Glasgow’s Postwar Planning Wars: Utopian Visions of Dystopia, Slum Clearances, New Towns and Social Engineering – Part 1

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Built Environment, Heritage & Conservation, National politics, New Technology,, Regional politics, Town planning
⏏️ Corporation engineer Robert Bruce (Source: Scottish field) ⨳

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As WWII drew to a close Glasgow Corporation (City Council) had big plans for changing the face of Scotland’s biggest city and the (British) “Empire’s Second City” in the postwar period. Determined to rid Glasgow of its unhealthy “ghettos of decay and decline”, its plague of overcrowded slums and entrenched poverty and to fix the city’s critical housing shortage, the Corporation was gearing up for a mission to transform the city-scape. In 1947 a plan for total urban renewal put forward by the city engineer and master of works, Robert Bruce, found favour with the authorities〚𝔸〛 [‘Streets in the Sky: a social history of Glasgow’s brutalist tower blocks to be documented’, Judith Duffy, The Herald, 29-Mar-2015, www.heraldscotland.com].

⏏️ Central Train station, Glasgow (Photo: Network Rail) ⨳
⏏️ The Planning Committee’s eight-minute film ‘Glasgow Today and Tomorrow’ (1949) was its sales pitch for Bruce’s vision of “New Glasgow”. The functionality and conformity of the estate in this model illustrates why the Bruce Plan was likened to a communist Eastern Bloc city (Screenshot, ‘Scotland on Screen’)
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“New Glasgow”
Bruce’s radical scheme was to wipe the slate clean in Glasgow…tear down a whole slab of the city including the run-down tenements in a wholesale slum clearance. Included in the plan for demolition were much of Glasgow’s iconic buildings, including architectural gems built by famous 19th century architects of the city, “Greek” Thomson and CR Mackintosh (Glasgow Central Railway Station, School of Arts, etc and many other historic Victorian, Georgian and Art Deco buildings). Bruce, an avid admirer of Le Corbusier modernism, wanted to fill the void at least partially with skyscrapers (“Streets in the sky”), the plan being for the city to “reinvent itself by building high and building modern”, alongside a program of urban and industrial decentralisation〚𝔹〛 [‘Canned designs: Two sides of Glasgow’, Christopher Beanland, TheLong+Short, 07-Apr-2016, www.thelongandshort.org]. Bruce also wanted to jettison the city’s familiar grid pattern in favour of straight streets and rectilinear blocks.⏏️ Slums in the Gorbels (Photo: thesun.co.uk)⨳ ⨳ ⨳
Fixing “the worse slums in Britain”
Apparently unfazed by the horror expressed by many Glaswegians at Bruce’s brazen assault on the city’s grand architectural heritage, the Glasgow City Council had definite self-interest in mind when it endorsed the plan: Bruce’s scheme was essentially about slum clearance and re-housing people in the less densely populated parts of the city, not about re-location away from the city’s boundaries. Politically, this suited the Labour-dominated Corporation which was concerned that large scale depopulation of central Glasgow〚ℂ〛 would diminish the city’s standing in the UK. In the late 1940s Glasgow Corporation walked back its initial endorsement of the Bruce Report…shied away by the projected astronomical cost of the project while Britain was in the vice of postwar austerity. Ultimately some of its initiatives were implemented but many were never put into practice〚𝔻〛. One ‘modernisation’ initiative that did come to realisation was the M8 motorway, constructed right through the middle of Glasgow (“Glasgow Inner Ring Road” encircling the city centre). Around 230 tower blocks in the city did get built (some of the tower blocks were subsequently torn down much later), eliciting mixed opinions from the community. Most of these high-rise constructions were cheaply and quickly finished to meet the pressing exigences of public housing. While some residents were initially attracted to the features of modern convenience included—central heating, indoor toilets and hot running water—the downside for the longer term was poor quality housing stock (Duffy). ⏏️ Moss Heights (Source: UK Housing Wiki – Fandom) ⨳ ⨳ ⨳
 Moss Heights
Moss Heights in Cardonald was the Corporation’s debut experiment with high-rise family housing (accommodating 263 families, built 1950-1954), and one of the best known. Intended to be “superior high-density housing for the working class”, the reality was that Moss Heights was more expensive to rent or buy than the usual Glasgow Corp units, thus many of those same working class families couldn’t afford to live there [‘Moss Heights’, University of Glasgow Case Study, www.gla.ac.uk]. The radical nature of the Bruce Plan polarised the community and dismayed many Glaswegians, eventually provoking a reaction to its extreme position and an ensuing tussle between two competing bodies of technocrats, one national and one local, to determine the future shape of Glasgow. The rival plan, the Clyde Valley Regional Plan 1946 (CVRP), was backed by the Scottish Office in Edinburgh. Part 2 of ‘Glasgow’s Postwar Planning Wars’ will look at the CVRP and its impact on Glasgow. Red Road Flats (Photo: glasgowtimes.co.uk) ⨳ ⨳ ⨳

