Today’s urbanist ‘common sense’ considers nothing to have been so uniquely damaging as the urban motorway. Ploughed through dense cities in the years after the Second World War, these roads, usually built with abundant state funding, were designed to carry commuters from the old cities into the new suburbs, in their own personal, single-family internal-combustion metal boxes. In the process, historic cityscapes were destroyed, thousands were displaced, cities were hollowed out, and pollution increased. In order to return cities to their prelapsarian state sometime before 1945, such road systems must be removed and replaced with spaces whose dense, mixed-use urban ‘grain’ hews closer to the standards of the nineteenth century. Taste varies among the urban think-tanks, architectural firms, planning publications and conferences about the aesthetic of the replacement, but the impulse is universal. Whether YIMBYs or NIMBYs, ‘trads’ or ‘mods’, Europe or the USA, a model of dense pedestrian street-blocks comprising mid-rise apartment buildings or townhouses is the norm. In the hands of the late high-tech architect Richard Rogers, or, especially, the Danish town planner Jan Gehl, these Haussmann-via-Georgian models have been elevated into a transhistorical principle.
The critique of the expressway is, broadly, true and historically indisputable – though delve a little deeper and you’ll find outliers. Tokyo, for instance, a city frequently praised by contemporary urbanists for its dense, car-suppressing streetscape, has one of the most extensive networks of urban motorways in the world. Built in the early 60s for the Tokyo Olympics, the Shuto Expressway is a cinematic sequence of flyovers, tunnels and multi-level ‘stack’ junctions, used to sublime effect by Tarkovsky in Solaris, Kiyoshi Kurosawa in Pulse and Wim Wenders in his recent paean to expressways and public toilets, Perfect Days. The cars absent from the pleasant pedestrianised streets where people live can often be found on concrete viaducts above. Under the Shuto Expressway’s viaducts are many of the small shops and community spaces that mainstream urbanists conventionally celebrate. Richard J. Williams’s new history of the urban motorway, The Expressway World, is full of such apparent anomalies. A critique of the neo-19th-century paradigm, it is both perverse and sincere, coming close to arguing that the removal of urban expressways has been one of the chief drivers of gentrification.
I first came across Williams’s writing through an unpropitious source – a manifesto published in 2008 called ManTownHuman, or ‘Towards a New Humanism in Architecture’. In a blast against preservationism, environmentalism and anti-developmentalism, it tried to revive the spirits of Sant’Elia and Robert Moses, imagining a new wave of massive construction to accommodate the influx of rural dwellers into cities across the world; the genre, popular among Western architects infuriated by lumbering Anglo-American bureaucracies and contracting systems, could be called ‘China Envy’ or ‘Longing for Dubai’. Most of the manifesto’s signatories were from the Living Marxism/Spiked Network, the peculiar British patchwork of think-tanks and publications that emerged out of Frank Furedi’s Revolutionary Communist Party, a contrarian Trotskyist sect that lurched rightwards in the 1990s, when it could be found pugnaciously defending, if not advocating the intensification of, the neoliberal status quo. Accelerationists without the philosophical clout, they reached their peak of influence under Boris Johnson, who ennobled one (Claire Fox) and made another his director of policy (Munira Mirza).
Williams turned out to be a much more sophisticated thinker than this company – naturally in favour of more cars as symbols of ‘freedom’ – might have implied, and his books in the last decade or so have been a quiet, calmly written counterblast against a lot of contemporary urban ideology. Rather than holding up an ideal-type – generally Copenhagen, Paris or Manhattan, depending on taste – and lamenting other cities’ failure to live up to it, Williams is interested in cities as they actually exist in all their diverse specificity. The airport bookshop-style title of Why Cities Look The Way They Do (2019) belied its nuanced, variegated account, which gave as much space to Leicester as to Beijing and Williams’s native Manchester; Sex and Buildings (2013) was an intriguing study of the influence of the ‘sexual revolution’ on modern architecture, from Playboy to ‘love hotels’ to feminist urban experiments; and Reyner Banham Revisited (2021) was both a celebration of the mid-century neophiliac and a critique of some of his blind spots regarding race and gender. The key question in Williams’s work is posed at the start of Sex and Buildings, in a lament about Edinburgh, where he teaches: ‘do we really want to recreate the city of the nineteenth century?’
