S imon G unn and S usan C. T ownsend . Automobility and the City in Twentieth-Century Britain and Japan

Simon Gunn’s and Susan C. Townsend’s Automobility and the City in Twentieth-Century Britain and Japan is an excellent comparative history of how and why mass motorization reshaped cities in Japan and Great Britain during the twentieth century as well as its persistence at the turn of the twenty-first century. As a collaborative exercise over more than a decade, the book benefits from the authors’ respective expertise and enthusiasm for the subject matter and their chosen case study cities. Birmingham and Nagoya—arguably the respective countries’ “second cities”—make good comparators: they were both remade as “motor cities” (xiv) during the second third of the twentieth century through their growth as centers of vehicle manufacturing, the emergence of a car ownership culture, and urban redevelopment being driven by motorization, especially between the 1950s and 1980s. As the authors note, comparative history has “given way” (xiv) to transnational and global history since the early...

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