Footnote: Red Road Flats
 While Moss Heights was a “one-off”, Robert Bruce’s vision of clusters of high-rise buildings filling the Glasgow skyline didn’t really arrive until the 1960s, their belatedness made up for by being scattered all over the city. One of the most notoriously Brutalist of the high-rise Sixties complexes was the massive complex of eight tower blocks known as the Red Road Flats in the northeast of Glasgow〚𝔼〛 . The ageing and condemned buildings, vandalised and afflicted with asbestos and rising damp, were demolished between 2012 and 2015 [‘End of the Red Road’, Disappearing Glasgow, www.disappearing-glasgow.com]. Red Road, along with “the equally controversial and derided Hutchesontown C estate in the Gorbals”, became a symbol of “the errors of Glasgow’s ambitious post-war housing renewal policy” [‘Red River Flats’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

♾♾♾♾♾♾♾♾♾♾♾♾♾♾

〚𝔸〛 officially, the “First Planning Report to the Highways and Planning Committee of the Corporation of the City of Glasgow”

〚𝔹〛Bruce’s vision was long-term, envisaging a transformation over a 50 year-span into “a healthy and beautiful city”

〚ℂ〛 the city an agglomeration of one million people at the time

 〚𝔻〛 an embittered Bruce resigned his post with the Corporation in 1951

 〚𝔼〛 furnished with the same set of “mod cons” as Moss Heights

Lakewood Park, Ca Housing Development, the West Coast Answer to Levittown

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Built Environment, Commerce & Business, Futurism, New Technology,, Regional History

In 2018 I posted up the two blogs linked below on the topic of Levittown, the postwar mass housing construction phenomena in the east of the United States.

https://www.7dayadventurer.com/2018/10/11/levittown-the-attainment-of-an-affordable-upwardly-mobile-home-and-lifestyle-for-some-part-i/


https://www.7dayadventurer.com/2018/10/13/levittown-the-attainment-of-an-affordable-socially-upwardly-mobile-home-and-lifestyle-for-some-part-ii/

Source: dustyoldthing.com (screen shot)
Lakewood, Ca. (Image:City-Data.com)

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In the late 1940s Bill Levitt’s New York company started constructing a series of new housing estates in the Atlantic seaboard states, succeeding in building affordable houses in double-quick time and on a mega-scale. Not long after Levittown showed the way, a triad of developers in California started planning their own gigantic scale home building project in Lakewood, Los Angeles County, to reap the rewards. The three ’amigos’, Ben Weingart, S Mark Taper and Lou Boyar, formed the Lakewood Park Company (LPC) and bought close on 3,500 acres from the Montana Land Co (previously sugar beet and lima bean fields adjacent to the city of Long Beach)¹. With Weingart’s extensive connexions in LA financing circles, the LPC got backing to the tune of $8.8 million from the Prudential Insurance Co, and were cleverly able to exploit a legal anomaly, leveraging a stack of federal finance to pay the large part of the private project’s expenditure [Kevin Starr, Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963, (2011)].

Photo: lakewoodcity.org
Moving-in day 1953 (Photo: JR Eyerman (Life mag.)

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A frenetic work schedule
The LPC utilised the same approach to construction as the Levittown developers. Every aspect was coordinated, synchronised like clockwork, the 4,000-strong work force was divided into 30 separate teams each with their own specialised task. Rapidity of construction was achieved by adopting the production efficiency methods learnt during WWII, foundations were laid post-haste (15 minutes to dig the hole by machine and not much more to fill it with concrete). Output was phenomenal, they were building around 40 to 60 new houses a day² (even managing in a single day to reach a record tally 110!).
Selling the American Dream
When Lakewood Park’s subdivision of model homes—complete with a “Tile Pullman lavatory” and a built-in ‘Pulverizer’ garbage disposal unit in the kitchen—was opened up to the public, the sales office was inundated with aspiring home-owners all seeking their piece of the “Father Knows Best’ fantasy lifestyle. One salesman sold 107 of the homes in a single hour [‘A New Kind of City…Lakewood’, Los Angeles Almanac, www.laalmanac.com]. Many were “sold off the plan” at a time before that term was in vogue. The cost for a Lakewood ‘model’ mostly ranged from $7,500 to $9,500. Like Levittown, Lakewood Park particularly appealed to WWII veterans who under the GI Bill were guaranteed advantageous terms, no down payment and 4% interest over 30 years. Lakewood’s population exploded – what was a small unincorporated village in 1950 became a ‘city’ with in excess of 70,000 inhabitants by 1953.

