Is the planet on a one‐way collision course with self‐destruction? Are cars, roads and everything that goes along with them the main culprits for the end of the world as we know it? In addressing the nebulous, amorphous and material ties between vehicles and infrastructure, this Special Section of SA/AS provides some cross‐cultural histories for better understanding commonplace as well as alternative paths, tracks and travel experiences. It also offers ethnographic narratives for the social lives, cultures and lived environments of everyday micro‐journeys or the hyper‐mobilities of human imaginaries. This collection of essays reaches a vantage point for a broad perspective on our long‐term relationship with transport infrastructures – helping to assess their impact on both the built environment and the Earth’s ecosystems.
This article examines the Lena Road (Doroga Lena), which is situated in the eastern part of Russia and stretches through the southern and central parts of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia). A former traditional path, it was developed into a corridor for accessing rich mineral resources in the area during the Soviet period. The road is associated with the socialist past and its meta-narrative that highlights roads' industrial profile. In this article the authors investigate the road's history through a biographical approach that incorporates biographies of people whose lives were linked to and shaped by the Lena Road. Such a biographical approach redirects the attention from a history written by a dominant totalitarian regime with its ideological prescriptions, towards the particular, individual and private, as well as highlighting the importance of people's contribution in creating the road and history.1. The road has been known under different names at various periods: the Amur-Yakutsk Trunk Road AYaM, M56, Doroga Lena. In 2017 the code for the roads will change all over Russia and the road will be given a new code A360. For this reason we decided to stick to the descriptive name rather than a numeric designation.Development and Change 47 (2): 367-387.
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