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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In the demonology of the contemporary city, is there anything more toxic than the expressway? Dividing neighbourhoods, depressing land values, concentrating atmospheric pollutants, the mammoth infrastructure of the expressway is now increasingly crumbling into the ground.
How did we build the expressway world in the first place? And what are we going to do now with it now?
This eye-opening book explores these questions partly through the great expressway abolitions of recent years, such as Boston’s Central Artery (buried and covered by a park) and Seoul’s Cheonggyecheon (replaced with an artificial river). But the book also uncovers the hidden stories of expressways that have become weird attractions in their own right, from London’s Westway to São Paulo’s Minhocão, celebrated in art and literature. Above all, the book proposes, counterintuitively, that we find ways to live with the expressway world and to adapt it to a different future, inspired by the many examples where people have already reinvented this challenging legacy on their own terms.
Engaging with case studies across the world and recent thinking in the environmental humanities and architectural theory, this is a thought-provoking invitation to reconsider the most maligned structures of the recent urban past.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Preface
Notes
Chapter 1 The Expressway World Revisited
The Promise of the Expressway
Traffic in Towns
Expressways as Power
Expressways as Culture
Autogeddon
Expressway Teardowns
The Plan of the Book
Notes
Chapter 2 New York: The Expressway in Ruins
The Miller Highway
The Miller Highway Occupied
LOMEX Detour
Enter Westway
The Creation of West Street Promenade
Fantasy Island
Notes
Chapter 3 Los Angeles: The Expressway as Art
Expressway Aesthetics – Lynch and Halprin
The Expressway in Art
The 405/10 Becomes Art
Another 405/10
LA’s Expressways in Ruins
The Homeless 405/10
Return to the 405/10
Notes
Chapter 4 London: The Activist Expressway
The Design: The Three Minute Motorway
Rolling in the Ruins
A Concrete Island
The Westway Trust
The Wall of Truth
Notes
Chapter 5 São Paulo: The Expressway Occupied
The Minhocão in History
Occupying the Minhocão:
Superficéis Habitáveis
The Minhocão Park Association
The Other Occupation: Below the Minhocão
Notes
Chapter 6 Madrid: The Expressway as Public Space
The View from the SEAT 600
Against the M-30
Infrastructure Becomes Culture Again
Calle 30 to Madrid Rio
Walking Madrid Rio
Notes
Chapter 7 Seoul: The Return of Nature
Cheonggyecheon: History Lessons
Towards a Newer Cheonggyecheon
Cheoggyecheon: Critical Voices
Seoullo 7017
Ecological Theatre
Notes
Chapter 8 Glasgow: Living with the Expressway
The Promise of the Highway Plan
The 1965 Highway Plan
The Plan Meets Reality
Carhenge
After Pollok
Walking Glasgow’s Expressways
The Expressway World is Dead – Long Live the Expressway World
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Preface
Cross-Bronx Expressway, New York City.
Chapter 1
The Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway, Boston.
Chapter 2
‘Truck and Car Fall as West Side Highway Collapses’, The New York ...
Miller Highway Remnant at West 72nd St., New York City.
Paul Rudolph, Lower Manhattan Expressway, New York City. Bird’s-eye persp...
Thomas Heatherwick, Little Island, New York City (2013).
Chapter 3
Marylin Jorgenson Reece and Carol Schumaker with the I-405/I-10 interchange unde...
California Department of Transport Division of Highways, I-405/I-10 interchange,...
I-405/I-10 interchange, Los Angeles.
Chapter 4
Scaffolding Play St. Marks, 1968.
Costume Under Motorway, 1968.
Hawkwind,
X In Search Of Space
interior gatefold, 1971.
Acklam Road skatepark, Westway, London.
Chapter 5
Prefeitura Municipal de São Paulo, perspective drawing of Elevado Preside...
Minhocão, São Paulo.
Ciro Miguel, proposal for Parque Minhocão, São Paulo, 2013.
Chapter 6
Madrid Rio from the Puente de Toledo, Madrid.
Las Colmenas housing and the M-30, Madrid.
Dominique Perrault, Puente de Arganzuela, Madrid Rio (2011).
Chapter 7
Cheonggyecheon restoration, Seoul (2003–5).
Kim Swoo-Geun, Sewoon Sangaa, Seoul (1967).
Cheonggyecheon restoration, Seoul (2003–5).
MVRDV, Seoullo 7017, Seoul (2017).
Chapter 8
M8 at Charing Cross, Glasgow.
M74 at Tradeston, Glasgow.
