Roads to engagement: A roundtable discussion with Jennifer Hart,Peter Norton,Anke Ortlepp,Heidi Tworek,and Roland Wenzlhuemer

Roland Wenzlhuemer: For our concluding roundtable discussion, we have four discussants with us, Jennifer Hart, Peter Norton, Heidi Tworek and Anke Ortlepp. We have prepared two questions, but before asking them, I would like to seize the opportunity to say a few words on observations I made during this conference. It was wonderful to see that we discussed so many things that usually remain unnoticed and undiscussed in transport history conferences. Just to pick out a few topics. First, that transport, also communication, very often takes place at two or more different speeds, and that of course is an issue. Some travel fast, some travel slow. Segregation, secondly; racial, social, a mixture of both. Who is allowed to do what? seems to be a persistent theme. The third theme that came up several times is visibility, vis-à-vis invisibility. Which forms of transport are meant to be visible? Marches, protest marches, walking as dissent – you do that in order to make something visible. And then there are other forms of transport that often stay hidden. The question is how much of the mobility and immobility that we see and study is actually involuntary. We know that there has been forced labour, slavery in particular, and we know that this has been based on involuntary forced mobility and migration. We are aware of this and have paid attention to such forms of forced and, thus, involuntary mobility. But there are other modes of mobility which are, of course, not forced, but still not quite voluntary, that we tend to keep losing track of. All forms of commuting, for instance, an everyday experience of countless people. Of course, this is in no way the same as forced labour and forced mobility and should, thus, not be directly compared. But still, it is a form of mobility that does not really fit our narrative of modernity: increasing mobility, shrinking world and so on. For many, it is nothing but a necessary evil, a loss of lifetime even, while being mobile. The history of mobility is a history of tension and friction. Tensions do not always imply conflict or violence, but also different speeds, visibility and invisibility. We need to take time and find ways to tell these complicated stories in a way that is both compelling and understandable. This is a major challenge which we will try to address in the next few minutes.

Question: Based on your own research, what are in your opinion the most pressing topics in the fields of transport history and infrastructure history?

Heidi Tworek: In a way, what has united my entire research is an interest in information, communication and infrastructure: how it is created, the politics and economics behind it, but also its influence on a whole range of different topics. My first book was about how Germans tried to use, control and shape the new technology of wireless and radio to achieve geopolitical, economic and cultural aims, not just within Germany but also in colonies and abroad. ¹ One could look at the creation of wireless infrastructure and trace it all the way through from around 1900 to 1945. Something that united elites across the political spectrum was an interest in using this infrastructure to achieve geopolitical, economic and cultural goals.

What makes infrastructure history so important is that it enables us to tangibly trace continuity and change in ways that, for example, a political history might not. Internet policy, for instance, is a topic that is very central in my teaching today. I have to explain to my students that there are deep and structural issues with the internet. The popular claim that things are unprecedented is a move to not use the regulation that is already on the books and that can be enforced. It is a means for a company to claim that if things are unprecedented then they can try to influence regulation. This is often factually untrue. It is very important to explain how what we are experiencing now is precedented or unprecedented. Studying infrastructure enables us to go beyond specific political eras. And it also enables us to intersect with a huge number of other disciplines and subdisciplines, whether it is geopolitics, business history, labour history, migration history, literature or photography. I would like to highlight five pressing topics for the field of infrastructure history. What they all have in common is that idea to use infrastructure and transportation to link to other subdisciplines or other disciplines.

The first is the business history of infrastructure. We need to look at the networks behind infrastructure: who is funding it? Is it for profit? What is the political economy of infrastructure? What do governments allow to be private versus public? The second topic is the question of accessibility. There is a lot that we could draw from disability studies, to really think about questions of accessibility. So, I urge us to think about bringing that lens to the table a little bit more. Think about the ways in which things like the American Disability Act and legal structures have pushed for infrastructure to be changed and adapted, and how often that conflicts with monuments. The third pressing topic is an intellectual history of the term infrastructure itself. We have, at some times, used it in a very ahistorical fashion, although there is certainly already a lot of intellectual history on this, for instance Steffen Richter's book on Infrastruktur in German literature. ² I have written about the German term Verkehr or Weltverkehr. I imagine there are many rich intellectual histories all around the world to be told about the term of infrastructure and what it means.