The Expressway World begins with an almost utopian journey on the M8, the urban motorway that bisects Glasgow, in which Williams’s car races through the multi-level concrete sculptures of the tunnels and flyovers, eventually emerging into a panoramic view of the West Highland landscape: a completely modern sequence, impossible to see by any other means. Unlike a straightforward advocate of the private car and its attendant landscape, Williams concedes how ‘rare for the driver, and costly for everyone else’ such an experience is, and how atypical this ‘miracle’ of Futurist topography. Most of the time, the M8 is a traffic-choked scar across a city far too small for such a drastic intervention, and enduringly damaged by it. But ‘the task of this book is to hold on to the reality of that experience’ – the moments when the world of the car is sublime and exciting – as well as the many ways in which it is destructive of landscape, climate and human life. The book comprises comparative studies of seven expressways (a better title, perhaps, than the Marshall Berman-derived one here, might have been an Ed Ruscha-style Seven Urban Motorways): New York, Los Angeles, London, São Paulo, Madrid, Seoul and Glasgow.
The book begins with fresh readings of two familiar stories: NYC as Berman’s city of motorway disaster, with Robert Moses’s Cross-Bronx Expressway destroying the communities of the northernmost borough, and LA’s freeway utopianism (and its racism, with black neighbourhoods on the southside deliberately cut off from the expressway network). But Williams then moves into new territory, offering sketches of London and São Paulo as radical alternative visions where expressways have had to adapt to urban activism; and of Madrid (which buried part of its expressway) and Seoul (which replaced its expressway with a heavily engineered stream) as neo-developmentalist gentrification projects; and of Glasgow, with its ‘ordinary’ expressway, as the urban mean. The portraits of the five of these motorways I know first-hand rang true, even to me as a non-driver, from the unexpected urban continuity under London’s Westway to the theme park advertainment landscape of Seoul’s Cheonggyecheon stream. In Williams’s accounts, relatively little attention is devoted to the main function of urban motorways – getting people out of cities – and much more to their effects within cities themselves.
Some of these accounts tap into revisionist currents underway elsewhere, in the revaluation of post-war architecture, such as Paul Rudolph’s speculative 1972 sketch of a Lower Manhattan Expressway, depicting a continuous, multi-level, multi-functional megastructure, soon foiled by a campaign led by Jane Jacobs, the mythic foundation of her later renown. Instead of Jacobs, Williams’s mid-century urban heroines are the two women who designed LA’s most famous expressway stacks, the engineers Marylin Jorgenson Reece and Carol Schumaker. His evocations of these, such as Reece’s famously curvaceous and vertiginous 405/10 intersection, display some of Banham’s gift for rendering futurist space in prose: the stack ‘has an unusual lightness, the concrete arcs and piers are so slim, the ground plane so visible throughout, it’s more pine forest than crypt’. It is Williams’s detailed descriptions that elevate his books above the urban studies genre, which is so often technocratic, jargon-laden and absolutist; at their best, they put him in the category of a Ruth Glass or a Mike Davis. Unlike urban abstractionists searching for models or ‘best practices’, Williams is interested in sequences, juxtapositions, and contradictions, and ways of carving out different modes of living.
Civic resistance, so common in the sixties and seventies, has seldom managed to stop an expressway, as Jacobs and her comrades did in Lower Manhattan. What it can do, though, according to Williams, is make ‘the expressway world’ – narrowly defined by Berman as a driver’s-eye-view indifferent to human life above or below – more humane for the people who have to live with it. Williams’s case studies here are the frequently occupied expressways of São Paulo, and the Westway, which slices through much of inner West London. The latter is the subject of the most positive of all Williams’s expressway portraits. He admires the Westway not only for its sublimity, as rendered in the novels of J. G. Ballard and films like Christopher Petit’s Radio On, but also for the way in which the campaigners who opposed it – from space rock enthusiasts who held free concerts underneath, to black activists concerned with its effects on what was then a largely Caribbean area – managed to fashion something of what they wanted in the flyover undercrofts that run underneath the expressway for several miles. The various community (and more recently, for-profit) projects of the Westway Development Trust are the most successful and lasting examples; but there are still signs of more uncontrolled initiatives too, as in the explosion of protest art about the ongoing failure of justice over the Grenfell Tower fire, which happened just off the Westway in June 2017.
Gentrification is the central concern of The Expressway World, and Williams emphasizes the counterintuitive ways in which expressways can be resistant to it. At the heart of the book is a story of how a developmental industrial state, in which authoritarian leaders funnelled resources into making cars (SEAT under Franco, Hyundai under Park Chung-Hee) and building expressways to accommodate those cars, has since the 1990s morphed into a state where ‘development’ means only one thing: property development. Madrid’s M30 motorway appears here, in its incarnations in early Almodovar films, as an unexpectedly free space for the alternative communities that sprung up after Spanish fascism; and in its recreation at enormous expense into Madrid Rio, an urban park built by a right-wing mayor.
Madrid’s motorway surgery is seldom held up as a global model, but Seoul’s removal of its major dictatorship-era expressway to recreate the Cheonggyecheon stream that once ran along its course is almost as influential as New York’s High Line as an example of ‘best practice’, a paragon of urban repair. Although he credits the ambition, Williams notes that the ‘stream’ is an elaborate fake. The idea arose from civic activists who emerged out of the anti-dictatorship movement. In Williams’s telling, these activists had a William Morris-style vision of a communal, pre-industrial Korea, and no idea of how much engineering would be necessary to recreate the stream in reality. Its current, engineers soon discovered, was incredibly weak, and would, if left alone, have rendered the stream little more than a mosquito-infested ditch (which was, indeed, what it was before it was filled in and surmounted with a flyover during the 1960s). To maintain a picturesque flow, the water is mechanically pumped by a station that works 24 hours a day. Rather than being a project against the developmental state, Williams argues that Cheonggyecheon simply marked that state’s reinvention as an interventionist sponsor of property development and tourism. The mayor who drove the scheme through, at great speed, was Lee Myung-Bak, a former chairman of Hyundai and a leading figure of the Park dictatorship, nicknamed ‘the bulldozer’.
Along with Williams’s suspicion of gentrification comes a great love of light industrial units making and storing unsexy things: not the craft beer brewery or ‘pop up’ store but the local wholesaler, MOT depot or toolmaking workshop, skate parks (if unplanned), graffiti, unusual urban wildlife – the things that can be found neither in Robert Moses-inspired visions of seamless parkways nor in the dense asphalt streets and squares of the gentrification projects. Williams invokes Donna Haraway’s phrase ‘staying with the trouble’ to define his own alternative: rather than sweeping away existing cityscapes, urbanists and activists could instead be conceiving and campaigning for new and unusual spaces to be created in the interstices where capital and property aren’t really looking. Surveying proposals to tear down Glasgow’s urban motorways, he writes that ‘economically speaking, it could be a more productive landscape, no doubt, populated by software engineers and fund managers, in shinier buildings. But cities need cardboard boxes and food too, and these things have to go somewhere’.
It is here, in Glasgow, however, where my genial agreement with most of The Expressway World fades into scepticism. Glasgow has the lowest level of car ownership of any city in the UK outside of London, and one of the most extensive public transport systems. In spite of this, almost all resources and funding are oriented towards the car: the privatised bus system is a joke, the Subway hasn’t been extended since the 1890s, and what should be an S-Bahn-style rapid train network is not nearly as regular and reliable as it could be given the demand. Rather than expanding and improving public transport, to reflect the actual preferences of Glaswegians, the city and the Scottish government have continued building expressways to get Central Belt commuters in and out of the city, such as the M74 extension, opened in the 2010s, which Williams praises for its detailing. For all that, one might wonder if Glasgow’s recent prominence in art and culture, from its many Turner Prize-winning artists to its attractiveness for fashionable thirtysomethings, owes something to the stupidity and backwardness of its current civic planners; they are hardly deliberately standing against gentrification by constructing new motorways, but they have nonetheless failed to create a particularly successful neoliberal city. In a more effectively run twenty-first-century metropolis – Manchester, let’s say – all the unusual community spaces Williams finds within the neglected folds of Glasgow’s urban motorways would now be buried under high-rise luxury apartments.
Williams’s urban philosophy is far more appealing than the one peddled by today’s new urbanists: less small-minded, more attentive to the realities and specificities of space, less enmeshed in the interests of property, more accommodating of people who don’t fit into the predominantly white, predominantly young groups of coffee-drinkers splashed across the hoardings outside the new development projects. With its focus on activism, enclaves and ad hoc repair, Williams’s ‘trouble’ resembles the dying cityscapes of the 1980s and 1990s, as described in, for instance, Laura Grace Ford’s counter-gentrification Situationist zine Savage Messiah. It is reminiscent of what British cities were like when Williams must have come of age, when big capital had mostly departed for the suburbs and the business parks, and cities like Manchester contained vast enclaves of squatted council flats and warehouses, the backbone of its pioneering nightclubs and record labels. Williams’s bêtes noires are not only the Jan Gehls, Ricky Burdetts and Richard Rogerses who would erase his Expressway World for dull clones of the Marais or Islington, whether in modern or traditional dress, but also the Morris of News from Nowhere, whose eradication of industrial society is the exact opposite of ‘staying with the trouble’. Morris’s vision of political change, which lays the ground for his ‘nowhere’, was not incremental or ad hoc, but a violent working-class uprising which destroys capitalism and creates a dictatorship of the proletariat. It is asking too much, perhaps, of a writer of Williams’s generation, to believe that such an event could create the city of the future.
Read on: Fredric Jameson, ‘Future City’, NLR 21.