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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The Expressway World
Richard J. Williams
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Richard J. Williams 2025
The right of Richard J. Williams to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2025 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6010-3
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024947561
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Illustrations
Cross-Bronx Expressway, New York City
The Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway, Boston
‘Truck and Car Fall as West Side Highway Collapses’, The New York Times (16 December 1973)
Miller Highway Remnant at West 72nd St., New York City
Paul Rudolph, Lower Manhattan Expressway, New York City. Bird’s-eye perspective section. Rendering. (ca. 1970)
Thomas Heatherwick, Little Island, New York City (2013)
Marylin Jorgenson Reece and Carol Schumaker with the I-405/I-10 interchange under construction. Los Angeles Times (6 April 1964)
California Department of Transport Division of Highways, I-405/I-10 interchange, photograph 16662-6 (14 January 1966)
I-405/I-10 interchange, Los Angeles
Scaffolding Play St. Marks, 1968
Costume Under Motorway, 1968
Hawkwind, X In Search Of Space interior gatefold, 1971
Acklam Road skatepark, Westway, London
Prefeitura Municipal de São Paulo, perspective drawing of Elevado Presidente Costa e Silva, São Paulo, 1969
Minhocão, São Paulo
Ciro Miguel, proposal for Parque Minhocão, São Paulo, 2013
Madrid Rio from the Puente de Toledo, Madrid
Las Colmenas housing and the M-30, Madrid
Dominique Perrault, Puente de Arganzuela, Madrid Rio (2011)
Cheonggyecheon restoration, Seoul (2003–5)
Kim Swoo-Geun, Sewoon Sangaa, Seoul (1967)
Cheonggyecheon restoration, Seoul (2003–5)
MVRDV, Seoullo 7017, Seoul (2017)
M8 at Charing Cross, Glasgow
M74 at Tradeston, Glasgow
Acknowledgements
Richard Anderson, Pedro Fiori Arantes, Stuart Baird, Joe Banks, Rosa Barba, Anne Bartolotti, Hugh Campbell, Ana Claudia Castro, Dongho Chun, Athos Comolatti, Neil Cox, Christina M. Crawford, Mark Crinson, Juan Cruz, Vena Dhupa, Alistair Fair, Jamie Forde, Richard Freeman, Ginés Garrido, Miles Glendinning, Ben Highmore, Dominic Hinde, Alex Hochuli, Claudia Hopkins, Andrew Houlachan, Paul Jenkins, Eunju Kang, Sepideh Karami, José Lira, Ana Maluenda, Daryl Martin, Peter Merriman, Nate Millington, Michael Moorcock, Felipe Morozini, Rory Olcayto, Jen Orpin, Ada Penna, Paul Routledge, Iain Sinclair, Paul Sweeney, Richard Thomson, Igea Troiani, Jon Trux, Christopher Turner, Jan Urquhart, Tom Vague, Abby Williams, Alex Williams, Tim Wilson, Ruth Verde Zein, and Sharon Zukin.
I would also like to thank the staff of the following institutions for their hospitality, help in locating research materials and for many excellent suggestions: the Burns Library at Boston College, Kendra Stoll at the CalTrans library in Sacramento, Anthony Ng and Mohammed Rashidfarokhi at CalTrans District 7, the Centre for Alternative Technology in Machynlleth, the Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos de Madrid, Ewha Woman’s University in Seoul, the Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo Universidade de São Paulo, the University of Liverpool library, the Glasgow City Archives at the Mitchell Library, the Getty Research Institute library in Los Angeles, the New York Public Library, Ouvidor 63 in São Paulo and the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid.
Thank you, finally, to the journals City, Sophia, and the London Review of Books for letting me publish some of my preliminary thoughts on the topic of the expressway world.
The project was generously supported by the Leverhulme Trust, who provided an International Research Fellowship based at the University of São Paulo in 2022, and the British Academy, who equally generously provided a Senior Research Fellowship for 2024, as well as a Small Research Grant in the same year. As ever, the University of Edinburgh provided consistent support throughout.
Finally, I have to thank Eileen Kinsman most of all. The book is for her, with love.
Preface
Imagine an expressway. You are standing on a concrete pedestrian bridge and you’re looking down on it, onto six lanes of slow-moving traffic, some of it stationary. In the distance off to your right is a modern city centre, dense and compact with office towers; you can pick out a few of the names of the occupants from this distance – the accountants KPMG, a Hilton hotel, the big names of capital. You’re some distance away from that world, both physically and psychologically, and you’re also well distanced from what you know to exist to your left, a mile or so away, an area of solid Victorian housing with leafy streets and cafes. You’re somewhere else here, the only pedestrian in the vicinity, and the only other humans you can see in the immediate locality are drivers and the occasional passenger, glimpsed behind glass. The traffic is a constant roar; you can smell it too, especially when a truck downshifts to drag itself out of a crawl. Nothing much grows here, apart from weeds poking through cracks in the paving. It’s a scene you can find all over the world – for many, an everyday form of devastation.
It might seem perverse to make a case for places like these, but more often than not that is exactly what I do in this book. The expressway I describe above happens to be in Glasgow, Scotland’s largest city and one that embraced the automobile with unrestrained enthusiasm in the 1960s and 1970s (it came close to erasing all of its Victorian centre at one point in favour of a car-oriented plan). Glasgow is a good case, but it could equally be Lagos or London, São Paulo or San Francisco. The expressway world is ubiquitous and global, and almost any city of any size that you can think of has an urban quarter like this. The expressway world, as I call it here, borrowing a label from an American critic Marshall Berman, is that place where the devastation is most acute.1 It’s where a highway slices through the city, dividing it from itself (‘severance’ is the term highway engineers use to describe this effect). The expressway can take various forms in this zone – it can be built at grade level, or buried, or even sometimes tunnelled at great expense. Most commonly, however, it is a bridge, an elevated structure of a kilometre or more, built in precast sections in concrete or steel, and raised up on piers. As engineering structures, they can be hugely impressive. Writing in all seriousness in 1971, the English architectural critic and historian Reyner Banham called the 405/10 junction in Los Angeles a ‘work of art’.
