Automobility and the City in Twentieth-Century Britain and Japan

Simon Gunn, Susan C. Townsend

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350075955
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Automobility and the City in Twentieth-Century Britain and Japan is the first book to consider how mass motorization reshaped cities in Japan and Britain during the 20th century. Taking two leading 'motor cities', Nagoya and Birmingham, as their principal subjects, Simon Gunn and Susan C. Townsend show how cars changed the spatial form and individual experience of the modern city and reveal the similarities and differences between Japan and Britain in adapting to the 'motor age'. The book has three main themes: the place of automobility in post-war urban reconstruction; the emerging conflict between the promise of mobility and personal freedom offered by the car and its consequences for the urban environment (the M/E dilemma); and the extent to which the Anglo-Japanese comparison can throw light on fundamental differences in cultural understanding of the environment, urbanism and the self. The result is the first comparative history of mass automobility and its environmental consequences between East and West.

1

Planning the Automotive City, c. 1920–1960

Outside North America the history of the car can justifiably be studied separately from the history of the city before 1930; thereafter their histories become increasingly inseparable. On the one side the car emerged as the essential accoutrement of modern urban living in the mid-twentieth century. On the other, the problem of how to squeeze automotive traffic into already densely packed townscapes loomed ever larger until, by the 1960s, it dwarfed all other physical considerations. As a review of Birmingham’s redevelopment put it in 1959: ‘The motor car is becoming the fundamental consideration of modern urban life’ – not least for city planners.¹ Yet there was a paradox here. For a while the problem of mass automobility seemed urgent – even terrifyingly immediate – in Japanese and British cities in the 1960s and 1970s, the solutions to those problems in the form of road planning and techniques of traffic control were already half a century old. In both Nagoya and Birmingham major schemes for reorganizing the city around the priorities of motor, or ‘mixed’, traffic had existed from the 1920s.

In this chapter we examine the pre-history of the automotive city in Nagoya and Birmingham from the First World War. After the First World War both cities had developed plans for urban remodelling that included major road systems. In Nagoya in the 1920s, town planner Ishikawa Hideaki envisaged connecting the whole city, including several new parks, through a planned system of streets, many of them widened to accommodate motor traffic.² For Birmingham, the City Engineer Henry Stilgoe suggested a series of ring roads – inner, middle and outer – as early as 1918, ostensibly inspired by a visit to Vienna with its famous Ringstrasse.³ Thereafter the planning history of the two cities is suggestive of the long gestation of major civil engineering works: Nagoya’s civil engineering showpiece, the 100-metre-wide roads, was completed by 1963. However, Birmingham’s Inner Ring Road was not formally completed until 1971, while the first section of Nagoya’s Urban Expressway did not open until 1979.

This chapter starts with planning for automobility in Nagoya and Birmingham in the 1920s and 1930s and the significant intervention in those histories represented by the Asia-Pacific War (1931–45) and the Second World War, in particular the consequences of strategic bombing for their subsequent reconstruction after 1945. The persistence of earlier plans into the post-war period is then examined in some detail, not least the question of how civil engineering projects associated with major road construction should be financed in the climate of post-war austerity experienced by both countries. Urban roads were designed not simply or primarily for the private car before the 1950s but had to accommodate a ‘mixed economy’ of traffic, including buses, trams and light vehicles. In the case of Japan, defeat and occupation caused a more radical break with the past than occurred in Britain, but Nagoya was unusual in resurrecting plans originally drawn up in the 1920s.⁴ In all this the national contexts – political, legal, fiscal – and the inherited infrastructure of automobility, from motor industry to road network, require exploring since these shaped the process of mass motorization and governmental responses to it from the later 1950s onwards. But we start with the early history of town planning in Japan and Britain, which first brought automobility and the city into relationship.

Traffic and the history of town planning

From the beginning of the twentieth century the movement in favour of town planning reflected concerns with the problem of motor traffic. In Britain, the Roads Improvement Association lobbied consistently to enhance the network and quality of the nation’s roads, first for bicyclists, then for motorists, resulting in the foundation by government of the Roads Board in 1908.⁵ In 1903 the novelist H.G. Wells wrote of the ‘necessity for adapting our roads to accommodate an increasing new traffic of soft-tyred mechanical vehicles’.⁶ The adaptation deemed necessary was not only to road surfaces, caked with mud and dust, but also to traffic itself, the dangerous mixing of machines, animals and people all legitimately using the roads. It was London’s circulation that was earliest – and most consistently – deemed to require remedial intervention. The first ‘Town Planning and Housing’ supplement of the Architectural Review in 1910 included an article by David Barclay Niven that proposed the development of a ring road encircling the capital and the same idea was echoed by the early planner G.L. Pepler in his call for a ‘girdle round London’ at the international town planning conference organized by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in 1910.⁷ As well as promoting traffic flow, the concept of the ring road in this earliest phase intersected with British planners’ desire to contain urban sprawl while simultaneously encouraging green spaces in the manner of the garden city.

