City Limits
Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America's Highways
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4.0 • 3개의 평가
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- US$6.99
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An eye-opening investigation into how our ever-expanding urban highways accelerated inequality and fractured communities—and a call for a more just, sustainable path forward
“Megan Kimble manages to turn a book about transportation and infrastructure into a fascinating human drama.”—Michael Harriot, New York Times bestselling author of Black AF History
Every major American city has a highway tearing through its center. Seventy years ago, planners sold these highways as progress, essential to our future prosperity. The automobile promised freedom, and highways were going to take us there. Instead, they divided cities, displaced people from their homes, chained us to our cars, and locked us into a high-emissions future. And the more highways we built, the worse traffic got. Nowhere is this more visible than in Texas. In Houston, Dallas, and Austin, residents and activists are fighting against massive, multi-billion-dollar highway expansions that will claim thousands of homes and businesses, entrenching segregation and sprawl.
In City Limits, journalist Megan Kimble weaves together the origins of urban highways with the stories of ordinary people impacted by our failed transportation system. In Austin, hundreds of families will lose child care if a preschool is demolished to expand Interstate 35. In Houston, a young Black woman will lose her brand-new home to a new lane on Interstate 10—just blocks away from where a seventy-four-year-old nurse lost her home in the 1960s when that same highway was built. And in Dallas, an urban planner has improbably found himself at the center of a national conversation about highway removal. What if, instead of building our aging roads wider and higher, we removed those highways altogether? It’s been done before, first in San Francisco and, more recently, in Rochester, where Kimble traces how highway removal has brought new life to a divided city.
With propulsive storytelling and ground-level reporting, City Limits exposes the enormous social and environmental costs wrought by our allegiance to a life of increasing speed and dispersion, and brings to light the people who are fighting for a more sustainable, connected future.
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Journalist Kimble (Unprocessed) sets forth an immersive account of three ongoing "freeway revolts" in Texas cities that aim to block further urban highway expansion. Marshalling decades of evidence, she explains how highways built within cities have destroyed neighborhoods, increased air pollution, exacerbated racial segregation, generated sprawl, siphoned funds from mass transit, and increased traffic congestion despite promising to do the opposite. Focusing on the stories of people whose homes and businesses have been or are in danger of being seized and destroyed via eminent domain for further city highway expansion (including Modesti Cooper, a homeowner who refused to sell as her neighborhood emptied and began to receive whiny postcards from government contractors cajoling her to leave), Kimble tracks the legal and political battles of activist residents in Austin, Dallas, and Houston who have organized in opposition to the powerful Texas Transportation Commission. These groups hope either to compel state and city governments to halt expansion or, better yet, to reimagine their city highways as surface-level boulevards stitching together currently divided neighborhoods. Kimble intersperses these activists' struggles with snapshots of the "first wave" of freeway revolts that occurred in 1960s New York City; Portland, Ore.; Rochester, N.Y.; and San Francisco. By seamlessly combining an expansive history of urban anti-highway organizing with an intriguing up-close look at present-day Texas politics, Kimble delivers an invigorating window onto American grassroots activism.