In terms of history, the expressway world is still in many places being built. African cities, pumped with Chinese capital, are enthusiastically building such structures, Indian and Chinese cities too. But this book is mostly about structures from a moment when the private car represented the future of transportation and cities everywhere were being reconstructed in its image. This is a few years from the middle of the 1960s to the early 1970s, a period before the oil crisis of 1973 when that car-oriented vision fell out of fashion. We mostly don’t care for that expressway world now, that world of the 1960s. On its construction, we might have been able to see its structures as works of art, and before they got clogged up with other people’s cars to experience them as seamless flow. But the expressway world mostly has negative associations now – pollution, waste, noise, visual and physical separation. The M8 is for many an urban disaster that must be simply abolished.
I am not so sure. The expressway world can be richer and more complex than it might first appear. In the following chapters, there are examples of expressways that have become – through activism, or imaginative political action, or benign neglect – urban places in their own right. You can find numerous adaptations of the expressway world too, ameliorations of its worst effects, and imaginative appropriations, as well as cases where nothing has happened at all. But above all you will find that the expressway world is something lived, involving the interaction of individuals and institutions in ways its designers may never have intended. In that it is very like the nineteenth-century railway environment with its arches and viaducts, now much prized by developers. There is no reason the expressway world can’t also become that if we want it. Roads are a resilient technology. Almost anything with wheels can move along them: bikes and buses as well as cars and trucks. You can sit and walk, or run on them, if permitted, which admittedly is not often. In a few places you can occasionally sunbathe. There has even been more than one idea to turn one into a swimming pool, miles long.
Arguments for abolishing the expressway world abound. However, abolition, I think, is mostly fantasy. It can be done, at vast expense, but it may end up being as totalising a solution as what it replaces. There can be losses as well as gains. As Megan Kimble, an American journalist, writes in a recent book, we need to be cautious, even when we think abolishing the expressway is the right thing to do. ‘We should tear down urban highways’, she writes. ‘But how we tear them down also matters.’2 Or, implicitly we end up with more of the same, more highway power being inflicted on those without that power, more division and inequality, just of a different form.
This book therefore tells stories of accommodation with the expressway world, of ways of living with it, and of directing it slyly to new uses. Some of the most arresting cases here, such as São Paulo’s Minhocão, manage to keep apparently mutually hostile interests in play, sometimes over decades. That is evidence of the possibility of a different kind of expressway politics, neither advocacy nor abolition, but something else.
There’s also some mourning here in this book too, for some readers no doubt misplaced, but nevertheless there because the expressway world one way or another is in decline. The cities that embraced it most enthusiastically in the 1960s have turned equally enthusiastically against it. I think what Megan Kimble describes in City Limits is the coming orthodoxy, however long it takes to come about. Paris, under the mayoralty of Anne Hidalgo has turned its riverside highways into beaches. England’s second largest city, Birmingham, is making a pedestrian-friendly boulevard out of its orbital ring. Every weekend Brasília, the most autophile of all the twentieth century’s new towns, turns its central expressway into a park. It is often said that ‘peak car’ has been reached in the rich world – the young, some say, can no longer afford cars, nor aspire to have them, nor even see the point in learning to drive.
It is nevertheless still occasionally possible to experience the expressway world as it was intended to be. Around car-mad Glasgow one can, if the timing is right, sense the miracle that its expressway designers imagined. On a summer’s evening, starting from the heart of the Victorian commercial city, you head westwards towards Charing Cross where in a minute or two you can pick up the M8, which sweeps you up almost immediately and south over the broad expanse of the river Clyde. It’s an exhilarating move on the rare occasions that the traffic is on your side. In twenty minutes the expressway drops down to the estuary and the view suddenly expands, dotted with islands and ferries, with the mountains of the West Highlands forming a vertiginous backdrop. This is a different world all of a sudden, both connected and metropolitan through the expressway, and also wild. The expressway world, for all its difficulties on foot, is also this.
I am a driver at least some of the time, and just occasionally I also experience this miracle – sometimes the journey westwards as described, sometimes in the other direction, where the Kingston Bridge swoops across the river before plunging deep into the engine room of the Victorian city. With luck, it is a quintessentially modern, Futurist experience. But it’s also rare for the driver, and costly for everyone else. It nevertheless is the expressway world, and the task of the book is to hold on to the reality of that experience, along with all the other contradictory and difficult experiences that contribute to it. You can be both a driver and a pedestrian, and activist and a consumer, an enthusiast and a critic. The expressway world isn’t a single world, but multiple and overlapping ones, and the stories the book revolves around are stories of complexity, both/and not either/or.
One last, but important thought: the original designers of the expressway world were, in their own ways, totalitarians, some more openly than others. Their solutions were total, all-encompassing, intolerant of dissent. The critical response to the expressway could also be as totalitarian, not to mention costly. We’re not now going to demolish concrete structures everywhere given the amount of carbon embodied in them, as well as the now well-known costs of demolition. So, most likely we are going to have to learn to live with them, just as we did with nineteenth-century railway viaducts – and that experience from the 1960s onwards shows the variety and imagination of the possible responses.