Source: old time magazines.com

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We’re all white thanks!: ‘Paradise’ homes for the white middle class
Again as with Levittown the ugly spectre of racism raised its head in the Fifties Lakewood Park ‘model’ lifestyle. One former sales manager for the LPC explained that his part of his role involved guided homogeneity, dissuading black (and Latino) families from buying into the estate on the grounds that the overwhelmingly white neighbours would object to their presence on the same block. This was part of a wider practice of “steering buyers into racially defined neighbourhoods” which persisted into the 1960s…the developers’ rationale being “that racially mixed communities (they believed) would not retain their resale value” [‘Suburban pioneers’, Lakewood City, www.lakewoodcity.org].

Source: smugmug.com (Pinterest)
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“The city of tomorrow today”
Like the Levittown prototype, Lakewood Park’s rapid-build assembly-line construction resulted in 17,500 houses springing up inside three years, a model planned community serviced by the construction of the Lakewood Center, at the time the largest shopping mall in the country (with parking for 10,000 vehicles)³ [‘Lakewood Community History’, LA County Library,, www.lacountylibrary.org]. Time magazine called to the largest housing development in the world, but some critics bemoaned the monotony of its grid-pattern streets and the houses’ sameness…it was however not quite Levittown Mach II, there were ‘subtle’ variations in landscaping and the use of slightly different home designs, the developers were careful to avoid Levittown’s error⁴ of having identical design homes next to each other in the same block [‘Lakewood California History’, Lakewood City, www.lakewoodcity.org].
Source: Pinterest

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Developers with “laugh-lines around their pockets”
A Senate hearing in 1954 troubled by the development’s ramifications concluded that the bulk of the profits from Lakewood Park‘s land sales and retail development ended up in the pockets of the LPC syndicate…finding that Weingart, Boyar and Taper in fact risked very little of their own money on the venture (about $15,000 altogether) by being able to (legally) rely on the accessible federal financing. Against their meagre personal outlays, newspapers estimated that the triumvirate made nearly a cool $12 million each from the deal (‘Lakewood California History’).

Photo: City of Lakewood historical collection

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Footnote: The Lakewood Plan, “Contract City“
Lakewood became an incorporated city in 1954—following a divisive community campaign and an attempt by larger neighbour Long Beach to absorb it—but of a unique kind. Foundation attorney John Todd and the developers opted to contract out the new city’s essential municipal services to LA County (police force, fire brigade, sanitation services, etc), an innovation (Lakewoodisation’) later copied widely in California and in other states (‘A New Kind of City…Lakewood’). The stated reason for going the “minimal city” route was financial efficiencies, but Gary Miller argues that self-advantage was the real purpose, allowing the wealthy to “insulate (their properties) from the burden of supporting public services…(thus) zoning out service-demanding low-income and renting populations”, “fueling white flight from Los Angeles” [quoted in Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, 1990]

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¹ the farming enterprise was known as the “Montana Ranch”…ironically, the land Weingart, Boyar and Taper bought included village housing estates which under Montana Land’s restrictive races covenant they as Jews would be barred from living in [‘The Lakewood Plan: Homeownership, Taxes, and Diversity in Postwar Suburbia’, Ryan Reft, Kcet, 16-Jan-2015, www.kcet.org]

² a house completed every 7½ minutes!

³ enticing the retail department giant the May Company as the mall’s flagship store

⁴ which had led to Levittown residents when returning home at night mistaking other houses for theirs’

In Pursuit of Vertical Take-off and Autorotation Landing: From Rotorcraft to Autogyro to Practical Helicopter

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Aviation history, Military history, New Technology,

🚁 Helicopter, from the Greek: helix (‘spiral’ or ‘whirl’ or ’convolution’) + pteron (‘wing’); into French: hélicoptère.

