Interstate Lovesong: How Popular and Official Narratives Have Obscured the Damaging Impact of the Interstate Highway System

By Ryan Reft Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has decried the racist history of the US Interstate Highway System, which obliterated many thriving Black and Brown communities. And earlier this year, Buttigieg announced new efforts at the US Department of Transportation to address that problematic legacy, dedicating $1 billion to “reconnect cities and neighborhoods racially segregated […]

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An Ode to Bus No. 60 and to Public Transportation in Madrid

By Inbal Ofer As a social historian I have always found public services to be a fascinating domain of research. They are a meeting point between theories of progress and the practicality of everyday life, and between the aspirations of professionals, the dictates of national, regional and local bureaucracies, and the needs of different users. […]

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Right in the Way: Generations of Highway Impacts in Houston

Editor’s note: This is the fifth in a series of articles during April that examine the construction of the Interstate Highway System over the past seven decades. The series, titled Justice and the Interstates, opens up new areas for historical inquiry, while also calling on policy makers and the transportation and urban planning professions to […]

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Writing about Street Life and Thinking about COVID

The Metropole Bookshelf is an opportunity for authors of forthcoming or recently published books to let the UHA community know about their new work in the field. By Brian Ladd My new book, The Streets of Europe, mostly ends a century ago, so it’s not about cars, but it would not have happened without their […]

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The Texan City by Transit: Lone Star Seniors and the 1970 White House Community Forums on Aging

Our second entrant into the Fourth Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest is Willa Granger, who transports us to 1970s Texas to show how older Texans were stretching to their financial and economic limits to retain their mobility and independence. In the third week of September 1970, the Nixon Administration, in tandem with state […]

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Policing the Automobile: “Private” Transit in “Public” Spaces?

By Sarah A. Seo Is a mobile home more like an automobile or a house? This was the key question that the justices of the US Supreme Court had to determine in California v. Carney, a 1985 case about the warrantless search of a mobile home parked in a lot in downtown San Diego. An […]

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Digital Summer School: Accra Wala, Transit Spanning Continents

It’s the final installment of Digital Summer School 2019! Wayne State’s Jennifer Hart drops us into the transit grid of Accra, Ghana as she and others working on the Accra Wala project engage the city’s public transportation system and the broader concept of automobility. For all other DSS 2019 courses scroll down to the bottom for links. Accra Wala […]

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The Metropole Bookshelf: Historian Genevieve Carpio discusses the intersection of mobility and ethnic studies in her new work, Collisions at the Crossroads

The Metropole Bookshelf is an opportunity for authors of forthcoming or recently published books to let the UHA community know about their new work in the field. Genevieve Carpio. Collisions at the Crossroads: How How Place and Mobility Make Race. University of California Press, 2019. By Genevieve Carpio Collisions at the Crossroads seeks to bring […]

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Member of the Week: Emily Callaci

Emily Callaci Associate Professor of History University of Wisconsin, Madison @ecallaci Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest?  I’ve been working for a few years now on a project on the history of reproductive technology in Africa in the 1960s through the present day.  It’s not an urban history project in the […]

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