I wrote this book in a city, Edinburgh, which most unusually has remained almost entirely untouched by the expressway. Edinburgh for better or worse chose not to remake itself in the image of the car in the years following the Second World War. It flirted with putting an expressway through its medieval Old Town, paralleling development in Glasgow, its rival to the west. In the end, it elected to do none of it, and the city’s streets remain largely those of the distant past. On this question, the city remains inordinately pleased with itself, as it is with its resistance to most other aspects of the modern world. But this conscious refusal of the expressway has had consequences. It has been harder to do the large-scale pedestrianisation schemes that can be found in Glasgow for example, and from the point of view of a driver, or bus passenger, the city’s traffic is agonisingly slow. And, perhaps more controversially, the refusal of the expressway world has also meant the refusal of the kinds of urban spaces this book describes, which, highly imperfect as they are, have qualities that bear consideration. The expressway world is a place as much as any other urban place, and it has value, admittedly often eccentric or difficult, but value nonetheless. To make sense of the expressway world now, we need to be open to that possibility – and the following chapters are therefore an exercise in open-mindedness. Between retention and abolition there are ways of living with the expressway world that may have lessons for how we learn to live with the rest of the built environment.
Cross-Bronx Expressway, New York City. Photograph by Richard J. Williams.
Notes
1
M. Berman,
All That Is Solid Melts Into Air
(London: Verso, 1983).
2
M. Kimble,
City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality and the Future of America’s Highways
(New York: Crown, 2024), p. 277.
CHAPTER 1The Expressway World Revisited
Back in 1982, the American philosopher Marshall Berman published an electrifying and much-cited account of the Cross-Bronx Expressway, the notorious section of Interstate 95 that slices across the northern part of New York City. The traffic was violent, he wrote, ‘fast, deadly fast’, everyone on the highway ‘seized with a desperate, uncontrollable urge to get out of the Bronx as fast as wheels can take him’. But it was not just the drivers’ behaviour that disturbed him, but the violence the highway did to its surroundings. It was a blasted, inhumane place: ‘hundreds of boarded-up, abandoned buildings and charred and burnt-out hulks of buildings; dozens of blocks covered with nothing at all but shattered blocks and waste’. An ordeal for anyone, he went on, it was ‘especially dreadful for people who remember the Bronx as it used to be: who remember these neighbourhoods as they once lived and thrived; until this road cut through their heart and made the Bronx, above all, a place to get out of’.1
Built between 1948 and 1968 the Cross-Bronx Expressway was an extraordinary act of will of one man, New York’s political colossus, Robert Moses. The violence Berman saw was Moses’s, nowhere clearer than in a notorious speech given in May 1964 at the World’s Fair. Moses – chair of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority and at least eleven other key committees, perhaps the most powerful single figure in New York City’s history – was recovering from a prostatectomy at the city’s Roosevelt Hospital, so he had the speech delivered by an aide. Radical surgery was on his mind: it was easy enough to build roads in a Canberra or a Brasília, he said, where nothing previously existed, but ‘when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis you have to hack your way with a meat ax’.2
Berman understood that sentiment all too well because the severed neighbourhood was precisely the one in which he himself had grown up. Moses’s actions felt like a personal attack. ‘The Expressway World’, the title of Berman’s chapter on Moses, was part of a larger argument about modernity, depicting it as destruction and chaos, rather than progress: as the book’s title put it, borrowing a phrase from Marx and Engels, ‘all that is solid melts into air’.3 The expressway was a key image in this argument, the heart of two of the book’s chapters. For Moses and strong men like him, the expressway was the purest embodiment of progress. For critics such as Berman, it was the destroyer of worlds.
There are plenty of reasons to go along with Berman. Expressways once built are more often than not somewhat toxic objects. Many of them are associated with dictators, or populist strong men, or just men like Moses used to getting their way (a warning: this is a book populated with big, not always entirely good, men). Many of the expressways in the book are associated with now unfashionable ways of doing things, like driving everywhere. In many cases, the urban expressway represents a peculiarly modern dystopia, the image we reach for when we want to represent scepticism about progress. Often enough the urban expressway in image is captured at a moment of embarrassing failure: the popular protest at the moment of inauguration, or the persistence of the traffic jam that the expressway was supposed to solve. There have been catastrophic structural failures, such as the collapse of Los Angeles’s I-5 during the 1994 Northridge earthquake, or the deadly disintegration of Genoa’s Morandi bridge in 2018, or the inundation of Houston’s I-45 and I-69 by Storm Beta in 2020, or in 2024, the destruction of the Francis Scott Key Bridge carrying the I-695 in Baltimore after a ship collided with one of its piers.4 Or there have been recent, and well-publicized cases where an expressway destroys the part of the city that it is meant to serve. In Giza, Cairo, the new Teraet Al-Zomor Bridge is said to pass less than 50 cm from the flats on either side, an act of urban warfare by any standards (Egypt’s Ministry of Housing argued after the fact that the flats had been illegally built, so the residents had no rights).5
The images of the Giza bridge are somehow uniquely horrifying – the expressway is literally in the bedroom! – but the dystopian expressway was already a long-established cultural trope. As early as 1958, the great American urbanist Lewis Mumford depicted the expressway as a uniquely destructive force. ‘Perhaps our age will be known to the future historian as the age of the bulldozer and the exterminator’, he wrote; ‘the building of a highway has about the same result upon vegetation and human structures as the passage of a tornado or the blast of an atom bomb.’6
The failed expressway has become an important political trope too. There are now innumerable acts of political resistance, from the American freeway revolts of the late 1950s onwards, successful in stalling portions of San Francisco’s freeway system. The activist Jane Jacobs’s work in resisting the Lower Manhattan Expressway in the 1960s is legendary. In London, the popular understanding of expressways is almost entirely in terms of failure. Its Motorway Box of 1965, an eight-lane, eighty-kilometre expressway on stilts, famously never happened.7 It was one of the academic and planner Peter Hall’s Great Planning Disasters, as his 1980 book had it.8 Elsewhere in Britain, popular resistance to the M11 and M77 motorways killed any substantial road-building programme from the late 1990s onwards.
