Some car (and post-car) futures

I've been slow getting the readings for our final seminar meeting together - thanks for your patience!

I'd like you to do a little web reading about some of the potential directions that cars and culture are headed in, so have a look at the sites linked below. As always, post at least a quick response here in the blog to any one of them.

As we head into the final couple of weeks of the seminar (and how the heck did that happen?), I'd also like you to do a bit more car journaling to reflect on where your thinking about cars and culture is now, how that's changed since the start of the semester (if it has), and what kinds of changes (if any) you can envision making in your own relationship to cars, or changes that you can imagine initiating or supporting in your community. What would you change, if you could? What makes individual and collective change easy, hard, or possible at all? (In our final meeting, we'll go back to some of the "culture concept" stuff that we looked at in the beginning of the seminar to help us think about why cultures change or resist change.) Jeff, our blogger-in-waiting, has already reflected on a lot of this in his most recent post, and others may want to post their journal thoughts here as well, or you could just bring them to our meeting.

READINGS FOR MAY 31

A couple of sites on "cars of the future" (including some from the past):
* the Petersen Automotive Museum's "Alternative Power" exhibit
* reviews of some prototype "future cars" - click on the various types (compressed air, hybrids, etc.) to get a sense of what's out there

A couple of pieces dealing with peak oil and what that might mean for automobility and other aspects of how we live (both of which trace some of the connections between food production and energy use):
* a blog entry from the University of Winnipeg on "The Hungry City"
* a useful page on the "food vs. fuel" debate arising around increasing use of biofuels

Three short pieces on bicycle culture, from the folks at Carbusters magazine:
* a bike-centric editorial predicting the coming end of car culture
* a piece on Ciclovia, a kind of bicycle-centered festival beginning to catch on in some U.S. cities
* and a story about how Ferrara, Italy, set about turning itself into the "City of Bicycles"

And finally, two ways of thinking about cars, culture, and heritage:
* the site of the Motor Cities National Heritage Area (There's no need to read the whole site. Just look around to acquaint yourself with what this project is and what it's trying to do - and think about what it might mean to be memorializing automotive history in a time and place where the car industry is still struggling to survive.)
* a piece from my "History on Wheels" blog about the Sharon Welcome Center on Interstate 89 in Vermont - a "green" site with some intriguing undertones

See you in a couple of weeks!