Although the concept of the ring road was less well-known in Japan, in 1907 news of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City Movement, from the first example at Letchworth (1903), spread among Japanese intellectuals and policymakers. British ideas about town planning, and the Garden City Movement in particular, inspired Shibusawa Ei’ichi, the entrepreneur and developer of Den’enchōfu, the most notable ‘garden city’ suburb near Tokyo. As in Britain, the capital initially led the way in city planning, with the Tokyo City Improvement Ordinance (TCIO) passed into law in 1888. Described as ‘Japan’s first planning law’,⁸ the TCIO authorized the government to rearrange the city streets ‘in view of the permanent advantages to be gained in the municipal administration of commerce, public health, fire prevention, and transportation throughout the entire urban area.’⁹ Large-scale urban planning in Japan in the early Meiji Period reflected Western influences brought back by a group of elite Japanese samurai engaged in the Iwakura Embassy to the United States, Britain and Europe between 1871 and 1873. These young men were greatly impressed not only by the grand vistas of Paris but also by the French capital’s role as a commercial and economic centre. The mission’s chronicler, Kume Kunitake, noted that an efficient transportation system was vital to prosperity and well-built, good-quality roads and streets were an indicator of a city’s commercial and economic vitality. The mission also recorded details about the construction techniques of road building, from the use of stone paving in Europe to tar-macadam in Washington as well as measuring road-widths and noting the use of trees to provide shade. TCIO planning included measures specifically designed to alleviate traffic congestion through introducing more uniformity to streets and eliminating bottle-necks, especially near bridges. Such was the link between roads and streets as an index of civilization and modernity that street improvement became a corner stone of Japan’s urban construction policies in its colonies, in cities such as Seoul.¹⁰

A subsequent generation of Japanese modernizers and social reformers, many of them influenced by Western liberalism and socialist ideas, insisted that only technology and practical education could meet the challenges that modern cities posed.¹¹ However, unlike Haussmann’s Paris, Japanese planners at home and in the colonies adopted a gradualist approach to street and road improvement. Rather than flattening existing urban areas to make room for roads, they were content with making incremental improvements over time which were not only less expensive but also less likely to incite opposition. This approach was particularly important in the colonies where planners adapted idealized plans to reflect local demands as well as different topographical conditions.¹²

In Nagoya during the 1920s it was the engineer Ishikawa Hideaki who led the way in re-conceptualizing the relationship between roads and green spaces after he was seconded to the city from the Ministry for Home Affairs. Ishikawa is regarded as one of the very few ‘visionary’ Japanese planners, along with the architect Tange Kenzō who was associated with Hiroshima’s reconstruction planning and a futuristic plan for a motorized Tokyo in 1960.¹³ Like many other young social reformers and city planners, Ishikawa was a man of the Taishō¹⁴ generation: those born in the 1890s who were most exposed to the radical influences of Western liberalism and socialism, often to the dismay of their Meiji generation peers who were born in the 1860s and 1870s. Ishikawa’s genius lay in combining both the monumental aspects of the early Meiji period and the modernizing impulses of the 1920s and 1930s. He was also unusual in applying a comprehensive plan to what was then a relatively unimportant regional city. During his posting to Nagoya, Ishikawa travelled extensively, visiting China in 1921 and Europe between 1923 and 1924 where he met Raymond Unwin and discussed his master plan for Nagoya based on the separation of the city’s functions.¹⁵ On his return, he drew up a plan envisaging a network of forty roads in 1924. His 1926 plan also included the creation of twenty-four parks covering an area of over 5.5 square kilometres, highlighting the importance of green spaces to the well-being of townspeople in terms of health, recreation and sanitation.¹⁶