Disaster, failure, dystopia: it has become difficult to see the urban expressway in any other terms. Whether we are concerned with them in academic, political or cultural representations, the treatment of the urban expressway has become almost universally negative. As Michael Dnes has put it in a book on London’s expressways, their treatment has focused ‘overwhelmingly on their rejection’. ‘Seen from a distance’, he continues, ‘the rise and fall of urban road projects appears to be a story of threat and redemption, or a revolution that cast out one flawed view of the world and established a new, better approach to managing transport in the city.’9 In other words, we know better now.
If anything, the mainstream approach to the urban expressway is more negative now than at any time in the past. In Carmageddon, Daniel Knowles describes the urban expressway as a ‘tourniquet on a healthy limb’, a way of killing a healthy city. Cars are getting too big, cars unequivocally ‘make life worse’, carmakers are ‘evil’, traffic can’t be beaten and all roads lead to the ground zero of racial capitalism, Detroit.10 Megan Kimble’s recent study of anti-expressway activism in Texas is unambiguous about them as agents of racist governance. Built, at least in part, to separate impoverished African Americans from the rich city, for the sake of racial justice alone, she writes, they must be torn down.11
The Promise of the Expressway
But before we get into the critique, what precisely do we mean by an expressway? It is a road, of a peculiarly modern kind. Designed exclusively for motor traffic, sometimes only restricted to the private car. It has limited access points, which is to say that it can only be reached on wheels via carefully engineered on- and off-ramps. Its carriageways are strictly separated, by a space where cars cannot drive, or by crash barriers; you can’t cross from one side to the other in the usual way. Pedestrians are forbidden. It’s designed for speed. There are huge signs designed to be read at a glance. As Peter Hall put it, these elements are remarkably consistent, even at the level of signage with ‘distinctive lower-case lettering, that became part of a new global visual symbolism’.12 Their very ubiquity would subsequently be an attraction for pop artists such as the American Ed Ruscha, keen on anything popular and mass produced.
The first expressway with these recognizable global characteristics was, Hall thought, most likely the Automobil-Verkehrs- und Übungsstraße (AVUS), a ten-kilometre route through Berlin’s Grunewald, completed in 1921. Germany’s Autobahnen, proposed during the Weimar period, and built enthusiastically by the Nazis from 1933 as a job creation scheme, were early evidence of the same, although (Hall points out) the engineering of these early highways could be primitive: ‘they run like a roller-coaster over every undulation in the landscape … on- and off-ramps are too tightly engineered.’13
The US built a handful of expressways at the same time (the Arroyo Seco Parkway, Los Angeles, in 1939; the Pennsylvania Turnpike in 1940) but it did not build with much enthusiasm at least until the passing of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 and the initiation of the Interstate highway system.14 Most of the cases in this book date from the later 1960s by which point the expressway had become an orthodoxy, invisible in its normality, even as it brutalized the existing city.
The expressway can take various forms in the city zone: it can be built at grade level, or sunk below ground, or tunnelled, the latter invariably the most expensive option. Most commonly, however, it is a bridge, an elevated structure of a kilometre or more, built in precast sections in concrete or steel, and raised up on piers. As engineering structures, they can be impressive or highly intrusive or both. The terminology varies a good deal. There are quite a number of labels in English, with equivalents in other languages – ‘motorway’ in British English has a precise legal definition and set of engineering standards, ‘interstate’ and ‘freeway’ likewise in the United States. Autobahn in Germany, autopistain Spanish, autostrada in Italian, autoestrada in Portuguese have similar meanings. There are some cultural differences depending on the time and place the terminology is used, along with variations in design standards.15 I use ‘expressway’ here, partly to refer to Berman, partly because it has generally urban connotations, partly because it can be found in use in various locations at various times – it is intentionally transcultural and transhistorical.