The fourth topic is the question of policy. What does this history do for policy? Again, infrastructure is a particularly relevant topic because it's so path-dependent, and it has such long-term ramifications, that again are very tangible and traceable. How can we trace path-dependency and what does that do for policy? It can help policymakers understand where the infrastructure they are trying to maintain or to get rid of came from. It can help them understand unintended consequences. I would love to have more discussion about that. I have just been made director of a centre that is in a policy school, the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions (https://democracy.ubc.ca). My aim is to bring in history and to explore what historians can bring to policy, in a responsible way. This is the fifth pressing topic: how can we write history that makes sense to policymakers and is presented in ways that are digestible but still responsible? I think infrastructure history particularly lends itself to that.

Anke Ortlepp: I totally agree with Heidi that the history of infrastructure is a field that invites cooperation with colleagues from other disciplines. In addition to the ones mentioned, I would like to add history of architecture, history of urban planning and material cultural studies. To think of history of infrastructure as a multi-disciplinary field is very useful. I come from American history and think of myself as a cultural historian. Infrastructure popped up as part of my work on air travel in the post-war period. A lot of my work revolved around airports, and I became particularly interested in studying segregated airports in the U.S. South and processes of their desegregation. I conceived of them as spaces of mobility and consumption and became very interested in their material qualities. ³ We should look at different infrastructure systems in a comparative perspective; in the case of my research, it was trains and cars. It was important to understand the differences in these modes of mobility, what the different needs were, and how infrastructure developed in different ways.

We should also try harder to look at the history of infrastructure from below. There are often so many sources available on how infrastructure was put into place, how policies were defined, how in the case of the United States federal agencies carried them out, what administrators did, and even sources on construction crews on the ground. But it is often very difficult to get access to how people actually used infrastructure, how they liked it, what kinds of things happened to them, the negative experiences they had. In doing so, it is very important to take an intersectional approach to telling the story of historical actors, because in all cases different identities overlap; among them race, gender, age or regional backgrounds.

In my research on airports, I was eager to find testimonies by African American travellers to understand what happened to them at airports, how they were denied access to airport infrastructure. Often enough, that is a question of source availability. Sometimes it seems awfully hard to tell stories of exclusion as it seems impossible to dig up the information. And yet, it is very important to find materials and to tell the stories of the people who actually used train stations, airports and other infrastructure. This goes together with looking at the material qualities of infrastructure: the quality of the material that was used, stuff that was not available, how things feel, smell, what kinds of materials invited people to enter and access particular forms of infrastructure. In my work on airports, I found that the sections reserved for white passengers in the 1950s and 1960s looked really nice with marble, plants and concession stands. Meanwhile, the areas for Black travellers were really drab environments; dark rooms that no one wanted to spend time in.

Peter Norton: I want to echo what Heidi said about infrastructure, this time more specifically about its troubled origins as a word. Infrastructure is a recent usage in English for the ways we’re using it. It was imported from the French who used it specifically for military installations like fortresses and harbours for naval ships. In the U.S. case, the term was taken over because idolators of individual liberty and free markets could not get behind a word like “public works”. In the 1970s, Committees of Public Works in the U.S. Congress changed their names to Committees of Infrastructure, so that Republicans could vote for big spendings in road construction without the term “public works” making them look like New Deal liberals.

Another fraud we have been sold is that infrastructure is a “solution”. I believe that we as historians are uniquely equipped to work against this. The rhetoric of solution is an absurd marketing technique with a very grim, creepy and sinister undertone, namely that you do not solve your problems with the tools of your choosing, we solve your problems with the products you buy. Once that transition has been made, it is very hard to get off that treadmill of unsustainable consumption. It's a genius invention for destroying the planet and our children's futures, and maybe infrastructure is part of the problem, therefore. I teach in an engineering school. All of my students are engineers, and they all begin with this problem: The problem is to take the state of the art and make it better. Their presupposition is astonishing and should give us chills: the state of the art is normal, and our job is to make this normal better. The effort to get every person inside their own passenger car, this time with a battery in it, is madness. But young engineering students think that this is not only reasonable, but also the path to sustainability.

