Government
The Tricky Second Wave of Urban Highway Removals
For a lot of cities, demolishing the most obvious candidates was the easy part
Dismantling urban freeways—replacing elevated viaducts of steel and concrete with parks and boulevards—is happening in so many places, it’s like an unspoken national urban policy. We've reached a unique point in city-building when the destruction of a public works project has all the glamour and buzz of breaking ground on a new one.
The "death row" of roadways, marvelously packaged by Eric Jaffe in this slideshow and noted in Michael Kimmelman’s dispatch from highway-erasing Madrid, has become a familiar, almost comforting narrative.