Expressway Ends : desarrollo y construcción de las autopistas urbanas en Estados Unidos : 1900-1967
Assembling original documents, historical material, completed or unrealized projects and the evolution of governmental and professional structures, this dissertation explores the development and construction of urban expressways in American cities, from their conception at the dawn of the 20th-centu...
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| Format: | doctoral thesis |
| Status: | Published version |
| Publication Date: | 2016 |
| Country: | España |
| Institution: | CBUC, CESCA |
| Repository: | TDR. Tesis Doctorales en Red |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:www.tdx.cat:10803/359394 |
| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/10803/359394 https://dx.doi.org/10.5821/dissertation-2117-96087 |
| Access Level: | Open access |
| Keyword: | 625 71 94 |
| Summary: | Assembling original documents, historical material, completed or unrealized projects and the evolution of governmental and professional structures, this dissertation explores the development and construction of urban expressways in American cities, from their conception at the dawn of the 20th-century, to the end of the 1960’s. Beyond the force of its physical imprint, and its impact on the operative restructuring of the city, the arrival of the urban expressway led to profound doubts about the value and the meaning of the urban, about the legitimacy or professional relevance of urbanism—the discipline that ostensibly had the expertise to deal with the city—and an institutional and political structure supported by what were in theory democratic ideals, but which were, in many cases, closely tied to private interests. Much has been written about the reasons behind the construction of the system of expressways and the need for great technical ability in order to complete this system. More still has been written about the consequences of this system, frequently linked to a string of negative adjectives when discussing their impact on the urban fabric. And not a few have written about the intricate political web behind this infrastructure. Nevertheless, relatively little has been written about urban expressways and the invisible network of questions, episodes, causes and consequences that shaped the decisions that would later be translated into a radical change of the American city.Theory versus method, disciplinary impotence versus professional competence, institutional orphanhood versus executive institutionalization would be, both successively and simultaneously, battlegrounds for a debate unleashed through a series of specific outgrowths of what is, or what may perhaps once have been, a mere piece of infrastructure.This dissertation will explore these questions, understanding the urban expressway in the American city to be only the tip of the iceberg of a profound change in the history of what we still refer to, generically, as the urban |
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