The expressway was once all wonder and promise. The promise is there in vestigial form in early modernist urban visions, in, for example, the Italian Antonio Sant’Elia’s Città Nuova (‘New City’), a highly mechanized urban vision sublimating high-speed circulation (Sant’Elia was a Futurist whose founding manifesto of 1909 opens with the perverse celebration of a car crash).16 It is there more clearly in Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine of 1922, an imaginary, but highly influential city of three million planned as a grid of identical skyscrapers set in open parkland.17 Through the middle of the Ville Contemporaine the architect planted a great expressway, dead straight, six lanes wide, featuring grade-separated crossings. There was an anachronistic triumphal arch at one end, but this city was otherwise uncompromisingly automotive.18 Le Corbusier liked cars: his 1923 manifesto Vers Une Architecture compared car design approvingly with the evolution of Greek temples and he actually designed a car in 1936, the Voiture Minimum, although none was ever built.19
The expressway world is there, in a distinctly early Soviet form in Mikhail Okhitovich and Moisei Ginzburg’s ‘disurbanist’ proposals of 1929 and later, which imagined cities in their traditional sense replaced by lightweight pods strung out along highways; the car would predominate.20 The expressway world found a well-known American form in Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1932 Broadacre City, described in the provocatively titled book, The Disappearing City, in which the expressway would be the means of effecting a radical decentralization of American cities, partially realized by a combination of accident and design after the Second World War.21
Of early visions of the expressway world, probably the most popular was the Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, sponsored by General Motors, and projecting a world twenty years in the future in which its products would be ubiquitous. An accompanying book, Magic Motorways, appeared in 1940. The author of both was a visionary theatre set designer, Noman Bel Geddes, a man (as the book’s disarming cover blurb read) ‘of almost unbelievable energy, irascible and unpredictable’.22 Approximately five million stood in line for the sixteen-minute Futurama show, making it by far the most popular attraction in World Fair history. It took the visitor on an immersive ride into a future America, criss-crossed with high-speed motorways filled with quick semi-autonomous cars, equipped with secondary safety devices to make accidents inconceivable. New York might be connected with San Francisco in twenty-four hours, indicating an average speed of more than 160 kilometres per hour, and a sleepless night, although Bel Geddes implied that the journey might be at least partly automated. It was a seductive vision, no more so than in the sections depicting urban life. Here, repeatedly, Bel Geddes was anxious to keep drivers and pedestrians apart with two separate circulation systems, distinct not only in method but in mood: ‘people saunter above – cars speed below’ reads the caption to a perspective drawing of a future city block.23 He replanned the metropolitan city around colossal expressways, punctuated every ten blocks with a skyscraper, each enormous block ‘a complete unit in itself’. That would not only be desirable but necessary: crossing the street would otherwise be suicide.24
Bel Geddes depicted the city as a machine, and its circulation sublime. In the United States that vision led directly to the 1944 Act of Congress establishing the national highway system. At the level of urban governance, it certainly helped embed the automobile-focused vision of the American city that Robert Moses was already building in New York.25 The city, in these breathless fantasies, is all automobility. As Robert Caro’s biography of Moses shows in relentless detail, Moses was a visionary as much as Bel Geddes. He could support his arguments for highway building with any amount of data on traffic flow and revenue streams to the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority – but he achieved much of what he did by force of rhetoric.26
Fantasies like Futurama are tremendously important, communicating unfamiliar and complex ideas to a mass public. Bel Geddes’s core ideas were legible and memorable: the supremacy of the car, the separation of pedestrian traffic, the sublimation of traffic flow. Echoes of these modernist fantasies can be routinely found throughout the postwar period, some more plausible than others. The new capital of Brazil, Brasília, is a city of half a million structured around a fourteen-kilometre expressway, the Eixo Rodoviáro, a symbolic and functional urban spine along which a large part of the city’s housing was strung out, along with some of its principal monuments. It is inescapable and spectacular in both the plan and real life. Lucio Costa, the plan’s architect, was clear about the imagery. Brasília, he wrote, was to be the capital of ‘the autostrada and the park’, a motorized vision that assumed, without being very specific, much greater car ownership.27 Costa did also build a colossal, multilevel bus station above a buried expressway, a Futurist spectacle. From the terrace of the bus station, probably the city’s most complex and animated public space, an extraordinary mechanized ballet plays constantly, as hundreds of buses make their way in and out, while cars flash by on the expressway below.
Automotive fantasies could be retrofitted onto an existing city, as they might have been in Berlin via the English architects Peter and Alison Smithson. In their competition entry for Berlin Hauptstadt in 1958, they proposed a thrilling experience for drivers as an expressway plunged them at speed beneath an urban megastructure, and they hoped an equally thrilling experience for pedestrians who would be able to look at the traffic. ‘Cars as spectacle’, they wrote ‘look down to the roads. People as spectacle: look up to escalators and terraces.’28
The perspective drawings they supplied for the competition had something of Brasília in them in their celebration of the expressway, as both structure and fantasy. They might have lost the competition, but a not dissimilar fantasy would show up, for example, in Cumbernauld, a new town to the north-east of Glasgow, similarly oriented around an expressway over which was erected a megastructure housing a modern town’s essential functions. In an undeniably exciting perspective drawing of it published in 1963, the town centre was approached at speed in a Ford Thunderbird convertible.29 It was an optimistic image for a part of the country that was both poverty-stricken and damp – but it was a widely disseminated and compelling fantasy.
Traffic in Towns
These visions, unbuilt and built, were essentially Futurist, speed-obsessed and uncompromising. There were quieter visions too. The expressway world might also be a means of giving the pedestrian a better deal, at least in theory. In Britain, this came first in the form of the Buchanan report on the predicted growth in road traffic. Commissioned in 1960 by Ernest Marples, the Transport Minister in the Conservative government of Harold Macmillan, it reported at the end of 1962, and an abridged version of the report appeared in paperback the following year as Traffic in Towns, becoming an unlikely bestseller. Its tone could be somewhat apocalyptic. Sir Geoffrey Crowther wrote in the introduction of a ‘national emergency’.30 Colin Buchanan, the report’s author, had already claimed that nothing less than ‘civilised life (was) at stake’.31 The precise threat was the growth in traffic volume, with traffic already unmanageable at the time of publication – the traffic jams around Christmas 1958 seem to have been a turning point. Volumes were predicted to grow by 300 per cent by 1980, based on the then reasonable assumption that every household would very likely soon acquire a car. There was a political dimension too, which Crowther described bluntly: ‘a majority of voters in the country will soon be car owners’.32
Traffic in Towns had some startling solutions. London’s Fitzrovia – the area bounded by the Euston Road and Oxford Street – would be largely demolished, to be replaced by an elaborate double-decked megastructure, with expressway-style roads at ground level and pedestrians at an upper level. Where that could not be done, Buchanan proposed retrofitting areas with a raised platform, separating pedestrian from car traffic in the same way. Life at car level need not be excessively gloomy, he wrote, proposing holes punched into the pedestrian platform to admit light, and shop frontages that could animate the below-grade scene.33
If Futurama imagined a city of flows, principally from the driver’s perspective, Traffic in Towns concerned itself more with the pedestrian. A photograph of Paris depicts the Place Vendôme as a rubbish heap of cars. We need, Buchanan wrote somewhat despairingly, to respect ‘the simple act of walking’.34 To facilitate this enhanced pedestrian realm, traffic needed to be directed somewhere else. Having done its job, pedestrian life could be liberated. The expressway world could also be this.
