Driving: Pre-Cognition and Driving

Abstract

In writings on mobility and non-representational theory, academics tracing the more-than-representational, performative, expressive improvisations of bodies-in-movement-in-spaces have adopted a range of theoretical and methodological approaches to explore the production and complex entwined performativities, materialities, mobilities and affects of both human embodied subjects and the spaces/places/landscapes/environments which are inhabited, traversed and perceived. Important work has emerged in geography on the materiality and embodied practices associated with cities ( Amin and Thrift 2002 ; Latham and McCormack 2004 ; Pinder, this book), the representational and non-representational dimensions of architecture ( Lees 2001 ; Adey 2008 ; Kraftl and Adey 2008 ), the emergence of self and landscape whilst walking ( Wylie 2005 , 2006 , 2007 ), the mobilities, materialities and embodied practices associated with driving and other ways of moving ( Sheller and Urry 2000 ; Cresswell 2006 ; Merriman 2007 ), and a whole host of other themes. While a few geographers have quite deliberately attempted to provide accounts of the production and consumption (or inhabitation) of particular landscapes, architectures or environments (e.g. Lees 2001 ; Llewellyn 2004 ; Merriman 2007 ; Kraftl and Adey 2008 ), the majority tend to focus more on either the physical production of architectures and environments or how they are inhabited and experienced; either examining the planning, design, and production of environments, or drawing upon participative and ethnographic methods and phenomenological and post-phenomenological philosophies to examine how embodied subjects sense, inhabit or apprehend their surroundings. 1 Research on driving and roads is a case in point. In the social sciences and humanities, scholars have tended to focus either on the consumption and inhabitation of the micro-spaces of the car and the generic practices of driving along roads, or the design, construction and landscaping of specific driving environments. There are clearly practical advantages to such divisions of labour, but while academic disciplines and traditions of enquiry may maintain or reinforce such divisions, many architecture, landscaping and engineering professionals have worked hard to overcome such distinctions, and throughout the twentieth century they developed new approaches to both driving and driving environments: in an attempt to comprehend how drivers perceive, inhabit, and experience the landscapes of roads and develop more sophisticated design, engineering and landscaping principles (see Appleyard et al. 1964 ; Kemp 1986 ; Schwarzer 2004 ; Merriman 2006 , 2007 ; Zeller 2007 ). In this chapter I examine the work of one such design professional, the prominent San Francisco landscape architect and environmental planner Lawrence Halprin, whose writings and commissions incorporated approaches to movement, embodiment and choreography derived from modern dance and avant-garde performance. Indeed, Halprin’s work can be situated in a long history of attempts by architects, dance choreographers, musicians and geographers (such as Torsten Hägerstrand) who have attempted to choreograph, notate, codify and diagram embodied movements in the environment ( Pred 1977 ; McCormack 2005 , 2008 ; Cresswell 2006 ). In Halprin’s case, he approached streets, roads and freeways not simply as inactive material environments in which driving or walking could be practised, but as active spaces which must be carefully designed, ‘scored’ and choreographed to produce particular movements, experiences, emotions and affects for motorists, pedestrians and local communities. In this chapter I explore how Halprin drew upon particular knowledges and understandings of movement and the environment in an attempt to engineer the affective potential of particular landscapes, including those of roads.

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