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Book Review
Fast Cars, Cool Rides: The Accelerating World of Youth and Their Cars
AmyBest
ISBN: 0-814799-31-0 2006 256 pages New York University Press
Sarah Hinde
National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, Australian National University, ACT
A growing literature examines the social processes underpinning car reliance, a phenomenon that has brought a plethora of ill-health and detrimental environmental impacts. Fast Cars, Cool Rides is a new contribution to this research area, drawing attention to youth: a group (often ignored) who have an important stake and role in the organisation of mobility. Youth tend to be politically marginalised, socially and geographically restricted, but are economically important as emerging workers and consumers. They are also enthusiastic participants in the modern worship of the motor vehicle.
The rich stories that emerge from this case study, of how one group uses one commodity, will interest those who are fascinated by the intricacies of youth culture, and consumer culture; those who crave more depth in explanations of why modern society is so car dependent; or, are curious about how to explain social practice by bringing together multiple forms of data, from individual interviews through to market research and historical accounts of place.
Best provides a fascinating and in-depth ethnography of youth car cultures at San Jose, Silicon Valley in the US. This work offers insights into the protocols, purposes and performances that occur within several car-dependent youth scenes: including moving slowly while cruising, moving fast while racing, and building vehicles (and identities) at 'auto' shop class. In and out of these situations, Best explains how young people use cars to negotiate between their desires and the boundaries they experience: such as police surveillance and control, family rules and responsibilities, and managing financially. The author provides critical accounts of the less tangible boundaries which operate within youth car cultures: gender relations; notions of ethnicity, history and community; contests over place; the forces of auto marketing; industrial, population and economic change; and, mechanisms of class reproduction.
The book is easy to navigate because it is well organised into sections that each address a unique aspect of youth car culture: from the highly visible and specialised, through to the mundane. The Introduction 'sets the scene' by highlighting the rise of the automobile in the US; including the emergence of a highly profitable car market targeted directly at youth. Part One begins with the cruising scene at Santa Clara, explaining how this practice is historically symbolic of political and economic struggles for Chicano people. This is followed by an account of how girls experience this cruising scene, illustrating how senses of self-determination and 'girl power' are constructed (despite the strict and highly gendered protocols, and dangers, of the cruising scene). Moving up a gear and turning to racing, Best offers a superb depiction of how efforts around masculinity and ethnicity interweave in the different ways boys build and race their cars.
Part Two gives attention to everyday consumption of the automobile in the context of family life, financial concerns and the future. The first chapter highlights the tensions between an economic and geographic context which necessitates car transport for families, notions of risk and parental control, and youths' feelings of fun and freedom, responsibility and coercion. The second chapter of this section tells of the economic context in Silicon Valley and the financial implications of these expensive car cultures for young people, some of whom spend significant amounts of money (and time at work earning this money), to own a suitable automobile.
A major theme of the book, which comes together in the conclusion, is an exploration of the role of the automobile in the identity-building projects of young people in the context of the post-industrial era. Best hypothesises that much youth car culture is motivated by the desire to be visible, to test different identities, to push boundaries and define oneself. The author reveals that this happens using firmly established meanings about femininity and masculinity, ethnic group membership, as well as class-related values about what it means to have a successful life. Best coherently explains how these concerns play out in car cultures, and reveals the problematic nature of the 'freedom' offered by the car, given the structuring influences of gender, ethnicity and socio-economics.
Other important structuring influences are less well scrutinised. Although the book describes some salient contests over street life in Santa Clara where youth cruise, there is very little discussion of why there is 'no real comprehensive public transport system' (p.18) in Silicon Valley (or, for that matter, in so many industrialised cities around the world). Apart from references to being 'stranded', the ethnography does not elaborate on the experiences of kids who are obliged to use public transport, bike or walk, or the alternative views of anti-car resistors. Best tentatively hopes that the auto as a commodity may assume 'transformative potential' (p.170), starting with kids (and adults) becoming more critical of car cultures. To that end, her book has ignored a crucial issue: why are there no alternatives?
Fast Cars, Cool Rides gives a sophisticated account of how kids are actively creating, as well as hemming themselves in by, their own car cultures. However, there is little attention to who else, apart from these youth, might be participating in constructing the meanings, identities and cultures that Best observes, or whether these cultures are peculiar to youth or resonate with mainstream car cultures. I am left with only a partial understanding of who else is benefiting - financially or otherwise - from having youth grid-locked every Saturday night in Santa Clara, or racing at death-defying speeds down the freeway, or spending hours stacking shelves at a supermarket to finance further hours spent 'aimlessly' driving around town. Moreover, where are stories of kids who have personally borne the costs of a car-reliant society, in the form of crash injury, neighbourhood traffic or highway construction? I wonder how, in their enthusiasm for cars, these kids make sense of an auto-addicted future entailing peak oil, obesity and climate change? Although these questions aren't answered, Fast Cars, Cool Rides does poignantly demonstrate how such an enthusiastic group of car adopters, who have embraced this commodity and saturated it with symbolic value, are ultimately bestowed with more constraints and obligations than transformative possibilities.
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