A Change in Scenery

The majority of my summer internship has kept me in the computer lab of the Design School at Penn. I can't complain because I get to be in an air-conditioned lab, researching, and being around some the next generation of great planner. This past week took me back to a place I got to know very well during second semester, the Urban Archives at Temple University. I spent the spring researching the Crosstown Expressway for a research seminar course. While I wasn't going back to work on the Crosstown, expressways were still my focus. The main difference was I was looking-up information on an expressway which was built, the Delaware Expressway (I-95).

The goal of the trip was to search the newspaper clippings to find personal stories which could be mapped. I was amazed to see how long the controversy over the expressway lasted. Thinking about the Delaware provided me with the chance to think about highways in a different light. The Crosstown, which was never realized, united a broad community and they were successful in showing what the human impact of an expressway would be. On the other-hand, I-95, which was built, has become an integral part of current-day Philadelphia transportation network. Is there ever a morning where you don't hear about congestion or an accident during rush-hour? I didn't think so.

I am constantly torn over how I think about highways. In our modern society they are a necessary evil. Imagine thousands of cars traveling through the streets of Philadelphia had it not been for the highways. In one of my earlier posts, I stated how I believed in the human-scale and taking into account what the personal impact of projects can be. Highways are projects which can have one of the greatest effects on a community, but I just can't find a way to reconcile highways. With our ever-growing dependency on the personal auto, highways are needed. If only we could find ways to make them less intrusive. This might not be possible but one can only hope.