Daylight Savings Time and a Bibliography on Autoism

A piece at The New Republic, "The Big Winner in the Daylight Saving Time Debate: Cars," discusses the time change debate as a "proxy fight" over our autoism:

[W]hat really sticks out is that the daylight saving debate is, to some degree, a proxy fight over cars and the role they play in American life....

Car hegemony persists even now, in part because so many Americans associate them with independence and self-reliance. But nothing benefits the reign of the automobile over us all than simple inertia—we’ve accepted that our built environment is designed for the benefit of cars so decisively that we’ve forgotten that we built that environment, through policy choices that may no longer make the sense they once did. That it’s easier to debate how to bend time to our will than it is to take back even a small parcel of the territory that’s been given to cars says it all.

via Twitter

Several conversations over the last month or two have yielded a real bibliography on autoism. This is a convenient peg for it.

Books

City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, by Mike Davis (1990)

Geography Of Nowhere: The Rise And Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape, by James Howard Kunstler (1993)

Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture, by Kristin Ross (1994)

Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City, by Clay McShane (1995)

Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take it Back, by Jane Holtz Kay (1998)

This next is interesting as it and the 2004 Urry article below, as well as other texts, use "automobility." 

This word has seemed to be a neutral modal description, the mere fact of getting around by car, and not the larger cultural system we have been calling autoism here. But some seem to use it for that cultural system also. "Mobility" usually has a positive valence, also. We like mobility. By contrast, the cluster of words marked with -ism and -ist often indicate more negative connotations, and indicate a perspective, orientation, system, or philosophy. So I still prefer autoism as more descriptive. But there is a body of analysis that uses "automobility."

Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America, by Cotten Seiler (2008)

Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, by Peter Norton (2008)

Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and its Effect on Our Lives, by Catherine Lutz (2010)

Trams or Tailfins? Public and Private Prosperity in Postwar West Germany and the United States, by Jan L. Logemann (2012)

Car Country: An Environmental History, by Christopher Wells (2013)

The Road to Inequality: How the Federal Highway Program Polarized America and Undermined Cities, by Clayton Nall (2018)

Policing the Open Road, by Sarah Seo (2019)

Autonorama: The Illusory Promise of High-Tech Driving, by Peter Norton (2019)

Articles

"Social Ideology of the Motorcar," by André Gorz - The provenance of this is a little dodgy, but people refer to it often. Possibly from Le Sauvage September-October 1973.and by an unknown translator.

"The City and the Car," by Mimi Sheller and John Urry.  International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 24 no.4, 2000, p.737-757.

"The System of Automobility," by John Urry.  Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 21 no.4-5, 2004, p.25-39.

"Automotive Emotions: Feeling the Car," by Mimi Sheller. Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 21 no.4-5, 2004, p.221-242

"Secessionist Automobility: Racism, Anti-Urbanism, and the Politics of Automobility in Atlanta, Georgia," by Jason Henderson. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 30 no.2, 2008, p.293-307.

"The Daily Grind: Work, Commuting, and their Impact on Political Participation," by Benjamin Newman et. al. American Politics Research, vol. 42 no. 1, 2013,  p. 141-170.

"Four Paradigms: Traffic Safety in the Twentieth-Century United States," by Peter Norton.  Technology and Culture, vol. 56 no. 2, 2015, p. 319-334. The names of the four paradigms he proposes: Safety First, Control, Crashworthiness, and Responsibility.