Too Big to Replace, Too Expensive to Tear Down: The Legacy of Urban Interstates
The 1956 Interstate Act laid the foundation for >40,000 miles of highways across the United States, connecting major metropolitan areas and transforming our country, cities, and towns. The interstates brought economic growth, spurred suburban development, bolstered our national defense network, and cemented the automobile as the primary mode of transportation.
While interstates enabled efficient regional travel, they also caused irreparable damage to our cities, especially neighborhoods lacking economic mobility. Planning of urban interstates reinforced redlining, and under the guise of "urban renewal" further segregated, disenfranchised, and uprooted African American neighborhoods. None more so than in Atlanta, where interstates were deliberately plotted to serve, in the words of then-Mayor Bill Hartsfield, as “the boundary between the white and Negro communities”. Not only did they act as a barrier, they razed the heart of Sweet Auburn, the most affluent Black community in Atlanta.
Today, the subversive legacy of interstate planning is evident in both the physical and social fabric of urban neighborhoods through numerous indicators such as demographics, housing value, and unemployment.
Maintaining the status quo is no longer an option; we must rethink the urban interstate. To inform future infrastructure investments, we propose a national evaluation of the consequences of our interstate systems, beginning with Atlanta. City-level and highway corridor analyses visualize areas that would most benefit from the transformation of traditional single-purpose highways into multi-beneficial pieces of social infrastructure. We ask if our interstates can do more, supporting the goals of justice, jobs, and carbon in addition to traditional infrastructure.