Historians can help because we are the people who know that the status quo is never normal. We can help show how, in the twentieth century in particular, tools were repackaged to solutions. The automobile, for example, began as a special purpose tool for special purpose needs. This construction of the automobile was a threat to the people who sold it. They strove hard and worked very successfully at reconceiving the automobile as the all-purpose mobility solution. But this status quo was never the product of some sort of rational normal evolution. In fact, engineers are constantly talking about evolution, of, say, autonomous vehicles or something like that. No, they don’t evolve, people make them, they have plans, and we need to find out what they are. And of course, these vehicles aren’t autonomous – they have drivers, the drivers are the tech companies, who want it to be their product. We have to question, are we being sold transport, which is how it is packaged to us, or is this just another way to generate endless consumption, which now includes, for example, data collection from the people in vehicles.

This is the topic we most urgently need to address, and it is going to take aggressive action here, because it has been claimed by others. We are the only people equipped to talk about the future and how to get there and to recognize that our greatest obstacle toward a better future is the presupposition that the status quo is normal.

Jennifer Hart: It is very interesting, that we all work in or collaborate in applied areas, in applied fields in various ways. I echo what Peter is saying about engineers and some of the practical or applied fields, such as architecture, urban planning – as Anke mentioned – and others. I was also, like Anke, not originally a historian of transportation, or technology, or infrastructure. I am not just a historian, but also an anthropologist. To some degree, it has always helped me not be too attached to certain historiographical conventions.

I embrace an interpretation of technology and infrastructure that grows out of a “new” anthropological and sociological understanding of technology and infrastructure as objects or systems that have no inherent meaning, but rather take on meaning through use. Mimi Sheller and John Urry and many other scholars have advanced this view over the years. ⁴ For transport technology and infrastructure in particular, I am convinced by Urry's conception of mobility as a system, a constellation of many things in which technological and infrastructural objects play only one part. Our human agency – in various capacities – and values and cultures also play a central role. Transport history has been transformed by the mobility turn. It pays increasing attention to people: not just as labourers, but as complex, multi-faceted, mobile, technological agents, who both have and enact their own social, cultural and economic logics and, at the same time, are subject to the structural and political conditions projected onto them by other people. So, technological objects, in other words, are vectors or tools through which action passes and upon which or through which it is enacted, rather than a force in and of itself.

I think it's urgent that we move away from technological determinism to this new vision. Transport history and the history of technology are at a crossroads and are trying to define or redefine themselves. There is a critical need for clear histories of capital, technocracy and expertise – not as triumphant expansion, but as themselves the subjects of historical problematisation and investigation. Of course, their growth is interconnected with empire and colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Capital and technocracy have shaped the history of technology and shaped the conceptual and theoretical assumptions we make about technology; what it means, how it works, why it matters.

We also need to do some really serious conceptual work. What do we mean when we say certain words? What implications does that have for the way that we do scholarship, for our methodologies, for our theoretical frameworks, for our forms of writing and engagement? That is important because, of course, our concepts have incredible consequences, as Peter is alluding to. Current technological narratives carry a danger to flatten local perspectives and local specificities. That is a danger that is rooted in the persistence of technological determinism and narrow definitions of technology and infrastructure, and a continued focus on what Clapperton Mavhunga calls “banal mobility”. ⁵ Too often, our narratives reproduce what I call modernist conceits: these things that modernists believed and projected onto the world through the expansion of capitalist and technocratic notions of expertise that were not necessarily true. They were beliefs, but they were not truths, and yet, over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they have often been universalised or transformed into normative theories, models and assumptions about the way that the world works.

Challenging assumptions about capital and technocracy and expertise encourages us to ask why the local matters, and what it does tell us about the global. It pushes us to think about infrastructure, about how infrastructures and technologies invade or intervene in space but do not necessarily make place. It helps us think about the extent to which the state does and does not matter in shaping the lived realities and experiences of everyday life. Both those things can be true and often are at the same time so that we should try to move beyond the binaries of oppression and resistance, or frankly any binaries, and pay closer attention to the intricacies and specificities of politics and power. This is critical to understanding the past, but also informing any kind of feasible future. And it is also critical to the development of a true literature of these things, rather than a series of studies, which is what we have currently in all of these fields.

Question: How can we convey these histories in a way that makes engineers and policymakers listen?

Roland Wenzlhuemer: I guess we all share a certain urge to go beyond writing history and to start advising and be much more eloquent about the things that we find. But when I am called upon to make a statement in the media, it is a huge challenge to let go of the historian's need to complicate, be detailed, be exact, use the “maybe” form, that is all stuff that an audience beyond academia usually does not want to hear, that does not help us make our advice heard.

