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City Limits
City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America's Highways | Megan Kimble
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An eye-opening investigation into how our ever-expanding urban highways accelerated inequality and fractured communitiesand 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 Timesbestselling 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 10just 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? Its 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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I heard about this from Parnassus Books‘ Laydown Diaries last week, and their recs rarely disappoint! Kimble looks at three cities in Texas and how proposed interstate highway expansions have negatively impacted local citizens, businesses, and the climate/air quality. I learned a great deal about why routing them through cities rather than around does not usually help travel times and what on-the-ground activists are doing to oppose this.

JamieArc I need to read this. We have a highway that was constructed to pass through a thriving black neighborhood in my city, and the effects were long-lasting and devastating. They made a documentary about it, so it‘s been a really great local history project. 7mo
Megabooks @JamieArc So many of the communities affected in this book were primarily Black and Latino. It's devastating to these communities. What's the name of the documentary? Is it available anyplace? 7mo
JamieArc @Megabooks It‘s called They Even Took the Dirt. I don‘t think it‘s widely available yet. They‘ve been doing local showings for the last year at community events, but I don‘t think even we can get a copy yet for personal viewing. 7mo
JamieArc If you search for the I-496 project in Lansing, MI, you may be able to see snippets. 7mo
Megabooks @JamieArc Thanks for letting me know the title. Maybe someone will pick it up for wider release! 🙏 I watch more documentaries than fictional films. 😃 7mo
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