| "Roads to Postwar Urbanism: Expressway Building and the Transformation of Metropolitan Chicago, 1930--1975," examines the politics, planning, construction, and impact of expressways in the nation's transportation hub. It argues that expressway building dramatically transformed metropolitan space, politics, and culture. Both the process and the roads themselves marginalized the city economically and politically, and the region's businesses and residents increasingly viewed expressway building as invasive, destructive, and corrupt. While it injected massive amounts of money into political machines, the complex building process and use of eminent domain undermined property rights and residents' trust in government. Building expressways, which had formed the foundation of a regional consensus marked by city-centric civic pride, atomized the region's people and helped create an oppositional, individualized, anti-urban and anti-government metropolitan culture, and transformed metropolitan political economy, and social and political geography. Although often glossed over in the literature about twentieth-century cities, expressway building did not merely coincide with demographic, social, economic, and political shifts in Metropolitan Chicago and cities around the United States, it generated them.;By the 1930s, skyrocketing car and truck traffic choked city streets, stifled business, endangered neighborhoods, and threatened the very lifeblood of Chicago---a city born of and dependent upon its transportation infrastructure. Expressways seemed to be the answer. They promised to modernize a city unfit to accommodate increased traffic, rationalize land use across the region, and create an integrated regional economy that would maintain Chicago's preeminence in the nation's transportation and distribution network. Achieving these goals, however, had profound social, cultural, and political consequences. Maintaining support for and making progress on destructive and expensive expressway projects required spreading around the spoils and benefits, exercising unprecedented public authority, and building when and where circumstances allowed. Rapid construction in the suburbs outpaced slow urban expressway building, which was bogged down by clearance of densely settled land, and intergovernmental competition over money and authority. By the 1970s, the city proved unable to convince or compel county, state, and federal governments, as well as many of its residents to build the final urban expressway, the Crosstown. Four decades of expressway building---which resulted in economic integration and metropolitan decentralization, physical and social segregation, atomization, and political fragmentation---had not only crippled support for the roads, but also reorganized the entire region's physical, social, and political landscape. The region's future was metropolitan; the city and urban problems were its past. In the Chicago region, as in metropolitan areas around the country, expressway building reconfigured political allegiances, as well as spatial and social relationships, causing fractures in a liberal coalition that had cohered since the New Deal. |
