Preface

Imagine an expressway. You are standing on a concrete pedestrian bridge and you're looking down on it, onto six lanes of slow-moving traffic, some of it stationary. In the distance off to your right is a modern city centre, dense and compact with office towers; you can pick out a few of the names of the occupants from this distance - the accountants KPMG, a Hilton hotel, the big names of capital. You're some distance away from that world, both physically and psychologically, and you're also well distanced from what you know to exist to your left, a mile or so away, an area of solid Victorian housing with leafy streets and cafes. You're somewhere else here, the only pedestrian in the vicinity, and the only other humans you can see in the immediate locality are drivers and the occasional passenger, glimpsed behind glass. The traffic is a constant roar; you can smell it too, especially when a truck downshifts to drag itself out of a crawl. Nothing much grows here, apart from weeds poking through cracks in the paving. It's a scene you can find all over the world - for many, an everyday form of devastation.

It might seem perverse to make a case for places like these, but more often than not that is exactly what I do in this book. The expressway I describe above happens to be in Glasgow, Scotland's largest city and one that embraced the automobile with unrestrained enthusiasm in the 1960s and 1970s (it came close to erasing all of its Victorian centre at one point in favour of a car-oriented plan). Glasgow is a good case, but it could equally be Lagos or London, São Paulo or San Francisco. The expressway world is ubiquitous and global, and almost any city of any size that you can think of has an urban quarter like this. The expressway world, as I call it here, borrowing a label from an American critic Marshall Berman, is that place where the devastation is most acute.1 It's where a highway slices through the city, dividing it from itself ('severance' is the term highway engineers use to describe this effect). The expressway can take various forms in this zone - it can be built at grade level, or buried, or even sometimes tunnelled at great expense. Most commonly, however, it is a bridge, an elevated structure of a kilometre or more, built in precast sections in concrete or steel, and raised up on piers. As engineering structures, they can be hugely impressive. Writing in all seriousness in 1971, the English architectural critic and historian Reyner Banham called the 405/10 junction in Los Angeles a 'work of art'.

In terms of history, the expressway world is still in many places being built. African cities, pumped with Chinese capital, are enthusiastically building such structures, Indian and Chinese cities too. But this book is mostly about structures from a moment when the private car represented the future of transportation and cities everywhere were being reconstructed in its image. This is a few years from the middle of the 1960s to the early 1970s, a period before the oil crisis of 1973 when that car-oriented vision fell out of fashion. We mostly don't care for that expressway world now, that world of the 1960s. On its construction, we might have been able to see its structures as works of art, and before they got clogged up with other people's cars to experience them as seamless flow. But the expressway world mostly has negative associations now - pollution, waste, noise, visual and physical separation. The M8 is for many an urban disaster that must be simply abolished.

I am not so sure. The expressway world can be richer and more complex than it might first appear. In the following chapters, there are examples of expressways that have become - through activism, or imaginative political action, or benign neglect - urban places in their own right. You can find numerous adaptations of the expressway world too, ameliorations of its worst effects, and imaginative appropriations, as well as cases where nothing has happened at all. But above all you will find that the expressway world is something lived, involving the interaction of individuals and institutions in ways its designers may never have intended. In that it is very like the nineteenth-century railway environment with its arches and viaducts, now much prized by developers. There is no reason the expressway world can't also become that if we want it. Roads are a resilient technology. Almost anything with wheels can move along them: bikes and buses as well as cars and trucks. You can sit and walk, or run on them, if permitted, which admittedly is not often. In a few places you can occasionally sunbathe. There has even been more than one idea to turn one into a swimming pool, miles long.

Arguments for abolishing the expressway world abound. However, abolition, I think, is mostly fantasy. It can be done, at vast expense, but it may end up being as totalising a solution as what it replaces. There can be losses as well as gains. As Megan Kimble, an American journalist, writes in a recent book, we need to be cautious, even when we think abolishing the expressway is the right thing to do. 'We should tear down urban highways', she writes. 'But how we tear them down also matters.'2 Or, implicitly we end up with more of the same, more highway power being inflicted on those without that power, more division and inequality, just of a different form.

This book therefore tells stories of accommodation with the expressway world, of ways of living with it, and of directing it slyly to new uses. Some of the most arresting cases here, such as São Paulo's Minhocão, manage to keep apparently mutually hostile interests in play, sometimes over decades. That is evidence of the possibility of a different kind of expressway politics, neither advocacy nor abolition, but something else.

There's also some mourning here in this book too, for some readers no doubt misplaced, but nevertheless there because the expressway world one way or another is in decline. The cities that embraced it most enthusiastically in the 1960s have turned equally enthusiastically against it. I think what Megan Kimble describes in City Limits is the coming orthodoxy, however long it takes to come about. Paris, under the mayoralty of Anne Hidalgo has turned its riverside highways into beaches. England's second largest city, Birmingham, is making a pedestrian-friendly boulevard out of its orbital ring. Every weekend Brasília, the most autophile of all the twentieth century's new towns, turns its central expressway into a park. It is often said that 'peak car' has been reached in the rich world - the young, some say, can no longer afford cars, nor aspire to have them, nor even see the point in learning to drive.

It is nevertheless still occasionally possible to experience the expressway world as it was intended to be. Around car-mad Glasgow one can, if the timing is right, sense the miracle that its expressway designers imagined. On a summer's evening, starting from the heart of the Victorian commercial city, you head westwards towards Charing Cross where in a minute or two you can pick up the M8, which sweeps you up almost immediately and south over the broad expanse of the river Clyde. It's an exhilarating move on the rare occasions that the traffic is on your side. In twenty minutes the expressway drops down to the estuary and the view suddenly expands, dotted with islands and ferries, with the mountains of the West Highlands forming a vertiginous backdrop. This is a different world all of a sudden, both connected and metropolitan through the expressway, and also wild. The expressway world, for all its difficulties on foot, is also this.

I am a driver at least some of the time, and just occasionally I also experience this miracle - sometimes the journey westwards as described, sometimes in the other direction, where the Kingston Bridge swoops across the river before plunging deep into the engine room of the Victorian city. With luck, it is a quintessentially modern, Futurist experience. But it's also rare for the driver, and costly for everyone else. It nevertheless is the expressway world, and the task of the book is to hold on to the reality of that experience, along with all the other contradictory and difficult experiences that contribute to it. You can be both a driver and a pedestrian, and activist and a consumer, an enthusiast and a critic. The expressway world isn't a single world, but multiple and overlapping ones, and the stories the book revolves around are stories of complexity, both/and not either/or.

One last, but important thought: the original designers of the expressway world were, in their own ways, totalitarians, some more openly than others. Their solutions were total, all-encompassing, intolerant of dissent. The critical response to the expressway could also be as totalitarian, not to mention costly. We're not now going to demolish concrete structures everywhere given the amount of carbon embodied in them, as well as the now well-known costs of demolition. So, most likely we are going to have to learn to live with them, just as we did with nineteenth-century railway viaducts - and that experience from the 1960s onwards shows the variety and imagination of the possible responses.

I wrote this book in a city, Edinburgh, which most unusually has remained almost entirely untouched by the expressway. Edinburgh for better or worse chose not to remake itself in the image of the car in the years...