Book Review: Riding the New York Subway. The Invention of the Modern Passenger by Stefan Höhne

Abstract

for women was also discussed very controversially in the trade unions and was described either as paternalistic presumption or as necessary protection against assault. A role may have been played by the fact that men claimed the nights as the most productive time. In practice, there was also a lot of typical Swiss federalism in this respect: Basel and Bern still had such a night driving ban in the late 1960s, while Zurich never did. Helene Bihlmaier’s contribution takes a completely different, architectural-historical perspective. Based on the history of the A16 motorway in the Swiss Jura, she shows that road construction was by no means always a purely male-dominated sphere. Built as one of the last motorway sections in Switzerland, the special feature of the “Transjurane” is also that an architectural competition was held for its design. This is probably one of the reasons why this section of the Swiss motorway network is characterised by a careful adaptation to the topography and yet architecturally self-confident independence in the design of the road space and the adjacent buildings. An important role in the winning consortium was played by Flora Ruchat-Roncati (1937–2002), an architect from Ticino who in 1985 was appointed the first full professor in the history of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. In the introductory article, Erika Flückiger Strebel takes stock of the state of genderspecific transport history in Switzerland. She begins in the Middle Ages, when a genderspecific division of the appropriation of space was first constituted. As a result, women were increasingly pushed into the domestic context; at the same time, however, they always remained present in public space in specific functions, for example as traders. Mobility thus very often arose primarily from economic constraints and remained precarious, even if it always had an inherent aspect of self-empowerment. The bicycle and the automobile, on the other hand, very quickly became emancipatory vehicles in the course of their mass use. This successful issue is part of the 20-year history of the journal “Wege und Geschichte”, which has become an indispensable institution in Swiss transport history.