Expressways as Power
Any book about roads is also a book about power. Roads enable power but they are also pictures of it. Before anything or anybody moves along a road, it exists as a representation of political power, perhaps in its most primitive form. A line joins two places on a map and power flows. Robert Moses, perhaps the single most important political figure in the history of New York City, understood this – his bridges and tunnels, turnpikes, parkways and expressways were the material forms of his political authority. Brian Larkin, an anthropologist, has written precisely of infrastructure as a means of making power visible, beyond the theatre of the debating chamber. ‘A road’s technical function is to transport vehicles from one place to another, promoting movement and realizing the enlightenment goal of society and economy as a space of unimpeded circulation’, he writes. But it can also be a fantastic object that exceeds any practical function. Roads ‘operate on the level of fantasy and desire’, key currencies of political power.35
The expressway world is therefore full of stories about the projection of political power, by men such as Robert Moses, but also by organizations, such as Glasgow City Council at the height of its municipal pomp, or the California Division of Highways, all visionary in their different ways. That power might be used to build the expressway world, as it is in many of the cases described in this book, but it may also be used to create spectacular alternatives to it; in terms of the expression of power, there is not always much difference between the creation of the expressway world in the first place and its replacement. That is the story of Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón in Madrid, or Lee Myung-bak in Seoul, both the subject of later chapters. The forms may be new, and on the face of it progressive, but they are nonetheless the expression of political power, for precise desired effects.
Thinking about power also means thinking about resistance to power. The expressway world might have been the expression of authority, but it also produced new forms of resistance to authority. This means, for example, the work of Jane Jacobs, a New York-based journalist and community activist, whose ground-breaking book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, described the residual power of citizens in the daily occupation of their neighbourhoods; they knew things, and could see things, and had (to the outsider) invisible networks of trust that could operate to maintain order.36 Effective power, she showed, could be distributed in new ways. Social networks could also be repurposed to deter political authority, as Jacobs showed in relation to the resistance to the Lower Manhattan Expressway, and after she moved to Canada in 1968, in relation to the Spadina Expressway in Toronto, both of which were cancelled in the early 1970s, in some part as a result of her work. It makes sense to think of the power of the expressway world residing in these places too; similarly, later anti-roads activism in the UK, for example in relation to the M3, M11, M74, and M77 expansions, ought to be considered integral to the expressway world, rather than simply in opposition to it. Such actions have produced a different kind of expressway world, even if they have not prevented it coming into being.37
Power in the expressway world might also simply mean use or occupation. Through use, places change over time, as the geographer J.B. Jackson repeatedly argued in his role as editor of the journal Landscape. By the middle of the 1960s he was regularly writing about roads as culture; a 1966 lecture described the messy automobile-oriented sprawl at the edge of American cities as producing unlikely but vital forms of modern social life.38 For Jackson, the parking lot might even be a new form of civic space (he was an optimist). Ideas like that have had enduring appeal for academics in cultural studies and adjacent disciplines – expressways, and roads in general, have increasingly come to be read as cultural objects, their richness deriving in part from their very ubiquity.39 The geographer Peter Merriman’s book on the construction and politics of the M1 motorway through England’s spine is a documentary of an anthropological place, produced by its users as much as its designers;40 Joe Moran’s book on roads is similarly an account of lived places. For Eric Avila, a specialist in Californian racial politics, the spaces of the expressway have scope for appropriation by the apparently powerless.41 In these cases, occupation is a form of power, and the expressway world a production of its everyday use as much as its design and construction.42 That occupation could involve care or even love, as a recent anthology has it.43 The expressway world therefore represents various forms of power – traditional political authority invested in individuals and institutions, resistance to that authority from below, and everyday forms of occupation, all of which matter, above all in how they relate to one another.
