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New Study: Highways Block Social Connection

March 16, 2025 Eliana Perozo, Next City. , , ,
A new study confirms what urban residents and advocates have known for decades: that America’s urban highways are barriers to social connection. The research, published this month in the journal PNAS, quantifies for the first time how highways have disrupted neighborhoods across the 50 biggest U.S. cities. Every single city studied showed less social connectivity between neighborhoods where highways are present. “Nobody could put a number on the disruption, and now we can give a score to every single highway segment,” says Luca Aiello, a professor at the IT University of Copenhagen and the study’s lead author.

How Should Cities Use The Land Freed Up By Highway Removal?

August 19, 2024 Morgan Florsheim, Next City. , , ,
The 20th-century era of urban planning saw highways carving scars across the landscapes of many American cities, leaving in their wake a legacy of displacement and destruction. Today, removing freeways seems to offer a path to repairing some of this harm and moving away from car-centric infrastructure. But highway removal alone is not enough. Whether removal projects make good on their promises to mend some of the damage caused by freeway construction and redesign cities at a more human scale depends entirely on two questions: Who controls the reclaimed land when a freeway comes down, and how will those decision makers use it?

The Fight To Reclaim Texas’ Highways For People

May 16, 2024 Maylin Tu, Next City. , , , , ,
Freeways rip apart neighborhoods, displace primarily Black and Brown people and increase greenhouse gas emissions — so why do we keep building them? According to a new book from Austin-based journalist Megan Kimble, “​​City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America’s Highways,” it doesn’t have to be this way. Right now, a new generation of freeway fighters is battling freeway expansion across the country. Kimble’s book profiles three campaigns in Texas to build places for people, not cars: Stop TxDOT I-45 in Houston, Rethink35 in Austin and the campaign to remove the I-345 highway in Dallas.