardized machines. This new manufacturing technology is also called Fordism which shows that the car played an important role during this time. Due to standardized and low-cost production the car became affordable to all people, even from lower social classes. This gave people new opportunities because they became more mobile and with mobility comes a sense of freedom which connects to American values such as independence. However, this was not only in America. The whole world saw cars as the future and the automotive industry grew at a tremendous pace. Consequently, public transport was strongly neglected at that time and it was considered unnecessary. After all, why take a bus when you can easily drive yourself and be there in a few minutes? At that time, nobody thought about sustainability aspects such as climate change and greenhouse gases or rush hours and heavy traffic. The importance of the car is relevant until today and 17% of the expenditures of an average American were used for transportation in 2019. This is the second place on the share of expenditures, right after housing (check the statistics here).

 

The Federal-Aid Highway Act

 

With the rise of the car came the need for infrastructure and highways. Before 1956 a lot of American cities were on a grid and looked symmetrical. This structure of a city made it easy for people to get around on foot or public transit. Even though the car increased the mobility of the people, it was complicated to get out of the city easily as the roads were not in good condition as they were not designed to be used regularly. At the beginning of the new decade only a third of the nation’s roads were drivable. 

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This is why the government started a huge infrastructure project which changed the US completely. The Federal-Aid Highway Act was signed by President Eisenhower on June 29, 1956. This project comprised 41,000 miles of highways that were constructed and the costs were around 25 billion dollars. It was one of the biggest infrastructure projects around that time and took around 10 years to complete. The movement behind this project started in 1930 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt expressed interest in a transcontinental highway system and also in 1921 plans to improve primary rural roads were made. But with America joining the war in Europe, the US had other priorities at that time. When Eisenhower came to power in 1953 this project came back into discussion. Eisenhower had great interest in this project as he realized as early as 1919, when he took part in a motor convoy from Washington to San Francisco, how important good roads are. And also, during the second World War when the Allies invaded Germany, he saw how advanced the German autobahn system and their enhanced mobility was. This inspired him to push forward the Federal Highway Act also due to their role in national defense. This is why the Federal-Aid Highway Act is also referred to as the National Interstate and Defense Highway Act. The road network was imagined as multiple lane superhighways crisscrossing the nation, where the vehicles could move at speed as high as 160 km per hour. 

 

This 1956 law changed the American landscape and with that the way of living. The old Medieval and Roman grid was split into tangles of highways. Looking at pictures from Detroit in 1951 there were already some preparations made for the huge infrastructure project, with parts of the city being cleared for highways. In 2010 the Central Business District is encircled by highways. Sometimes highways cut right through urban areas and destroyed housing. Especially in poorer areas the new infrastructure made it almost impossible to get to some neighborhoods by foot. On the one hand the highway act created an automobile friendly city but it was also hard to get around the city at all with anything other than the car. 

 

Mobility and Public Transport

 

While mobility increased concerning car culture, work in public transport was very limited around that time up until now. America as well as many other countries saw the car as the future. With the highways expanding outwards, the cities expanded as well, and suburbanization began. This resulted in longer paths to work, school, grocery stores and many other things. With the car it was easy to get around. With public transport it was, however, almost impossible and even today the public transport system is very bad in America. The suburbs are mostly always connected with the Central Business District through bus or tube, but the suburbs themselves are often not connected which makes it hard to reach other suburban areas. 

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Looking at mobility statistics we can see that in 2019, Americans took 9.9 billion trips on public transportation. This sounds a lot at first but looking at it differently we can also see that at the same time 45% of Americans have no access to public transportation. 78% of Americans commuted to work by car in 2019, whereas only 5% used public transit. This is very low and especially since the climate crisis the use of public transportation became more and more important to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The numbers vary of course for different regions with New York having over 2 million people who commute to work by public transport but in general it plays a less important role in America. The average workday distance for Americans is 7 miles. This does not seem long and with a car it only takes around 10 minutes but for a pedestrian or on a bike it is almost impossible to cover in a reasonable time. So cities were not only not transit friendly but on top of that also not pedestrian friendly. 

 

Connections Between Suburbanization and Car-Centric Planning

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At the time of the ever-growing popularity of the automobile, suburbs in the US were also growing almost unceasingly. After 1945, the lives of many Americans were impacted by a mass migration to those more remote places away from the downtown areas of big cities. Could it be that both changes in lifestyle, meaning changing preferences in transportation as well as in housing, gained popularity at the same time not purely by chance, but rather were mutually dependent? More specifically: Was increasing car-centric planning a reason for suburbanization and did suburbanization, in turn, mold habits of commuting and car dependency?

