Performance and Memory: The Trans-Canada Highway and the Jumping Pound Grade Separator, Alberta‪.‬

The building of the Trans-Canada Highway (1949-1961) was a nationalist exercise spurred by forecasts of increased road links with the United States for trade and tourism, and undertaken in the postwar climate of the Cold War. It is an object of national unity coordinated by the provinces, illustrating how a federal government policy was enacted on a series of local sites, by provincial governments often historically suspicious of federal intentions. Besides the road surface itself there are a certain number of attendant structures: bridges, overpasses, tunnels and lay-bys. These were designed and constructed locally (provincially in rural areas, municipally when the Trans-Canada Highway crossed a city) according to Trans-Canada Highway Act guidelines. The building of the Trans-Canada Highway and the engineering works along its route collectively forma piece of material culture very much a product of its time. In any structure, technology and universality are bonded to locale. It is local soil conditions, building materials, labour, climate, economics, politics and culture that take a universal, modern idea and adjust it to fit local conditions. This is not a matter of choice or a desire to ameliorate universal culture, but a necessity. The adaptation of technological solutions to specific tasks while affirming the aesthetics of specific communities is necessary to material existence and social survival. In this case a simple universal concept, a cross-Canada highway connecting, with a single pavement, all the provinces, met a number of challenges that were inevitably local. The imposition of a single system on an uneven terrain has resonance with the impact of globalisation on an unevenly developed world: access is improved, local identities are in danger of becoming folklorical, the possibility of authoritarian control is facilitated. The role of highways as channels of development, as deliverers of tourists to the landscape and, as in Eisenhower's justification of the United States Interstate system, a means of military defence, operates with a sense of a larger whole, which is the nation, that the highways render coherent and that in turn renders the highways intelligible.