Expressways as Culture
The expressway world is also culture. Culture matters here because it is representations – in art, design, advertising, television and, above all perhaps, film – that condition reality; we learn to see things in image before we can see them in real life. Katherine Shonfield, an architectural theorist, wrote extensively about this question. In her book Walls Have Feelings (2000), she wrote how ‘fictions’ (for her, especially film), could be used ‘to reveal unseen workings of architecture’.44 A film might represent a building in ways the architects could not have envisaged, particularly when it comes to attributing meaning: in films, she writes, ‘architecture is inevitably self-consciously loaded with meaning’, perhaps because film-makers typically spend so long looking at the results of what others have built. ‘I am struck’, Shonfield continued, ‘by the way a film maker will commonly spend much longer determining how the artefacts of architects and other urban designers are to be filmed than was originally spent designing the artefacts in the first place.’45
One of those ‘artefacts’ is precisely the expressway, long an obsessive image for film-makers. (We can argue about the reasons, which may be that the Western film world’s capital, Los Angeles, has so many of them, or that their experience through the windscreen is already quasi-cinematic – that is another book.)46 A great many of those cinematic representations of the expressway have been dystopian. Typically, it is jammed and choking (Federico Fellini’s 8½, Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend, Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down, Damien Chazelle’s La La Land), ruined and littered with abandoned cars (Mimi Leder’s Deep Impact, Fernando Meirelles’s Blindness, George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road), the site of repeated family trauma (Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas), or a stand-in for an authoritarian state (Héctor Babenco’s Kiss of the Spider Woman). It’s a stock disaster movie trope, a straightforward means of representing civilization turned on its head. Those negative, sometimes catastrophic, representations arguably connect to the way we think about the expressway now.
The expressway on film can also be highly ambiguous, open to contradiction. One of Shonfield’s key cinematic examples is Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film, Two or Three Things I Know About Her, filmed in Saint Denis, a suburban commune on the northern edge of Paris. The Périphérique orbital expressway, then under construction, repeatedly appears without explanation in the film. It’s a strange, somewhat surreal object, and the relationship with its surroundings in the film, Shonfield writes, is ‘one of absolute difference’.47 ‘Godard’s Périphérique’, she continues, ‘sweeps through the city at high level, ignoring the vertical spatial hierarchy of the buildings it cuts through, isolating them and rendering them forlorn objects subordinated to the road’s curvaceous power.’48 Buildings are reduced to ‘commodities’, dissolving traditional urban hierarchies, much as the film does generally. But the film doesn’t judge, and instead largely accepts the Périphérique, its strangeness telling us something about the contradictions of the modern urban condition. It makes its oddness visible, and it shows a public learning, somehow, to live with it. For the anthropologist Marc Augé, the Périphérique was the embodiment of the ‘non-place’; Godard shows it becoming its opposite.49
In Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, a 1971 treatment of a Stanislaw Lem novel about the human encounter with a sentient planet, a hypnotic, wordless sequence depicts a drive on Tokyo’s fantastically illuminated expressways. It bears no relation at all to the rest of the narrative, let alone the book on which it is based, but it speaks eloquently of Tarkovsky’s fascination with the expressway as a magnificently strange, sublime object. It represents – one supposes – something of the director’s surprise as a Soviet citizen abruptly exposed to hyper-capitalist Japan, but it also simply recognizes a new kind of nature.
For other film-makers the expressway has often enough been a terrain vague, a zone where things are possible or can be said that are otherwise forbidden. Or it might become, by accident, something unintended. In the documentary film Lagos/Koolhaas made in 2002 by the architect Rem Koolhaas and the artist Bregtje van der Haak, the harbour expressway in the centre of the Nigerian metropolis is the focus of a film about the everyday lives of its inhabitants.50 The expressway appeals to the film-makers here because its intense traffic has turned it into a place of commerce and socialization, a neo-public space rather than a means of circulation. Similarly, the São Paulo expressway of the 2006 documentary film Elevado 3.5 by João Sodré, Paulo Pastorelo and Maíra Bühler, appears as a lived place, an unlikely but authentic home for a diverse population. Film is particularly good at doing this, but the expressway world has been a routine subject in art too, particularly for artists based in LA. In the UK, a Manchester-based artist Jen Orpin has lately made a career out of painting tiny, intensely detailed panels depicting British motorway bridges, each one laboriously describing overlooked infrastructure.51 They picture the often intense lived experience of the expressway world, and its human associations and meanings. In Orpin’s paintings, the expressway world has become anthropological place.52
Autogeddon
To engage with an infrastructural object like the expressway is to engage with one of the key symbols of the hydrocarbon economy, at a moment when that economy finds itself in a place of unprecedented uncertainty. The crisis pervades all thinking; we don’t know where to ‘land’, as the philosopher Bruno Latour put it in a late essay on environmental thinking.53 It has produced some striking gestures: California, long the epitome of the car-oriented society, passed a Senate Bill in 2013, which put an effective end to new expressways, with the explicit aim of reducing driving.54
The sociologist John Urry anticipated many of the present uncertainties about the expressway world in a 2007 book Mobilities. Urry used the term ‘automobility’ to describe a system of some complexity, much bigger than individuals and their vehicles, the latter being, he thought, relatively unimportant. The system, he thought all-encompassing, extending to anything from licensing to oil refining to motels and repair shops, anything from government to the tinkering of ‘car enthusiasts’.55 Automobility’s costs were huge, he wrote, involving ‘massive environmental resource use’ as well as ‘an extraordinary scale of death and injuries’. Noting 3,000 daily deaths globally through car use, he wonders if ‘the freedom to drive’ is not also ‘the freedom to die’.56
A similar sense of crisis also pervades contemporary architectural discourse, to which this book is certainly adjacent. In September 2019, the British professional publication Architects’ Journal started what it called a ‘Retro First’ campaign, arguing for retention and reuse over demolition, given the amount of embodied carbon in existing structures – it repeated the manifesto-like phrase from 2007 of Carl Elefante, a former president of the American Institute of Architects, ‘the greenest building is the one that already exists’.57