(Photo: Paul Popper/Popperfoto via Getty Images)

We know that manned, powered, heavier-than-air flight in an aircraft began with the Wright brothers in 1903 at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina—unless that is you accept the audacious alternate candidate, Gustave Whitehead’s flight in Connecticut made two years earlier🅰—but when did the first helicopter get off the ground? The primitive archetype seems to be the brainchild of Frenchman Paul Cornu. Cornu, like the brothers Wright, started off as a bicycle maker before veering off into the nascent field of aerodynamic engineering.

M. Cornu (Photo: FAI)

Getting the concept off the ground
Near Lisieux in northern France in 1907, Monsieur Cornu became the first person to (ever so briefly) pilot an airborne rotary-wing, vertical-lift aircraft. The rotorcraft (using an unpowered rotor in free autorotation to develop lift) from Cornu’s own design was a twin-rotor job, the blades rotating in opposite directions which neutralised the torque. M. Cornu’s craft levitated about 1.5 metres off the ground, hovering for some 20 seconds. The Cornu ”Ur-copter” wasn’t manoeuvrable at all (requiring manpower to hold it in position from the ground) and therefore wasn’t practical, but it is considered to be a forerunner of the modern helicopter.

Juan De la Cierva (Photo: Crouch/Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)

De la Cierva and the autogyro
From 1912 on, numerous inventors and engineers were turning their hands to building prototypes of the rotorcraft, but with limited or ephemeral success. Compared to fixed-wing aircrafts, progress with rotorcrafts evolved very slowly, due to intrinsic problems with torque, dissymmetry of lift and control. Sikorsky (below) spent 30 years working on developing helicopters before his breakthrough. Etienne Oehmichen, whose early prototypes included vertically-mounted rotors and a tail rotor, allowing it to fly a distance of one kilometre in 1924! Oehmichen was also the first to carry passengers in his Oehmichen No. 2 helicopter. By the early 1920s Spanish aviator and engineer Juan De la Cierva built the autogyro (sometimes called a “windmill plane” or ‘gyroplane’)… his success advanced the understanding of rotor dynamics. Cierva’s autogiro had air safety in mind, proposing a solution to the craft losing its lift or stalling even at very low speeds. The Spaniard worked out that the autogyro’s rotor function is driven by the speed of the air, cf. the helicopter’s which depends on a motor…in the descent of the autogyro the rotor functioned as a kind of parachute according to Cierva. Ultimately, the helicopter’s superior velocity made it the preferable mode of aerocraft, however Cierva’s principle of the self-turning rotor remained a vital contribution to the later development of functional helicopters. Cierva’s flapping rotor blades has been described as “the single most important discovery in helicopter development” (CV Glines). A countryman of Cornu’s, Louis Bréguet, also experimented with the autogyro in the Thirties, his Bréguet-Dorand “Gyroplane Laboratoire” improving both the craft’s speed to 120km/h and its control capacity.
Another step forward in the evolution of helicopters came from Nazi Germany. Professor Heinrich Focke applied Cierva’s pioneering work on aerodynamics to the task of transitioning from the limitations of the autogyro to the creation of a “pure helicopter”. In 1936 Focke and Gerd Achgelis‘ Focke-Wulf Fw-61 smashed existing helicopter records for range and altitude and demonstrated autorotation descent to landing. This plus a control system much more reliable and robust than earlier rotorcrafts leads many aviation geeks to consider the Fw-61 to be “the world’s first truly functional helicopter”.

Image: http://primeindustriesusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/prime-industries-history-of-the-first-helicopter-infographic.jpg. ’History of the First Helicopter’.

Sikorsky’s practical copter
What Cornu started, Russian-born American designer Igor Sikorsky brought to commercial fruition. Sikorsky invented the first mass-produced, and in the opinion of many, the first practical helicopter, the VS-300, in Stratford, Connecticut in 1939🅱. In commercial production called the R–4, it would go on to play a significant role in the Second World War. By the war’s end Sikorsky had added the R–5 and the R–6 models, specifically designed for the military and specialising in search-and-rescue missions. Although he didn’t invent the first prototype of the helicopter, Sikorsky is commonly thought of as “the father of helicopters” because “he invented the first successful helicopter upon which further designs were based”. The VS-300 became the model for all modern single-rotor helicopters.

