Architectures of Hurryobilities, Cities and Modernity

‘Hurry’ is an intrinsic component of modernity. It exists not only in tandem with modern constructions of mobility, speed, rhythm, and time-space compression, but also with infrastructures, technologies, practices, and emotions associated with the experience of the ‘mobilizing modern’. ‘Hurry’ is not simply speed. It may result in congestion, slowing-down or inaction in the face of over-stimulus. Speeding-up is often competitive: faster traffic on better roads made it harder for pedestrians to cross, or for horse-drawn vehicles and cyclists to share the carriageway with motorised vehicles. Focussing on the cultural and material manifestations of ‘hurry’, the book’s contributors analyse the complexities, tensions and contradictions inherent in the impulse to higher rates of circulation in modernizing cities.

The collection includes but also goes beyond accounts of new forms of mobility (bicycles, buses, underground trains) and infrastructure (street layouts and surfaces, business exchanges, and hotels) to show how modernity’s ‘architectures of hurry’ have been experienced, represented, and practised since the mid-nineteenth century. Ten case studies explore different expressions of ‘hurry’ across cities and urban regions in Asia, Europe, and North and South America, while substantial introductory and concluding chapters situate ‘hurry’ in the wider context of modernity and mobility studies and reflect on the future of ‘hurry’ in an ever-accelerating world.

This diverse collection will be relevant to researchers, scholars and practitioners in the fields of planning, cultural and historical geography, urban history and urban sociology.

Phillip Gordon Mackintosh is Associate Professor of Geography, Brock University. He is the author of Newspaper City: The Liberal Press and Toronto’s Street Surfaces, 1860-1935 (University of Toronto Press, 2017), numerous publications on turn-of-the-twentieth-century cultures of urban reform and city planning, historical cycling, and urban historical geographies of class, gender, and race, and is co-editor of The World of Niagara Wine (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013).

Richard Dennis is Emeritus Professor of Geography, University College London (UCL). His books include Cities in Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and English Industrial Cities of the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1984). He has written for numerous publications on housing, public transport and imaginative literature in 19^th- and 20^th-century London and Toronto. He is an editorial committee member of The London Journal and previously edited Journal of Urban History, Studies in Historical Geography, The London Journal and British Journal of Canadian Studies.

Deryck W. Holdsworth is Emeritus Professor of Geography, Pennsylvania State University. He is the co-author of Homeplace: The Making of the Canadian Dwelling over Three Centuries (UTP, 1998), and was co-editor of the Historical Atlas of Canada, Volume III, Addressing the Twentieth Century (UTP, 1990). He has authored numerous journal articles on office buildings, folk and industrial housing, and insights from historical hotel guest registers.