These ideas reflected the prevailing spirit of Western-influenced Taishō liberalism and democracy. The movement went hand-in-hand with an emphasis on the creation of gardens and parks for the sake of hygiene and health. The ideas were promoted by government-sponsored organizations such as the Cultural Life Research Group (Bunka Seikatsu Kenkyūkai) and the Alliance for Lifestyle Improvement (Seikatsu Kaizen Dōmeikai), both founded in 1920.¹⁷ Ishikawa also articulated a concept of ‘scenic beauty’ in plans to protect areas of natural and historical interest, and his designs for new residential areas to the east of the city incorporated open land and forest.¹⁸ A 1924 committee within the Alliance for Lifestyle Improvement recommended: ‘Public Housing (apartment houses) and garden city facilities should be constructed in accordance with the circumstances of the metropolis’ and called for unified planning for houses and roads along the lines of the Garden City.¹⁹ The incorporation of green spaces into road design was one of Ishikawa’s most important legacies to Nagoya’s post-war reconstruction planning. His idea of publicizing plans widely in order to garner public support was also ahead of his time. He was active in the new Society for Urban Creativity (Toshi Sōsaku Kai) inaugurated in April 1925 to serve as a forum for discussing ideas about the urban environment, housing, green spaces and road construction; in this view roads were an aid to environmental improvement and public health, not antithetical to them. To support these ideas a journal, Toshi Sōsaku (Urban Creativity), was published from September 1925 until April 1930.²⁰ In this way Ishikawa acted as a conduit for introducing Western ideas about city planning into Japan.²¹

As with Nagoya, Birmingham did not lag behind London in the movement to planning or to rings. The City Corporation established a Town Planning Committee in 1911 and two years later a plan for the districts of Quinton, Harborne and Edgbaston in the south-west of the city, designed to limit suburban development on what was then Birmingham’s fringe, was the first such scheme nationally to be approved by the Local Government Board.²² In contrast to Nagoya, ring roads were an integral part of the early planning vision; an outer ring for Birmingham had been proposed as early as 1908 and in 1918 the City Engineer Henry Stilgoe suggested an ‘inner ring’ or ‘kind of loop’ around the city centre, linking together the existing arterial roads. Here was the origin of the Inner Ring Road, Birmingham’s major civic engineering achievement and Britain’s first urban motorway, whose route was to remain largely unchanged when it was finally opened half a century later.²³ As Birmingham steadily expanded its city boundaries to the north, east and south through the first three decades of the twentieth century, so arterial and ring roads became increasingly important in circumscribing and connecting the urban form.²⁴

By contrast, the concept of transportation rings or loops was limited to the building of intra-city railways in Tokyo, where railways arrived in 1872 and the electric tram in 1903. However, even the famous Yamanote railway loop, which encircled the city to the west of Tokyo station and Ginza, linking the main districts of Shinagawa, Shibuya, Shinjuku, Ikebukuro and Ueno, did not start out as a loop. It began from freight lines running from central Japan to the port at Yokohama at the end of the nineteenth century. Only after the final phase of the Tokyo City Improvement Project was completed in 1919 did the Yamanote line connect the various stations and subcentres.²⁵ Before the age of the automobile: ‘The history of the Yamanote epitomizes how various separate lines of movement become entangled, forming phenomenological and symbolically powerful loops and linkages.’²⁶ Only in the later twentieth century did roads in Japanese cities take on the mantle of modernized connectivity and mobility.

The inherited urban form as well as changes in urban transportation added to the increase in traffic congestion in both cities between the wars, but there were differences in the nature of the traffic and the problem. In Birmingham rising levels of motor traffic were blamed in part on the siting of industrial factories in and around the central core. Birmingham City Council established a special committee on traffic congestion in 1936 to investigate the problem in the central area. The issue, however, was not so much the private car as the increased mix of traffic on the streets. What particularly concerned local authorities, in cities like Manchester and Birmingham in the 1930s, was the congestion caused by the different means of mass public transport, notably tramways, trolley buses and motor buses.²⁷ It was similar concerns, combined with the high rates of road casualties in the 1930s, that impelled the Metropolitan Commissioner of Police in London, Alker Tripp, to begin advocating for strict segregation of pedestrians and vehicles, a principle that would become an orthodoxy of traffic planning in Britain after 1945. Following visits to cities...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• List of Graphs
• Preface
• Note on Text and Translation
• Introduction: Automobility and the City between East and West
• 1. Planning the Automotive City, c. 1920–1960
• 2. Civic Engineering: Roads Construction and the Urban Environment
• 3. Automobility and Urban Form
• 4. Driving the Motor City: The Experience of Automobility
• 5. Pollution and Protest
• 6. Kuruma Banare: Turning Away from the Car?
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint