“Freeways without futures”: Urban highway removal in the United States and Spain as socio-ecological fix?

Abstract

Urban highways are widely recognized to have devastating social, economic, and environmental consequences, locking in fossil energy dependence, racial and class segregation, and suburban sprawl. Today, as much of the infrastructure built during the peak of the midcentury road construction boom in the global North reaches the end of its lifespan, there is growing interest in removing highways and replacing them with parks, housing, and surface boulevards in the interest of economic development, repairing social divisions in urban space, and fostering more sustainable mobility. Based on preliminary research, this paper offers an empirically driven conceptual outline of highway removal projects in the United States and Spain. I argue that highway removal constitutes an opportunity for a “socioecological fix” for the emerging crisis of automobility, but in practice, highway removal projects may reinscribe the scalar contradictions of carbon-intensive urban-regional metabolisms. Through several empirical cases of highway removal projects, I examine three dimensions through which these contradictions can be understood: national policy changes in urban infrastructure planning and governance, material conflicts between demolition and tunneling and their implications for regional metabolisms, and local sustainable development politics and their distributional contradictions. Although the projects sketched here tend to fall short of their transformative promises, I emphasize that highway removal remains a critical arena of urban climate change politics.