Peter Norton: To pick that up, we often use the word “nuanced” as a compliment. Maybe among us it is, but we need to be less nuanced with wider audiences. History has a trajectory and historians have the power to shift that trajectory.

A true story: the historian Carter Woodson was the son of slaves. He made it his life's purpose to shift the trajectory of U.S. history toward a future of racial justice. His associates said to him, “Well, we’re working on the future”, but he said, “You’re not going to get there until you get the past right”. A school of historiography called the Dunning School dominated U.S. history writing after 1900. It was named after the Columbia University professor William Archibald Dunning, who trained his doctoral students to go through the Reconstruction records of the Southern State Legislators, always with the purpose of proving that Black Americans were incompetent. The dissertations of these doctoral students then “proved” that they were incapable of self-government. To counter this, Woodson trained his students to go back to these primary sources. They provided evidence that the Reconstruction-era legislatures were not only quite competent, but in a lot of ways were models of decorum compared to what happened when Reconstruction came to an end. And in explaining this, Woodson has an argument in his book The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933) that says that you will not get the future right until you get the past right. ⁶

Here is another true story: in 1922, a roadbuilder wrote an editorial in his important engineering journal. He wanted to figure out how to get to a future where everybody is driving. At that time, the majority felt that “cars are slaughtering people, they take up space, they’re good for a few things, but everybody driving is an insane idea”. His difficulty was: how do we convince everybody that they should be driving all the time? And he wrote in his editorial, “the obvious solution lies only in a radical revision of our conception of what a city street is for”. ⁷ His vision was to transform the city street from a public space for everybody, above all people on foot and in electric street cars, into a place where you have to petition to cross the street, because now we are turning it over to very fast vehicles, even in vast cities where it makes no sense. That was an insane goal, but they pursued it, and they did it by telling some good stories. They became masterful storytellers; they told stories of the past that were total constructions. They provided visions of the future that were infeasible but extremely attractive, thereby shifting the trajectory of history.

We are all dealing with a future that is on a trajectory with a version of the past that was constructed to maximize consumption, to make things like the long commute feel like something that we solved by making you go faster. Again, the most urgent needs are to question our assumptions and to bring in a constant variety of perspectives. Both will help us find the topics that we have either neglected entirely or misunderstood, and of course this confirms the obvious; that history is inevitably political. The only historical perspective that has the pretense of being apolitical is the one that is politically in charge at the time in the setting. And that's the one that gets the luxury of characterizing itself as apolitical.

A trajectory is defined by two points. One point is in the past, which means if you can move that point, you can control the direction of the future. We can take an example from Carter Woodson. Rachel Carson shifted the trajectory of history. Jane Jacobs shifted the trajectory, as did dozens of other people in large or small ways. They did not do it by heavily footnoted research, rather through truthful, smart but highly readable narrative-driven books that were also bestsellers. Rather than partner with policymakers or engineers, I think we need to partner with storytellers, and as has been suggested by more than one person here, become excellent storytellers ourselves. We have a lot of good examples to learn from.

Heidi Tworek: To pick up on what has been said, this question draws me back to the classic old Hayden White question, which is What narratives are we writing? And they’re not really romances. Are they tragedies? It is not clear. ⁸ It is a very interesting way to think about new narratives – perhaps experimental narratives drawn more from literature, film or music – to tell these stories of infrastructure. It is really important for us to reflect on the narratives that we are telling because they have so much to do with the present and the future. As historians we are trying to offer different ways of talking about this. Of course, we must also think about how we are doing it: there are so many ways that infrastructural history offers itself up to different modes of presentation that are potentially more accessible to wider audiences, such as digital history formats or maps.

Speaking about wider audiences, as someone who spends a lot of time in the room with policymakers or other groups of people where I am the only historian, I believe that policymakers care about history. If you bring a historical example, you might get to a much more productive discussion than when political scientists deliver a present-based analysis. That said, it is about figuring out how we talk about it. It is about learning to give a presentation that is 2 minutes long or writing something that is only 800 or 1,000 words long. Just like we learn to write journal articles and books, you can’t just step into a room and expect to give a 2-minutes presentation to policymakers that lands. I am offering policy communications workshops and I also try to open the door for different kinds of voices and people, to elevate the voices of my students, for example.

