Recent concerns about air pollution, global warming, the damaging effects of car emissions and the sustainability of the petrol- and car-based society have highlighted just how embedded the car system became in the second half of the twentieth century. At the same time, many of the measures currently envisaged as solutions to the problem – congestion charging, motor vehicle taxation, new engine technologies, alternative fuel sources and so on – themselves have histories almost as long as the car itself.

Nagoya, Japan’s fourth largest city, and Birmingham, Britain’s ‘second’ city, provide an outstanding opportunity for comparison and contrast of the historical development of motorised cities in the East and the West. Not only do they have important associations with the automotive industry, Toyota in Nagoya and British Leyland Motor Corporation in Birmingham but, following extensive bombing during the Second World War, they were rebuilt as modern ‘motor cities’ becoming, from the late 1950s, fulcrums of burgeoning national motorway systems. We are interested in national differences in these histories of motorisation and urban environmental change, but also in how common experiences of car ownership, traffic planning and conservation translated across the two urban cultures.

Our project is not only comparative, but also multi-disciplinary, drawing on archival, statistical and visual sources and bringing to light previously unexplored Japanese and British sources on the history of city planning and car-use. It is influenced by current scholarship on the relationship between ‘nature’ and modern urbanism, in particular, the idea that nature is not somehow extraneous to the modern city but pervades it through complex networks that have recombined human and material agency in new forms. It also has contemporary relevance. As cities in developing countries such as China, India, and parts of Africa contemplate a still more potent environmental dilemma to that faced by Birmingham and Nagoya, we believe there are lessons to be learned from the history of the modern car system in British and Japanese cities in the crucial period of its implementation between the mid-1950s and mid-1970s.

The project was awarded Leverhulme funding in summer 2011 and work started in autumn 2011 for three years. The results will be published in a number of ways; through academic articles, a joint authored monograph by Townsend and Gunn, workshops in Britain and Japan, a project website and an exhibition at Birmingham Museum.