Watching the Traffic Go By

As twentieth-century city planners invested in new transportation systems to deal with urban growth, they ensured that the automobile rather than mass transit would dominate transportation. Combining an exploration of planning documents, sociological studies, and popular culture, Fotsch shows how our urban infrastructure developed and how it has shaped American culture ever since. Fotsch emphasizes the narratives underlying our perceptions of innovations in transportation by looking at the stories we have built around these innovations, and juxtaposing contemporaneous critiques by Lewis Mumford, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer, he argues that these narratives celebrated new technologies that fostered stability for business and the white middle class. At the same time, transportation became another system of excluding women and the poor, especially African Americans, by isolating them in homes and urban ghettos. [From publisher description].

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.