Anke Ortlepp: I agree with a lot of what you just said. It makes the most sense to try to get students involved in the community, to encourage them to pay attention to issues, and to engage with people beyond campus. Of course, there is the question of storytelling. How do we arrange our stories? Whose voices do we hear? Whose stories do we actually tell? We need practitioners, engineers and policymakers, to pay more attention to the issues we discussed. That is actually what our university's board is encouraging us to do. We get extra credits if we get on the media, on television, on the radio, if we use our social media accounts to reach audiences beyond the campus. We get out there, do the stuff that we just talked about before, and by explaining the past, help people in Germany get ready for the future.

Jennifer Hart: I worked for many years in the middle of Detroit and now at a large polytechnic university. Like Peter, I have a lot of students who are engineers, architects and public health students. They are very interested in urban development; they are interested in things that directly impact their community – issues of inequality, and the ways in which technology and its regulation have created and reproduced inequality. I intentionally seek to attract these groups of students, and I very specifically address things that I know they are going to encounter in their work. In my classes, I talk about smart cities, digital inequalities, the way that transport infrastructure in U.S. cities created or reinforced segregation and continues to reproduce it. I provide students with alternative examples of people who are doing it differently. I also try to strengthen interdisciplinary collaboration at my university, and I often – though not always – receive enthusiastic and generous responses. We have to insert ourselves into those conversations actively.

That does require that we learn to talk to people who are not like us. Yes, we need people to pay more attention, but we also need to be better at grabbing attention. We need to be reaching out and going to people. We have to learn how to use slightly different language, how to be more concise and straighter to the point. We must learn how to think about the applications of our work. The new subfield of history called history communication is about translating historical research for the public through a wide variety of mediums. Too often, historians sit back and complain that people do not listen to us. But are we asking for meetings with leaders of corporations like General Motors or with government officials like my colleagues at the Mobility Innovation Office in Detroit? Are we trying to make explicit arguments about the impact of our work by helping people who are not historians understand it? Are we being effective translators? Are we providing people with outlets to engage? All of us can learn how to translate the consequences and implications of our work and think about how they are applied. It is a matter of training and intention.

You empower local populations by giving them evidence directly. We worked for many years to develop an interactive digital map of the trotro system in Ghana that is intended to function as an archive of urban life in Accra, Ghana. The interactive map gives people an opportunity to talk about their own stories and to spatialize those stories in ways that challenge how the city is mapped and how policymakers conceive of mobility in this city. This might give us – me, academics, but also the Ghanaian drivers’ unions that I work with – ammunition to go to the government and say: “Listen, these things that you’re proposing don’t make sense, here's evidence that we can point to because we’ve collected it”. We are also taking that model from Accra and using it to think about how we might address issues of transport access in Detroit, in neighbourhoods that have very limited access. We can use the model of Accra's trotro system – a grassroots public transport system – to think about how we can develop grassroots, neighbourhood-based para-transit in Detroit. Thinking about technology and infrastructure can be a way to connect Detroit to global issues while empowering local communities and thinking critically about history.

I agree with everyone here that history is not just the study of the past. If you ask students on the first day of class what history is, they say it is “the thing we learn so we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past in the future”. People intuitively understand history in this way. It is something that informs the present and helps us imagine and shape the future. But I do not think we are going to be able to imagine a more just, sustainable, inclusive or mobile future if we don’t get the past right. It won’t be possible because we’re going to keep telling ourselves lies. We are going to keep reproducing systems of violence, reproducing structures of inequality, over and over again. We’re doing it now; we’re going to continue doing it in the future because we’re just not talking to ourselves honestly and we’re not grappling with the details of these past politics with any kind of clarity. We need to think about the technological, infrastructural mobility histories in light of histories of structural, systemic, racial and class violence, and what Mimi Sheller calls mobility justice. ⁹

We have to think about people as complex human beings and put them at the centre of our stories, always. This will help us tell better stories. Most people don’t want to hear a story about the construction of a railway in great detail. It's not a compelling story, at least not in the political-economy way that traditional technology histories are written. There are interesting stories there, but we have to talk about the human beings involved and the motivations of those human beings – what they brought to the table, what the consequences of their actions were, how they impacted societies. Those are compelling stories that help us – and others – think about why and how technology, transportation and infrastructure matter.