A peek at Crimea’s controversial election day, Philly widens freeways by mistake, and does Austin, Texas, have a drinking problem? Plus, the incredible story behind Rio’s most famous monument, and the truth about earthquakes in L.A. Come along with us on this week’s Urban Reads.
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Carmageddon—it was the nightmare scenario L.A.’s transportation authorities warned of when a construction project shut down a critical stretch of freeway for an entire weekend in July 2011. Gridlock. The glow of brake lights. The overwhelming angst of a city denied its full and unimpeded access to its freeways. In the end, the public outreach built around that ominous term worked. Motorists stayed home, and life went on as normal. A few wags even staged a "dinner party" on the deserted freeway.
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Martin Luther King’s 1956 tips for riding integrated buses, examining how design has helped an Alabama county, building instant cities in Accra and instant skyscrapers in Mumbai, and how two New York architects are tearing down the work of their former friends. It’s all this week in our favorite Urban Reads.
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It seemed like a good idea at the time, right? We’d build vast, multi-lane roads slicing through the center of our cities, bulldozing our most historic architecture and displacing tens of thousands of residents at a time, all in the name of progress. 50 years later these genius improvements have severed our neighborhoods, ruined our air, and may not even have helped that much in the way of traffic. So why have a freeway exposed like a gaping, oozing urban wound when you can put a park on it?
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