149: Cecelia Tichi's Shifting Gears

In Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America, Cecelia Tichi traces the change in metaphors, images, and methods of composition used by American writers from the 1890s to the 1920s as evidence of a change in worldview, a "shifting of gears" from a romantic view of the world to a mechanical one.  Incorporating a wide variety of texts, including popular journalism, ads, kids' books, westerns, medical textbooks, government publications, modernist poetry, novels, and books on technology, not to mention toys, movies, and buildings, Tichi argues that the new "gear and girder" technology altered the ways writers used language - and that by adopting the tools, logic, and aesthetic of their surroundings, Machine Age writers made technology legible.

133: Edward Relph's Modern Urban Landscape

Edward Relph's The Modern Urban Landscape examines the landscapes of large cities since 1880 for clues as to the relationship between modernization and urban form.  In particular, he studies the visual landscapes of the "modern parts of towns and cities" in North America, Britain, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand; building on this firsthand experience, he concludes that "the modern urban landscape is both rationalised and artificial, which is another way of saying that it is intensely human, an expression of human will and deeply imbued with meaning."  He thus shifts the focus of human geography from the rural to the urban, while retaining the discipline's focus on empirical observations of coherent visual landscapes.

To collect data on the changes in urban architecture, planning, technology and social conditions since 1880, Relph takes the "geographical" approach of "watching:" he starts with "the totality of what I see," then follows "several directions more or less at once," looking for unusual details, new developments, and ironic juxtapositions within the larger context of the urban fabric.  Landscapes, to Relph, are the "visual contexts of daily existence," and he insists on retaining the wholeness of the urban landscape because so much of landscape is about context, about the relationships between buildings and the streets and spaces and other structures around them, that you cannot study any one element in isolation.  Only by preserving landscape's "fragile wholeness" can we hope to learn anything about how it functions.