City Limits by Megan Kimble

CITY LIMITS by Megan Kimble is an excellent exploration of “Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America's Highways.” Kimble, an investigative journalist and former executive editor at The Texas Observer, employs numerous relevant examples (e.g., I-35 in Austin, I-45 near Houston), and writes knowledgeably about this topic and its complexity.  One of her key points concerns the progress that was promised with highway development sixty or more years ago. Instead, she points to how neighborhoods were separated or demolished and how highways themselves paradoxically led to longer commutes and more and more traffic. One case study that Kimble profiles is replacing the Inner Loop in Rochester, New York; she writes about community organizations, more parks and promises of revitalization. The epilogue, too, is a hopeful one, full of comments about the foresight of those who led the development of the mixed-income, mixed-use area that until 1999 was Austin’s Robert Mueller Municipal Airport. Kimble herself lives there now on “a street full of elementary school teachers and hospital nurses and social workers.” She is unwavering in her quest to encourage readers and planners to envision a different future that is less car-centric with fewer highways. Extensive notes comprise over twenty percent of this text. CITY LIMITS received a starred review from Publishers Weekly.