Everyday Places on the American Freeway System

Abstract

The Interstate Highway System is one of the largest civil engineering works in the United States and a crucial component of urban transportation systems. Despite its inescapable presence, it has received relatively little attention from cultural geographers. Although some work has shown how people and communities have adapted to this highway system, it has also been seen as uniform and homogenous, and therefore lacking any real places, or even any sense of place. This paper argues that this view is an oversimplification that fails to acknowledge the diversity of places that exist on freeways. Instead, freeways can be seen as an assemblage of a very large number of places. While these places are generic in that they do not have proper names and rarely show up on official maps, they exist everywhere throughout the system. This paper will examine and discuss some of the kinds of generic places that can be found on the Interstate Highway System and other freeways. These should be investigated in greater detail, not just to enrich our knowledge of everyday places but for the insights we may gain into the meanings associated with freeways and automobile travel within our highway-based transportation system.