The impacts of highways — and what we can do about them — is the subject of a new book, City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America’s...
In ‘City Limits,’ author Megan Kimble examines the costs of urban highways — and what to do about them.That highways don’t belong in cities may be news in Texas, but it is hardly a new idea. Back in 1963, in his book, the critic and historian Lewis Mumford wrote that “arteries must not be thrust into the delicate tissue of our cities; the blood they circulate must rather enter through an elaborate network of minor blood vessels and capillaries.” Even Dwight D.
In early 2020, the Texas Transportation Commission voted to fund a more than $4 billion project to expand I-35, a mile from where I live in Austin. I had been writing about, where I worked, and the highway seemed like a way into that larger story of car dependency and sprawl. That summer, I learned about a massive highway expansion in Houston that would demolish more than a thousand homes and businesses.
Americans were sold the idea that highways — and automobiles — would create prosperity and freedom. This idea was first articulated by General Motors in 1939, but it soon became enshrined in federal policy as we subsidized car travel over every other form of transportation. It’s hard to imagine today, but there used to be pretty robust public transit in almost every American city. We tore out that transit to build highways. And so people had no other option but to drive.
You spend a great deal of time writing about those displaced by highway building and the impact that construction had on minority communities. In what ways has race shaped the building of urban highways?In the 1950s and 1960s, city planners and highway engineers intentionally routed urban highways through Black and Hispanic neighborhoods. That’s very clear in the historical record, the idea that highways could help clear so-called blighted areas.
Highways not only displaced and demolished communities of color, they also helped segregate cities. In Austin, for example, I-35 was built along East Avenue. Two decades earlier, the city’s first comprehensive plan had prohibited Black people from living west of East Avenue. The highway only cemented this segregation, creating a wall between a Black neighborhood and the heart of the city.
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