Rethinking the Interstates

On June 29, 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act, authorizing $25 billion over a dozen years for the construction of 41,000 miles of high-speed roads across the United States. By 1992, when the last section was completed, the landmark law had produced nearly 50,000 miles of highways at a cost of almost $500 billion (in today’s dollars). By any accounting, this vast network — the largest public works project in the nation’s history — has transformed the country.

How might the Interstate highways — conceived in the postwar era of cheap oil, suburban expansion, urban renewal, and Jim Crow — be newly understood and creatively adapted in a century defined by climate crisis, renewable energy, suburban sprawl, and the Movement for Black Lives? How might this extraordinary but everyday monument to federal technocratic expertise be given greater political importance and cultural presence through civic deliberation grounded in local knowledge and democratic ideals? How might the system be meaningfully reconceived, and not simply “updated” for auto-centric consumerism in the 21st century?

This series is supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.