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To begin with, it must be said that suburbanization cannot be traced back to a single cause but was rather influenced by a multitude of reasons. Additionally, it cannot be claimed to have been a postwar phenomenon exclusive to the US but had occurred on an international scope at the time. Nonetheless, it proceeded farther and faster in the US than in other countries’ metropolitan areas. Two types of theories have been provided to explain suburbanization, although they overlap and interact with each other. The “fiscal-social problems approach” highlights aspects such as high taxes, racial tensions, crime or lower quality public schools in central cities as reasons for affluent people to move from the city centers to the suburbs, in turn leading to an even lower fiscal situation and life quality within the downtown areas, causing further suburbanization. The “natural evolution theory” is favored by urban theorists and transportation experts and is more applicable to shed light on our question about the mutual influence of suburbanization and car-centric planning in the US. This theory explains that the development of cities naturally happens from the inside out. Central Business Districts, for example around a port, are created first to keep commuting costs for workers in those areas low. More affluent residents then can afford to move further out into the suburbs as the city centers are more and more filled, creating an income-stratification with lower income groups towards the center and better-off middle class groups in the suburbs. Not least, one reason for the possibility of moving to the outer areas is the development of new and, at the time, expensive modes of transportation, allowing only those who could afford a car as a fast way to commute from the suburbs to the city center to live further away from their job site. It can be said that, with rising incomes and better infrastructure, people opt to chose the benefits of the mobility of the car, causing suburban living to expand. Then, with the dispersion of points of departure and destinations, the attraction of the car and the demand for better highways further rises, creating a self-reinforcing cycle.

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Overall, the connection between life in the US becoming more and more car-centric and the expansion of suburban living as well as the interdependence of the two cannot be denied. Nonetheless, the rise of the automobile and highway penetration of central cities must not be considered in isolation or as the main reason for suburbanization but as one influencing factor among many. To learn more about suburbanization, you can go here. Eventually, with the development of suburbs, other factors besides housing were also decentralized to cater to the needs of people in those neighborhoods – one of them being retail and shopping.

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The History of the Mall and an Austrian’s Vision

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The history of the suburban shopping mall cannot be told without talking about Victor Gruen, its founding father. Gruen was originally from Vienna, Austria and fled the rising Nazi regime in 1938, finally ending up in the US. He used his skills as a trained architect to design storefronts all over the country. In doing so, Gruen could not help but notice that American citizens spent a significant amount of time inside of their cars, not socializing with others, especially in the suburbs where travelling by car is the only feasible mode of transportation. Gruen realized that suburbs lacked “third places” besides people’s homes and work sites, where they could spend their free time connecting with others and building communities. The absence of such places and Gruen’s dislike of seeing how car-dependency affected cities made room for his grand vision of creating public sites for pedestrian-based everyday sociality that had been lost due to suburbanization. Gruen envisioned the implementation of a relaxing environment with lots of greenery and stores and a covered plaza as an “island of connection in the middle of the sprawl”. Gruen had hoped to develop a mixed-used facility where people would get out of their cars to stroll and socialize while enjoying not only commerce but also other attractions like fountains or art work, imitating a town center in the microcosm of a single building. The idea of the American Shopping Mall was born. When one of the first was built in 1956 in Minnesota with the name Southdale Center, it became apparent that Gruen’s vision was much more dependent on the use of the automobile than he had hoped. Building the mall came with massive adjacent car parks, reducing Gruen’s idea to a compromise of having people walk and stroll only after driving over to the mall by car. Additionally, Gruen’s idea of not only being after people’s money and giving them incentive to shop but rather create a community space was doomed to fail when economists realized that presenting shoppers with as much opportunity to shop as possible resulted in exactly that – generating sales. The intention to create a third place that would improve the living experience within the suburbs had ultimately promoted automobile-dependent consumption. Over time, Gruen realized that his malls were having a negative impact on the city centers, causing downtown areas to decay. The Austrian architect, who was formerly focused on adapting retail to the living situation in American suburbs, thus shifted his aim during the 1960s to revitalise Central Business Districts by applying his knowledge from suburban malls to those areas. Needless to say, at that point an enormous number of malls had already been built across the country, taking inspiration from Gruen’s template mall Southdale Center and further fueling American car-dependency and car-centric planning of cities. To learn more about the death of the Central Business Districts, go here. 

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