Igor Sikorsky, 1939 test flight

༻༺༻༺༻༺༻༺༻༺༻༺༻༺༻༺༻༺

🅰 see the November 2014 blog on this site, ‘Wright or Not Right?: The Controversy over who really was “First in Flight”’

🅱 Sikorsky’s 1939 flight was actually tethered, so the first ‘free’ copter flight (also by Sikorsky) didn’t take place until the following year, 1940

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Sites and articles consulted:

‘History of Flight: Breakthroughs, Disasters and More’, Aaron Randle, Inside History, 09-Jul-2021, www.insidehistory.com

’Focke-Wulf Fw-61’, Modelling Madness, Brian R Baker,  www.modellingmadness.com

‘World’s First Helicopter — Today in History: September 14’, September 14, 2018, Connecticut History.org, www.connecticuthistory.org

‘History of the Helicopter’, Mary Bellis, ThoughtCo, Upd. 04-Oct-2019, www.thoughtco.com

‘Who Invented the Helicopter? (and When?)’, Aerocorner, www.aerocorner.com

‘Juan de la Cierva: Autogiro Genius’, C.V. Glines, Aviation History, Sept 2012,  www.au.readly.com

‘History of the Helicopter from Concept to Modern Day’, Prime Industries Inc, 31-Aug-2015,  www.primeinustriesusa.com

’Juan de la Cierva and the Autogyro’s Invention’, Javier Yanes, Ventana al Conocimiento, 21-Sep-2015,  www.bbvaopenmind.com

Shinkansen, Japan’s Pioneering VFT and National Icon

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
New Technology,, Regional History, Sports history
Tokyo ‘64 (Source: glacerie123.com)

A symbol of modernisation
1964 was a bumper year for the Japanese. In October of that year two events helped the country finally break free of the persisting shadow of an an ultimately inglorious and painful World War II experience. Japan’s capital Tokyo staged the XVIII Summer Olympic Games and Japan launched its iconic high-speed train service, the Shinkansen (meaning literally “new trunk line” or “new main line”), popularly called the “Bullet Train” (弾丸列車 dangan ressha) because of the similarity of the initial (0 series) design of the nose✲. Together, the Olympics and the Shinkansen’s arrival symbolised the fulfilment of “Japan’s recovery from the devastation of war and the beginnings of Japan’s stratospheric rise as an economic superpower” (Braser & Tsubuku)⌧.

(Source: JapanRail Pass)

Planning for the Shinkansen started in the 1950s and had its origins in the realisation that Japan’s conventional rail network was reaching capacity and not up to the demands of modernisation. The country’s geography, climate and population needed a faster, modern network. A VFT was identified as imperative for a land mass that stretched over several islands north to south for thousands of kilometres. Construction (and operational) challenges were manifold and extremely formidable – a mountainous country subject to earthquakes, typhoons, heavy rain and snow and flooding (Hood).

The original rail service, the Tōhoku Shinkansen connected the three principal cities on Honshu island, Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka. The impact on intra-Japan rail travel was immediate and dramatic. With the sleek “whiz-bang” new train reaching speeds of up to 210 km/h⍟, the journey between Tokyo and Shin-Osaka was cut from 6 hrs & 30 mins in an conventional train to around 4 hrs & 10 minutes in the Bullet Train! (in 1965 it was reduced again by a further hour)✪.

Two symbols of Japan (Source: National Geographic)

An accident-free record
As impressive as it is, the Shinkansen’s most impressive attribute is not its rapid speed, but its peerless safety history over a period of 57 years. The Shinkansen service has not suffered a single casualty or even one injury in the totality of its trips. The only blots on the perfect record in this time have been two derailments (one in an earthquake and one in a blizzard) (Glancey).

The JRG 6 (Source: JapanRail Pass)

Rail privatisation
Originally the Shinkansen train network was built and operated by the Japanese government (Japanese National Railways), but in 1987 it was privatised, coming under the ownership of six Japanese Railways Group (JRG) companies. Today they runs nine separate lines, smoothly criss-crossing the densely-populated Honshu and Kyushu islands and extending to the northern island of Hokkaido, it’s spotlessly clean carriages carrying an average of around 150 million passengers a year (JapanRail Pass). The network has two types of Shinkansen trains – Kodama Express and the limited stop Hikari Super Express train.

N700 series (2020) (Source: cnn.com)

Personifying Nihongo efficiency
The latest iteration of the Shinkansen, the N700 train with its aerodynamic duckbill-nose completes the Tokyo–Osaka journey in 2 hrs & 25 mins⌽. The N700S (Supreme) has the advanced capacity to continue operating during earthquakes. Punctuality is also the Shinkansen’s strong suit – the average delay for the railway’s fleet of trains is less than 60 seconds (Dow). The Shinkansen’s efficiency represents “an elegant solution for shuttling workers from one dense city to another” and doing it rapidly, workers living “in distant, relatively undeveloped areas can commute to Tokyo (for instance) in two hours” (Pinsker)〥.

