CRP 384
Highways and Communities

Instructor: Susan Handy
Unique Number: 01215
Time: MW 10:00 - 11:30 am
Place: Sutton 2.110

Highways play a complicated role in our communities. They provide us with easy access to where we want to go, linking us with jobs, shops, friends, and family, but they also divide communities, creating physical, economic, and social barriers. They serve as a physical framework for the development of our communities, shaping the location and the style of new development but also sometimes causing the decline and destruction of existing development. Whether or not to build new highways, where to locate them, how to design them, which of their impacts to mitigate and how - all of these decisions impact the quality of life in our communities in myriad ways.

The goal of this course is to explore the ways in which highways shape and impact our communities and the philosophies that have guided the planning and design of highways. We will discuss a variety of issues, including the design of freeway structures, the barrier effect and the dividing of communities, the balancing of capacity needs with community needs, the contribution of highways to sprawl, possibilities for reconnecting communities, and the evolving roles of the engineering, architecture, and planning professions. Case studies will include MoPac and IH35 in Austin, the Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco, the Cypress Structure in Oakland, the Big Dig in Boston, the Century Freeway in Los Angeles, IH40 in Nashville, and others. The content of the course will depend in part on the specific interests of the students enrolled but will draw from a variety of fields, including transportation planning, urban design, environmental planning, growth management, and community development.

This is a seminar course with substantial student participation. Each student will select either a case study or an issue and complete a research report on this topic. Students will submit two preliminary drafts over the course of the semester before submitting the final report at the end of the semester. Several class sessions will be reserved for discussing the students' research. Throughout the semester, students are expected to complete assigned readings and participate in class discussions.