Peter Norton: Learning from Experience — The Past and Future of Urban Mobility | City & Regional Planning Lecture
As disciplines, urban design and transportation engineering rightly value data, but they generally disregard experience. Hard-earned lessons from the past must therefore be learned again and again — the hard way. In urban mobility, the status quo is the product of a history we generally either don’t know or misremember. Unlimited data collection cannot compensate for the neglect of long experience. By correcting and recovering historical experience, we make better urban mobility futures possible. Peter Norton, associate professor of history in the Department of Engineering and Society at the University of Virginia, presents the U.S. as an example case.
About the Speaker
Peter Norton is an associate professor of history in the Department of Engineering and Society at the University of Virginia, where he teaches the history of technology, social dimensions of engineering, research, and professional ethics. He is the author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City (MIT Press) and Autonorama: The Illusory Promise of High-Tech Driving (Island Press, 2021). In 2018–2019, Norton was a visiting faculty member at the Technical University of Eindhoven in the Netherlands.
His article “Street Rivals: Jaywalking and the Invention of the Motor Age Street,” published in Technology and Culture, won the Abbott Payson Usher Prize of the Society for the History of Technology. He has published work in transportation history and policy, traffic safety, and autonomous vehicles. He is a member of the University of Virginia’s Center for Transportation Studies. Norton is a winner of the Hartfield-Jefferson Scholars Teaching Prize and the Trigon Engineering Society’s Hutchinson Award “for dedication and excellence in teaching”. He is a frequent speaker on the subject of sustainable and equitable urban mobility.
This lecture is part of the Department of City & Regional Planning’s fall lecture series.
If you require accommodations to fully participate in this event, please contact dcrpadmin@berkeley.edu.