Local dissenters to the “love affair” with the Shinkansen
The Shinkansen has been a change agent for Japanese economy and society, a potent symbol of the nation’s development. Research indicates that those urban hubs with a Shinkansen station experience higher population and higher employment growth rates (Sands). Not everyone in Japan however is 100% behind the Bullet Train companies’ unbending “full-steam ahead” approach. There have been pockets of local rural opposition pushing back against JRG’s relentless land acquisition process. Residents along the routes whose quality of life has been adversely affected by Shinkansen’s noise and vibration have also been vocal in their complaints (Hood).

Japan’s Maglev prototype (Source: ft.com)

Eye on the future
Not resting on the laurels of the Shinkansen series’ cutting-edge technology, research has been happening since 1962 on a linear motor railway system. In the 2000s JR Central commenced testing a Maglev train prototype, the Linear Chūō Shinkansen, which can reach a speed in excess of 500 km/h – this service is slated for introduction in 2027 (Nippon.com).

Postscript: To transfer technology or not to transfer technology?
Japan’s success with the Shinkansen has spawned imitators. China’s vaulting high-speed train ambitions—while denying charges of intellectual piracy by copying the Shinkansen—has seen it have to resort to reliance on German and French as well as Japanese VFT technology for its own high-speed train. Consequently some Japanese railway insiders have criticised the technology leak to China, lamenting that when you put high technical ability on display (as Japan has with its crown jewel train), it gets copied. However there’s no consensus on this point within Japanese government and business. Central Japan Railway Co (owner of Shinkansen and Linear Train Technology) have actively participated in the development of US high-speed trains on an ongoing basis, proponents of this approach argue that by not exporting the Bullet Train technology to countries with large markets, Japan risks losing out to competitors who’ll get in first…the Overseas Rapid Railway Project’s Katsunori Ochiai summed up the gains from exporting: “If the new Japanese model Shinkansen and linear trains are adopted in America, the market for manufacturers of the carriages and signal systems would be greatly expanded.” (Shimbun).

Shinkansen technology transfer’ first export overseas was to Taiwan, successfully helping to develop the Taiwanese High-Speed Rail system.

Taiwan HS Rail (Source: construction-post.com)

ゅ⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯ゅ

✲ a blue snub-nosed design with white livery

present maximum operating speed of the Shinkansen clocks at 320 km/h

✪ another pioneering first for the Shinkansen: the first dedicated high-speed railtrack in the world

⌽ the N700 series has reached 332 km/h in trials

〥 the network’s efficiency and speed comes at a price – a typical ticket will set you back about $US130 (2014), unless you are subsidised by your employer (Pinsker)

<ほのぱ ほのぱ ほのぱ>

Articles and sites consulted:

’Japan’s Transfer of Bullet Train Technology A Mistake. China, Of Course, Has Copied It’, Sankei Shimbun, Japan-Forward, 18-Aug-2017, www.japan-forward.com

HOOD, Christopher P. “The Shinkansen’s Local Impact.” Social Science Japan Journal, vol. 13, no. 2, 2010, pp. 211–225. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40961264. Accessed 26 June 2021.

SANDS, BRIAN. “The Development Effects of High-Speed Rail Stations and Implications for California.” Built Environment (1978–), vol. 19, no. 3/4, 1993, pp. 257–284. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23288581. Accessed 26 June 2021.

‘How the Shinkansen bullet train made Tokyo into the monster it is today’, Philip Brasor & Masako Tsubuku, The Guardian, 30-Sep-2014, www.theguardian.com

‘What 50 Years of Bullet Trains Have Done for Japan’, Joe Pinsker, The Atlantic, 07-Oct-2014, www.theatlantic.com

‘Japan’s Shinkansen: Revolutionary design at 50’, Jonathan Glancey, BBC, 15-Jul-2014, www.bbc.com

‘The Shinkansen Turns 50: The History and Future of Japan’s High-Speed Train’, Nippon.com, 01-Oct-2014, www.nippon.com

‘Five things to know about Japan’s Shinkansen: The trains that always run on time’, Aisha Dow, 11-Nov-2016, https://i.stuff.co.nz/