“Neighborhoods kept divided”: Race, roads and rupture in a Baltimore neighbourhood-park corridor

Abstract

This article presents a history of Druid Park Lake Drive, a multilane road in Baltimore, Maryland that acts as a barrier between Baltimore's Druid Hill Park and the African American neighbourhoods to its south. Lake Drive is often understood by residents and journalists as a racially discriminatory infrastructure, consciously designed to engender segregation. By analysing newspaper articles, interviews with residents and old maps, this article finds that Lake Drive was never intentionally planned to carry out a politics of exclusion. Its racial politics, instead, emerged over time as broader demographic, environmental, cultural and political developments took place in the corridor that surrounds Lake Drive. This argument calls into question the practice of focusing solely on planners’ intentions when analysing the politics of infrastructure. Instead, we should ask what broader factors imbue roads with politics – and how these politics change over time as these roads are encountered and used by different people.