12: The City and the Car¹

According to Heidegger, machinery ‘unfolds a specific character of domination … a specific kind of discipline and a unique kind of consciousness of conquest’ over human beings (quoted Zimmerman 1990: 214). In the twentieth century this disciplining and domination through machine technology is most dramatically seen in the system of production, consumption, circulation, location and sociality engendered by the ‘motor car’, what Barthes describes as ‘the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals’ (1972: 88).

Indeed the car is a particularly good illustration of a putative globalisation. One billion cars have been manufactured during this century. There are currently over 500m cars roaming the world, a figure that is expected to double by 2015 (Shove 1998). However, the car is rarely discussed in the ‘globalisation literature’ (see Albrow's The Global Age; 1996), although its specific character of domination is as global as the other great technological cultures of the twentieth century, the cinema, television and the computer which are seen as constitutive of global cultures. Contemporary ‘global cities’, and cities in general, remain primarily rooted in and defined by automobility as much as by newer technologies. Thus to understand the ways in which social life might be reconfigured by new technologies of information and communication will require that social analysts take seriously their relation to the car.