| "'People Before Highways': Reconsidering Routes to and from the Boston Anti-Highway Movement " investigates a 1960s era urban social movement to halt interstate highway expansion in the Greater Boston region. This project utilizes archival research, ethnographic fieldwork and oral history to consider the meaning and environmental impact of U.S. highway growth from the perspective of local citizens and activists pressing for new types of regional and national transportation policy. This research illuminates the ways in which competing conceptions of democratic governance and participation collide to author a new urban geography for Massachusetts. Through empirical research, focus groups and photo and map gathering, I document the racial, economic and political conflicts that gave rise to Boston's anti-highway movement and the 52-acre central city park that it birthed in 1987. As a physical embodiment of successful grassroots organizing, the city's Southwest Corridor Park reveals a complex urban material and social history. As an innovative articulation of mass transit near the end of the twentieth century, the park also demonstrates how pedestrian, suburban commuter, intraurban and automobile needs can be integrated and balanced to produce stunning new travel landscapes forged by a radically participatory post-civil rights politics. |
