AUTOMOBILE INDUSTRY

Automobile Industry

Automobile Industry

Q.1 How would the elimination of the automobile affect social, cultural, and economic arrangements in American society?

The elimination of automobile's impact on American life is everywhere, for the car is much more than a means of traveling from one place to another? After the heady days of citizen engagement that characterized World War II, North Americans retreated from a public sphere of active citizenship and embraced a private world of domesticity, conformity, and materialism. Previously urbane citizens moved to the suburbs where they lived in identical houses, drove identical cars, and watched identical television programs. Retiring to comfortable domestic interiors, their interests in politics, culture, and society disappeared. (Lewis, 2007)

Or so it is commonly asserted. There are books that are offering useful analyses of suburbanization, industrialization, and modernity. Together they deepen our understanding of how government and business orchestrate living arrangements and cultural productions. While focusing on the 1850s to 1960s, the authors speak to contemporary struggles to achieve fulfillment and equality in an age that has grown more cynical of the modernist equation of progress with achievement.

Q.2 What adjustments would Americans have to make to effectively function in an “automobile-free” society?

Although some exclusive suburban enclaves existed in Montreal and Toronto during the later 1800s, suburbs did not become widespread in Canada until the 20th century. During the 1910s the streetcar and the urban population boom encouraged people to move from city centres and rural locations to the urban fringe. From this period through the 1930s, four types of developments characterized the Canadian suburban landscape: wealthy, elite communities; middle-class districts; industrial suburbs; and "shack towns." Located far from cities and usually in unserviced areas, shack towns were working-class communities in which most owners had, often over the space of several years, built their own homes. (Lewis, 2007)

In the thirties and forties, the federal government suppressed suburban diversity and promoted the middle-class standardized suburb. The Dominion Housing Act [DHA] of 1935, renamed the National Housing Act [NHA] in 1938, enabled lenders to offer mortgages backed by DHA insurance. Since the NHA would only provide mortgage insurance to lenders of which it approved, the NHA gave the government control over which types of lenders could provide housing loans. Not wishing to lose government insurance, lenders provided mortgages only on places and to individuals deemed low risk. Such places were serviced and such people were affluent; hence the NHA discriminated against low-income Canadians. In 1946 the state placed the NHA under the purview of a new crown corporation called the Central (now Canada) Mortgage Housing Corporation [CMHC], and in 1954 it revised the Bank Act to allow chartered banks to enter the mortgage field. Both actions indicated the government's belief that corporations provided the best route for suburban development. (Flink, 2002, 18)



Q. 3 If forced, could Americans make such adjustments? What would you personally have to give up and/or change about your lifestyle to live in an “automobile-free” society?

The introduction of a National Building Code cemented the rise ...