Richard J. Williams

In the demonology of the contemporary city, is there anything more toxic than the expressway? Dividing neighbourhoods, depressing land values, concentrating atmospheric pollutants, the mammoth infrastructure of the expressway is now increasingly crumbling into the ground. How did we build the expressway world in the first place? And what are we going to do with it now? This eye-opening book...

We tend to think cities look the way they do because of the conscious work of architects, planners, and builders. But what if the look of cities had less to do with design and more to do with social, cultural, financial, and political processes, and the way ordinary citizens interact with them? What if the city is a process as...