So why do officials keep spending so much to expand them?
The network of highways crisscrossing American cities is easy to take for granted. In large part planned and built during an exuberant period of road construction in the middle of the 20th century, urban highways have become such a fact of life that it's hard to remember that their layout embodies deliberate choices: Who gets connected with a direct bypass? Who gets walled off from their neighbors? And who has their home bulldozed to add an extra lane? |
As an architectural designer, Adam Paul Susaneck brings an elevated level of visual and spatial analysis to these issues with his project Segregation by Design, which catalogs the division and destruction of communities of color by highway construction and urban renewal projects. He regularly publishes maps, archival photographs, structural tracings and aerial imagery to show how these large-scale government works, in many instances, reflect and reinforce the segregationist attitudes prevalent at the time they were built. |
In a guest essay, Adam invites us on a scrolling tour along the original example of destructive urban highway construction, the Cross Bronx Expressway. He also takes us to Houston, where a highway expansion project threatens to widen the racial divide between the eastern and western sides of the city. |
The Biden administration, invoking the Civil Rights Act, has placed a freeze on the Houston highway project because of concern that it would disproportionally affect Black and Latino residents. Adam argues that the government should be doing much more — it should change its overall approach to transportation. |
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Instead, the recent Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act include hundreds of billions of dollars in funding for highways and automobile infrastructure. As Adam mentions, President Biden has a favorite phrase he attributes to his father: "Don't tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I'll tell you what you value." |
As infrastructure dollars once again begin to gush through the budgets of American cities, Adam's work helps us gain perspective on how these funds have displaced and divided Americans in the past — and how things could play out differently in the future, if only we could bring a little remembrance and imagination to the planning process. |
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