Chapter 4 of Simon Gunn and Susan Townsend's fascinating new book, Automobility and the City in Twentieth-Century Britain and Japan, opens with a scene from David Lodge's novel Changing Places, which recounts the experiences of a Californian academic driving around a fictionalized Birmingham in 1970. On looking at the extravagant new network of tunnels and flyovers in the West Midlands city, the Californian reflected on the universalizing feel of urban life when seen from the windows of an automobile: “it looked like the seeds of the whole twentieth century had been planted under the ground a long time ago and were now beginning to shoot up into the light” (Lodge, 210). On the one hand, this fictional Californian academic might be correct. The identical questions of scale, safety, and environmental mitigation posed by the sudden, global emergence of mass car ownership in the mid-twentieth century had a homogenizing effect on cities across the world. But, on the other hand, as Gunn and Townsend show in this careful and rich study of the fates of two second-order “motor cities” on different sides of the world, the arrival of mass car ownership was complicated, contingent, and profoundly shaped by the cultures in which it thrived.

Automobility and the City is an unusual and rewarding work of comparative history, looking at how the British city of Birmingham and the Japanese city of Nagoya were transformed by the automobile. Both cities have much in common. They are both large industrial centers that have been overshadowed by their nations’ capitals. They were both intensely redeveloped after World War II, each city becoming centers for the production, ownership, and deployment of automobiles. Looking at the history of these two cities allows the reader to further understand the relationship between the automobile and the built environment in the twentieth century and the complex ways that car ownership is embedded in culture. It also adds much needed regional depth to a historiography of car ownership and urban space that is heavily dominated by the United States.

Gunn and Townsend show how both Britain and Japan saw a staggering increase in private car ownership after the 1960s as private affluence came to supplant postwar austerity. In Britain, the number of automobiles tripled from 5 million to 15 million between 1960 and 1975, while Japan, a country with less than a million private automobiles in 1960, had 20 million by 1980. As millions of new drivers poured onto poorly regulated roads, the result was carnage. Gunn and Townsend show how, after World War II, the safe and efficient management of traffic became a new domain of expertise in both countries. Urban planners came to realize that mass car ownership required rethinking the very nature of the built environment. In response, both Birmingham and Nagoya were heavily redeveloped by two didactic urban planners—Herbert Manzoni and Tabuchi Juro, respectively—in the 1960s. In Birmingham, this took the form of a vast inner ring road built between 1957 and 1971. Designed to produce a uniform and constant traffic flow through the city, it was described by one critic as “a strange coming together of an American ‘strip’ and an English high street in the middle of Brum” (55). In Nagoya, Tabuchi opted for width over height, bisecting the city with vast, 100-meter-wide freeways that preserved sightlines and continuous views. These new road networks prompted a “traffic architecture” (61) in both cities—with new underground shopping malls, pedestrianized tunnels, and multistory car parks proliferating. Perhaps most distinctive, however, was less these new urban developments but the remade urban form as a whole, as it became increasingly latticed by “dead public spaces” (98) in the form of roads.

Meanwhile, mass car ownership became embedded in the culture of both Britain and Japan from the 1960s, becoming symbols of affluence and freedom. In Japan, this era was heralded in 1961 by the theorist of technology Hoshino Yoshiro as the “My Car Era”; in Britain enthusiastic futurists like Rayner Banham wrote rapturously of the emancipatory potential of the automobile. However, car ownership remained uneven. In Birmingham in 1970, as the inner ring road was being completed, 58 percent of people were still carless, while, the same year in Nagoya, four of out of five households belonged to what were becoming known in Japan as the “no car folk.” Despite their numbers, the “no car folk” of Birmingham and Nagoya were left behind in the fantasies of the future indulged in by urban planners. Moreover, this inequality took gendered and racialized forms. Areas of Birmingham, such as Handsworth, with a significant Afro-Caribbean or Asian presence had some of the lowest rates of car ownership while women did not start driving in significant numbers in Britain or Japan until the 1980s.

Like so much else, automobile-led urban development unraveled in Birmingham and Nagoya in the 1970s. The 1973 oil crisis revealed the limits of a technology powered by cheap, abundant petrol. At the same time, new attention was drawn to rising pollution levels by a high-profile epidemic of asthma and lung diseases in the Japanese city of Yokkaichi. Although Gunn and Townsend end their account in the later twentieth century, the invisible and existential threat of carbon emissions is given less attention here than more tangible pollutants such as lead, smoke, and sound. This is perhaps understandable, given the immediacy of ill health, visual blight, and thundering sound that came to mark the lives of residents of Birmingham and Nagoya. Nevertheless, as climate change comes to dominate the future over the longer term, it is likely that this will be the critical lens through which we view the urban forms of Birmingham and Nagoya in ten or twenty years’ time. Just as Manzoni and Tabuchi created ambitious urban plans that retrofitted mass car ownership into urban forms built for trams and horses, we will need to do something similar over the next generation, reimagining cities of suburbs and freeways to suit new forms of mobility that draw on different sources of energy.