from "place and placelessness" by E. Relph (1976)
"The old road", writes Todd Snow, "was a definite place, a strip of land that went between other places." It was a road which had to be traveled slowly and which this encourages social contact as well as involving the traveler directly in the landscape. "Since the old road was basically an extension of a place it partook of the nature of all other places and was related to the geography beside the road as well as that of and at the end of the road." In contrast to this is the New Road, an essentially twentieth century creation and an extension of man's vehicle; it does not connect places nor does it link with the surrounding landscape. "The New Road generally seems to go between cities, but the primary requirement is that it start from where the people are and go on indefinitely, not that it go between places or lead to places. The Old Road started from and led to the city. The New Road starts everywhere and leads nowhere.
Snow and Relph are here talking about the fact that mass transit, mass communication have shifted away from a model based on facilitating the transfer of people, things and ideas between specific centers or places, and towards the facilitation of movement and transfer in general, as an abstract concept. The interstate highway, the internet, jet travel do not exist expressly to make possible the journey from Rome to Paris or New York to Atlanta, though they do make that journey more faster. Rather they exist to make possible rapid movement between any and all locations, reducing the friction of distance to such a degree that differentiation no longer occurs. Rather than roads coming to places, places become because of the roads. I live in Austin, which is located where the fertile plains meet the stony plateau and a great river flows through the landscape. There is a highway which tracks the path between San Antonio, Austin, Minneapolis. There are cities along its path which were settled long before the roads were built, in response to the natural landscape and the availability of natural resources and transportation (rivers). There are also places like Pflugerville and Round Rock that exist in response to the New Roads.
Kind of interesting!
