The Federal Highway System is perhaps the most used and simultaneously ignored piece of our urban fabric. It is one of the great modernist ideals symbolizing everything that is right and wrong with our country. Through the insertion of highways into our urban fabric, we solidified our dependence on the automobile and undermined the physical and cultural landscape of post-war America. The highway system has been a part of everyday American life for 50 years. It is ingrained deep into our psyche, blinding us from realizing its past, present, and continuous influence on our urban environment. ¬We generally don’t notice the highways at all.
We certainly don’t think of them as aesthetic objects. In fact, we don’t think about the interstate system at all, except when a significant chunk of it plunges into the river. (Karrie Jacobs)
Urbanists are insisting these structures should be torn down, turned into wide boulevards or buried as extreme solutions to problems which are part of everyday life. The repercussions we are facing from allowing the highway system to shape our urban fabric are more than can be solved by tearing down or burying the problem. Is there a way we can tap into the millions of acres of land and change the stigmas associated with the space utilized by the highway system? I would argue that through absorption and occupation of the highway system, as a type of co-use or re-allocation, we could reinstate a continuity to the urban fabric.
Maybe if we the price of the flying car (popular mechanics) was driven down to an affordable $50,000, allowing everyone to abandon the freeways… but we’d still need trucks to use them for delivering goods.