Publishers Weekly
★ 01/08/2024
Journalist Kimble (Unprocessed) sets forth an immersive account of three ongoing “freeway revolts” in Texas cities that aim to block further urban highway expansion. Marshalling decades of evidence, she explains how highways built within cities have destroyed neighborhoods, increased air pollution, exacerbated racial segregation, generated sprawl, siphoned funds from mass transit, and increased traffic congestion despite promising to do the opposite. Focusing on the stories of people whose homes and businesses have been or are in danger of being seized and destroyed via eminent domain for further city highway expansion (including Modesti Cooper, a homeowner who refused to sell as her neighborhood emptied and began to receive whiny postcards from government contractors cajoling her to leave), Kimble tracks the legal and political battles of activist residents in Austin, Dallas, and Houston who have organized in opposition to the powerful Texas Transportation Commission. These groups hope either to compel state and city governments to halt expansion or, better yet, to reimagine their city highways as surface-level boulevards stitching together currently divided neighborhoods. Kimble intersperses these activists’ struggles with snapshots of the “first wave” of freeway revolts that occurred in 1960s New York City; Portland, Ore.; Rochester, N.Y.; and San Francisco. By seamlessly combining an expansive history of urban anti-highway organizing with an intriguing up-close look at present-day Texas politics, Kimble delivers an invigorating window onto American grassroots activism. (Apr.)
From the Publisher
Texas highways have destroyed and dominated our built environment. Megan Kimble’s book City Limits offers a new vision. . . . City Limits reveals the human consequences of our built environment.”—The Texas Observer
“Kimble has penned a big-picture book about a ponderous topic with fascinating implications: what highways mean for American life.”—Bloomberg
“Kimble channels Caro by locating the human drama behind freeways and failures of urban planning.”—The Millions
“Expertly documented . . . Kimble’s book doesn’t offer any false promises of easy victories, but it compels us to search for a better way.”—San Antonio Express-News
“Gripping. . . . a propulsive, deeply human, and ultimately hopeful story of the people who are leading that fight, even as they stand to lose their homes, businesses, and the very fabric of their neighborhoods.”—Streetsblog USA
“Immersive . . . Kimble delivers an invigorating window onto American grassroots activism.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“If your commute is a nightmare, or if you have had enough of the asphalt jungle that many America cities have become, read this book. City Limits is not just a compelling read—it’s a road map to a better world.”—Jeff Goodell, New York Times bestselling author of The Heat Will Kill You First
“As dams are to living salmon streams, highways are to living cities. Nothing could be more heartening than the growing movement—powerfully chronicled in City Limits—to move past this sad stage in our country’s development, and on to something new and old that works for people, not cars.”—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature
“Megan Kimble turns the history of highway construction into something much larger: a treatise on power and possibility. City Limits proves that the world can change faster than we think.”—P. E. Moskowitz, author of How to Kill a City
“City Limits is a triumph. Megan Kimble echoes Robert Caro exposing how powerful groups like TxDOT are able to take away people’s homes, destroy their neighborhoods, and run roughshod over communities with virtually no accountability.”—Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class
“Megan Kimble’s paradigm-shifting City Limits details how American cities came to completely revolve around cars—to the detriment of the people who live in those cities and suburbs, as well as to the communities that highways have displaced.”—Roxanna Asgarian, author of We Were Once a Family
“City Limits, a definitive, neighborly guide to how our cities got so sliced up by highways, the damage they’ve done to communities and the climate, and the many great ideas for how we could replace them, if only we can organize ourselves.”—Maurice Chammah, author of Let the Lord Sort Them
“Kimble capably proposes a sustained rethinking of urban infrastructure. . . . A convincing case for removing highways and shaping cities meant for people, not cars.”—Kirkus Reviews
Kirkus Reviews
2024-01-18
An extended argument against car culture and the continuing proliferation of highways.
Austin-based journalist Kimble has been witnessing firsthand the consequences of living in the country’s fastest-growing metropolitan area, with its lack of affordable housing, sprawling urban footprint, and increasing traffic gridlock. Traveling through the eight miles of downtown via the north-south interstate used to take eight minutes, but by 2019, that had stretched to 32 minutes; in 2045, it is expected to take 223 minutes. The more sensible alternative would be improved public transit, but “transit functions best when it connects people across densely occupied places,” which doesn’t describe so much of urban Texas, with metro Dallas–Fort Worth “covering more area than the states of Connecticut, Delaware, and Rhode Island combined.” Kimble’s case studies center mostly on Texas cities, with forays into the experiences of highway architects and anti-highway activists elsewhere. While the book is full of solid information and sometimes appalling data, to say nothing of sound arguments for such things as reenvisioning the federal government’s role in funding, it’s overlong and could have benefited from a little less purely anecdotal, human-interest journalism. Still, Kimble capably proposes a sustained rethinking of urban infrastructure, untangling highways from cities that serve as chokepoints and recognizing more widely the long-established fact that traffic expands to fill such motorway space as is made available to it, so that no road, however new and shiny, ever does a thing to ease the jam. We’ve been going at it in exactly the opposite direction, notes the author. “Between 1993 and 2017,” she writes, “the hundred largest urbanized areas in the United States spent more than $500 billion adding new freeways or expanding existing ones”—and the resulting congestion far outstripped the rate of population growth.
A convincing case for removing highways and shaping cities meant for people, not cars.
