The Effect of the Freeway on the Urban Environment
Freeways define the city of today; they are the largest, most intrusive, and most recognizable man-made structures within the modern urban environment. They are landmarks which carve and define entire cities; they are meridians of reference by which everything is located; they are regulators of how a modern city is experienced.
When a person experiences an American city for the first time, chances are his or her initial impression of it is by way of the freeway. A person passing through a city by car probably stays on the freeway, and thus experiences the city exclusively from the vantage point of that freeway. Those visiting a friend or relative in this city most likely enter or exit the city by way of freeway. Those who fly into this city probably see it for the first time from the freeway from the airport as well, whether it be by taxi or rental car. Thus, the freeway becomes a very powerful regulator of what is seen and unseen by new visitors to a given city. An initial impression of the city is formed by the freeway.
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| The freeway is a powerful regulator of how a city is experienced. above: downtown Atlanta, Georgia. (photo by author) | The freeway creates an impression of the city on the motorist. above: downtown Houston, Texas (photo by author) |
If the urban freeway’s effect on the way a city is experienced is great, then its effect on the physical city itself is exponentially greater. The freeway is as important to defining and delineating a city as is a feature such as a railroad or a river. The sinuous ribbons of concrete form a framework by which the city is referenced and compartmentalized; anybody who has viewed a large American city from a passing airplane has probably noticed this. Oftentimes these definitions have certain psychological or social implications as well as physical ones. For example, the phrase “inside the beltway,” which is a reference to Interstate 495 which encircles the Washington, D.C. area, is commonly used as a metaphor for those having intimate connections with the workings of the Federal Government. In several cities, and oftentimes due at least in part to conscious decisions made by city leaders and engineers several decades ago, the phrase “the other side of the freeway” has the same social and even ethnic implications that the phrase “the other side of the railroad tracks” used to have.
Yet despite this incredible physical and psychological presence, freeways are usually built with nothing more than their utilitarian purpose in mind; they are architect Louis Sullivan’s edict of “form follows function” taken to its extreme. Their design revolves around structural integrity, vehicular safety and navigability. The conventional way of thinking has held that the freeway’s purpose is to move cars, not to be a work of beauty, and for that reason they are rarely designed with aesthetic ideals in consideration and are rarely constructed with the communities they serve in mind. Their construction destroys, displaces and divides inner-city neighborhoods. Their presence invites traffic-generated noise, litter and pollution as well as unwelcome auxiliaries such as billboards, truck stops and junkyards. The massive scale of the freeway is incompatible with the human scale of the city; “[b]uildings are made to fit man; freeways are made to fit vehicles many times the size of man” (Robinson 1971: 119). In the American city of today, freeways are usually little more than vast concrete scars on the cityscape that are unpleasant to experience and which create awkward disconnections and fragmentations of space within the city. As architect Lawrence Halprin writes in his 1966 book Freeways:
Freeways have done terrible things to cities in the past decade, and in many instances have almost irrevocably destroyed large sections of the cities they were meant to serve. On the social level, they…have often devastated, more completely than any bombing, vast acreages of houses which provided needed low cost housing (Halprin 1966: 24).
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| The freeway can be as beautiful and as sculptural as any work of art. above: US 183 in Austin, Texas. (photo by author) | Oftentimes, however, urban freeways are little more than drab concrete scars on the cityscape that are unpleasant to experience. above: I-17 in Phoenix (photo by author) |
Architecture
and the Freeway
The disruptive nature of the freeway is especially
apparent when it is examined in relation to the
individual architectural components of the city, which
before the freeway had little competition within the
built environment. Bruce Webb notes that “The design
of the architecture and the spatial experiences along
freeway corridors has not kept pace with the design of
the freeways themselves, where a highly refined and
precise technical-engineering approach has resulted in
highways that satisfy a limited range of criteria.”
He goes on to note that “architects have, by and
large, had little real impact on the design of freeways
and have failed as well to develop viable, special
solutions for this general class of building-context
problems” (Webb 1994). Not only does it create a
crisis in terms of the architectural profession, which is
seeing itself become marginalized by transportation
engineers as the freeway, as opposed to the building,
becomes the defining physical structure of the modern
city, but it also creates what Webb terms “a great
discontinuity” among the elements of that built
environment. Webb describes the friction between
architecture and the freeway:
The architecture which lines the freeway seems made up of capricious or desperate elements struggling to maintain a connection with the no-nonsense minimalism of the highway. The awkward spaces in between, medicated by a prosthetic architecture of signs, fail to satisfy even the most basic requirements of place-making (Webb 1994).
What is so ironic about this friction between the freeway and architecture is that highways can oftentimes be as beautiful and as evocative as a fine piece of art or architecture. They are massive, authoritative sculptures that are experienced by tens of thousands of people on a day-to-day basis; “Technology at this scale can be beautiful. Powerful” (Webb 1999). If so much thought and care goes into the design of buildings, why can similar thought not be put into freeway design, as well?
Just as important as the freeway’s effect on the city and its dwellers is the freeway’s effect on its users: the motorists themselves. A 1968 publication of the Federal Highway Administration emphasizes the “visual enjoyment” of a highway, recalling a quote from the New Yorker which reads “travel is not solely for the purpose of arriving - there should be pleasure along the way, and a window on the world” (FHWA 1968: 37). Halprin focuses on the experience of motion and the reference of the freeway:
These vast and beautiful works of engineering speak to us in the language of a new scale, a new attitude in which high-speed motion and the qualities of change are not mere abstract conceptions but a vital part of our everyday experiences. Though man is dwarfed by the size of these immense structures, he regains his relationship to them by participating in their use. Freeways involve each of us visually through the strength and urgency of their structure and also through the qualities of motion which they make possible (Halprin 1966: 17).
For Halprin, the failure to achieve a reconciliation of the freeway with its architectural or urbanistic realm is one of failing to see road-building as an artistic endeavor (Halprin 1966: 5). Quite literally, the concept of enhancing the aesthetic value of the freeway is about unifying the technics of transportation with the subjectiveness of art. This is not just about making them fit in better to their urban surroundings but is also about making them more pleasant to experience for everyone.
Indeed, aesthetic sensitivity in highway design is important for the same reasons aesthetic sensitivity in architecture and urban design is important: it provides beauty and comfort, creates a sense of place, evokes an emotion and leaves an impression on those who experience it. This is the underlying assumption of this report.