In the current issue

Peter Soppelsa, "Intersection: Technology, Mobility, Geography"

Film Review
Joseph November, "When Women Were Computers: LeAnn Erickson, Top Secret Rosies"

Essay Reviews
Shannon Jackson, "Technology, Bodily Limits, and Ways of Knowing: Joy Parr, Sensing Changes"

Eda Kranakis, "'And it is, it is a glorious thing/To be a Pirate King!': Adrian Johns, Piracy"

Peter A. Shulman,"The Richest Hills Unearthed: Timothy J. LeCain, Mass Destruction"

Amy E. Slaton, "The Uses of Context: Steen Hyldgaard Christensen, Bernard Delahousse, and Martin Meganck, eds., Engineering in Context"

Technology and Culture
October 2011

Intersections:
Technology, Mobility, and Geography

Peter Soppelsa
This issue of Technology and Culture explores the intersections of technology, mobility, and geography by bringing together four articles, each individually submitted and developed, into an impromptu theme issue. While recent scholarly discussion of mobilities has foregrounded mobile objects, people, and ideas, these articles strikingly link mobility to geography, drawing our attention to the spaces that shape or are created by changing sociotechnical practices of movement. Our authors bring these geographies into view by telling stories in which the where of technology’s social construction matters as much as its who. They approach geography on different scales—from national territory to urban, suburban, and rural spaces. Geoff Zylstra, Greet De Block, Els De Vos, and Hilde Heynen show how streetcars, railways, and automobiles influenced the social production of space, while Tiina Männistö-Funk shows how geography shaped the production of bicycles. All of the authors connect technologically enhanced mobility with modernity, and with the contentious social construction of race, gender, and national and regional identity. They show how the coproduction of technology and geography intersects the workings of power and inequality, via production of peripheral, segregated, and otherwise unequal spaces.

Geoff Zylstra narrates black and white struggles over streetcar ridership in Civil War–era Philadelphia, hitching the mid-century U.S. horsecar boom to the context of a destabilized racial order: “Blacks, whites, and Irish immigrants used the streetcar as a device for articulating racial boundaries and reshaping the mid-nineteenth-century racial hierarchy.” Zylstra thus adds to the young but growing study of race in the history of technology by showing how streetcars were enrolled in producing racialized users, practices, and spaces. Unlike older versions of SCOT, which asked how “relevant social groups” shaped technologies, Zylstra reverses the analytic by asking how streetcars were deployed in struggles to define users and nonusers. While all pedestrians had previously enjoyed relatively free access to the city, the streetcar’s arrival provided whites an opportunity to cut off African-American mobility by creating closed, white networks. This in turn could help create enclosed, white zones in the city, thereby protecting white power and privilege. Philadelphia’s industrialization was as much a political process as it was a material and sociotechnical one; the streetcar became a tool for negotiating Philadelphia’s intersecting industrial and racial transformations.

Zylstra connects race and geography by consistently casting access to technology and mobility as “segregation.” An unequal distribution of transportation rights was expressed as spatial segregation of streetcars. African-American claims to access (like white claims to their nonaccess) were in effect citizenship claims, which negotiated membership in city, community, and polity. For blacks, streetcars meant freedom and equality; for whites, they meant power and privilege. In the end, African-American community organizers mobilized activists to protest streetcar segregation and, somewhat surprisingly, it worked. In 1867, the year before the iconic Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, Pennsylvania’s state legislature outlawed streetcar discrimination based on race. A century before the civil rights movement fought for access to autobuses, drinking fountains, and other technical artifacts, Philadelphia African Americans were already struggling to define their own geographies of mobility, both physical and social.

Greet De Block also connects technology and geographies of power, by coupling railway planning with nation-building in the early years of Belgian independence (1830s). Her work resonates with Chandra Mukerji’s recent call to analyze state power materially and territorially via the study of infrastructures and public works. Belgium’s founding elite was hungry for mobility, economic development, and territorial mastery, and state engineers’ Saint-Simonian ideology suggested railways as an appropriate national “frame” that could “safeguard the political revolution.” De Block’s article centers on an 1833 plan by engineers Pierre Simons and Gustave De Ridder, which projected a total, national railway network, a “coherent infrastructural frame” or “backbone” for the new nation, “a radical, top-down, territory-covering instrument.” She thus redefines nation-building materially as “the organization of territory and society.” Nations are not only imagined communities, but also built communities. Similarly to Michel Callon’s engineer sociologists, De Block’s engineers were nation-builders.1

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©2011 by the Society for the History of Technology.