“Car Cities” and Concepts of Mobility: Comparing Two Cases in Germany

Cars are not simply technological objects—they participate in a wide-ranging technological system that includes streets, gas stations, garages, parking places, and other elements. As technological system, the car has re-structured cities and landscapes (Zeller 2002 / Crawford 1992), and reconstituted the experience of everyday life in the modern age. To emphasize the car’s important role in organizing space and in structuring the built environment is not to make a new claim. This paper looks to deepen this analysis by focusing on so-called “car cities”—cities such as Detroit, Turin, Toyota-City in which the car industry is at the center of civic and economic life. While modern urban space is re-structured by the car, we argue that “car cities” as industrial cities constitute an extreme and early form of an “autogerechte Stadt” (“car adapted city”). To explore this process in detail, we compare two West-German “car cities” of the 20^th century: Rüsselsheim (GM/Opel) and Wolfsburg (Volkswagen), each distinctive in their development. The latter was actively planned by the Nazi-Regime, while the former, an old village, was transformed piecemeal and without formal planning. This difference will allow us to explore and contrast concepts and practices of mobility that re-structured and transformed space and its use in each city. The car industry as agent will be of special interest. We will focus on how the car industry has influenced the concepts of traffic in each city, of the car as a technological system, and how the use of urban space was negotiated among the car industry, transport policy-makers, city administrations, and users in these two different contexts.