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Segregation by Design, New York, NY (2026)

05/21/2026

New York is overdue to make a decision on the future of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. So, which way, Mayor Mamdani? Double down on the insanely bad ideas of the Robert Moses era, or chart a new course? This clip is part of City Nerd’s longer exploration of the BQE’s on-the-ground impact, which is available online: “Transportation as Atrocity: A Brief Investigation.”

05/05/2026

Cities from unusual angles... specifically, centered on the river. One of the purposes of this project is to show cities from a metaphorical “new angle,” revealing how policy has shaped the built environment in deliberate and pernicious ways. On the other hand, these images show cities from a new angle literally. In doing so, they partially demonstrate how the built environment interacts with the natural environment at the urban scale, and vice versa, while also revealing different approaches across cities. What do you notice?

For me, it is interesting to observe where planners acted to overcome existing geographic features (e.g. Chicago, where the grid dutifully continues even as the river cuts diagonally across) versus where they built seemingly in concert with it (e.g. Philadelphia). It is also interesting to see cases where a clear lack of any coherent plan has left waterfront development up to a patchwork of private actors and disparate agencies, resulting in a haphazard, fractured, and somewhat random relationship with the water (e.g. Cleveland).

Viewing urban waterways like this, especially in cases with no coherent plan, I think about the thousands of individual development decisions over the years which, taken on their own, didn’t have the capacity to fundamentally alter the natural force of the river. But decades of these small decisions build up—small course changes, more and more sources of pollution, channelization, etc—to make these rivers ultimately something more man-made than natural. I guess this is a fairly obvious point (especially as I sit writing this in the Netherlands of all places).

Finally, even though they have become something man-made, these waterways still fundamentally shape the layout of cities in ways that we often can’t perceive at all at ground level. So, anyway, thought these were cool. Saw a reddit post the other day with a similar angle of Chicago.

04/30/2026

“The Story of the BQE” documentary is now available to watch online! Link in bio.

Using archival footage and photography, this 40-minute video shows how the construction of the 16-mile-long BQE demolished historic neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens, divided communities, and displaced hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers across the two boroughs.

I made this video last year with the Institute for Public Architecture and NYU Schack Institute of Real Estate. We hosted several live screenings and panels throughout the city, discussing solutions to create a more just future. Thanks so much to everybody who came out! It was great meeting folks. If you weren’t able to make it, I’m working with the IPA on a couple more for the summer and fall. Stay tuned!

04/27/2026

The complete “Story of the BQE” mini-documentary will be available on youtube this Wednesday at 12:30pm EST! Link in bio. In the meantime, this trailer gives a preview of some of what’s covered in the full video, a history of the destructive Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

Thanks so much to everybody who came out to our screenings over the past year and a half in New York City. We had some great discussions about the future of the highway (with our frequent moderator, Tiffany-Ann Taylor, having since joined the Mamdani Administration’s DOT as Chief Strategy Officer). I’m working with the IPA on a few more events for the summer and fall—stay tuned.

04/20/2026

São Paulo’s “Minhocão” elevated highway, seen on a typical Monday vs. a Saturday. On weekdays the Minhocão (“Big Worm”) is a normal highway, cutting through the city center and drowning the surrounding high-density residential neighborhoods in traffic noise and exhaust fumes. On nights and weekends, however, the highway is transformed into Parque Minhocão, a 3.5km-long linear park (2.2mi) open to the public. The Parque provides much needed public space, if imperfectly and impermanently, in a city notorious for its inequitable distribution of parks [1].

In contrast with the post about Zürich, as well as with other ongoing large-scale highway retrofit projects, Parque Minhocão presents an alternative approach—one that, for now at least, avoids many of the pitfalls associated with more “formal” strategies for mitigating highway impacts, like capping (which risks induced demand, upholding unjust mobility networks, local cost burdens, etc.) or even boulevard conversion and complete removal (risking potential gentrification without proper protections) [2][3].

In “The Politics of Public Space at São Paulo’s Minhocão,” Richard J. Williams writes:

“Minhocão is far from the only example of such transformations of expressways into quasi-public space, and there are now many more complete, not to say more expensive, transformations: Seoul’s Cheonggyecheon park (2005) and Boston’s Rose Kennedy Greenway (completed 2008) are the most celebrated examples, not least because of their astronomical cost. However, the Minhocão is unusual in that it has undergone little physical transformation at all, aside from fencing at the side of the roadway to prevent accidents, the periodic addition of street furniture, and some scaffold-like pedestrian access points. Its transformation into semi-public space bears revisiting at a time when calls for transformations of expressway infrastructure have become more frequent. In particular, the Minhocão in its current, unresolved condition suggests the possibility of a route between inaction and complete reformation, one that might be capable, however imperfectly, of balancing contradictory interests.” [4]

[CONTINUED IN COMMENTS]

04/12/2026

The A1 Highway in Zurich, before-and-after the installation of the “Einhausung Schwamendingen,” an enclosure over the road that features a public park on the roof, designed to reduce noise and emissions into the surrounding neighborhoods. Opened in 2025, the long linear structure is also intended to reduce divisions between the surrounding areas. “The highway had bisected the neighborhood since 1980,” said Zurich Mayor Corine Mauche to the SRF (translated from German). “It’s a major urban planning wound that we can finally heal.” [1]

Einhausungen, translating to “enclosures,” are an increasingly popular strategy in Germany and Switzerland. Unlike a “cap,” which requires a road already be built in an open trench below ground level (like much of the Cross Bronx), an Eishausung is a solution for covering at-grade highways by building up and over the right of way.

For many highways, especially in the overbuilt networks of US cities, we should strongly consider boulevard conversions or complete removal (like Rochester). However, where infeasible, something like this could be an option.

In the past I’ve expressed skepticism about capping. Caps are often used as a “Trojan Horse” to distract from significant widenings of the highways beneath (see: I35 in Austin and Dallas). In such a situation, while the cap creates a hyperlocal pocket of “reconnection,” they ultimately worsen the problem elsewhere. This includes both traffic and pollution, as the cap doesn’t eliminate exhaust fumes, it concentrates it at the tunnel exits or vents. Finally, investments such as caps have resulted in gentrification, pricing out the residents they are intended to serve.

However, Zurich has seemingly mitigated these downsides. First, they didn’t widen the highway. Second, the city had a leg up by being able to leverage the ventilation system in the existing adjacent tunnel to reduce emissions concentrations. Third, the city has encouraged the development of non-profit housing cooperatives in the area, which now consist of 28% of the units in the neighborhood. This will have a “significantly moderating effect on the development of rental prices,” says a city official. [2].

04/02/2026

April update of “Reconnecting Communities” news, which focuses on developments relating to overcoming discriminatory urbanism. Links to articles at the link in bio.

One of the advantages of looking comparatively across cities in this fashion is identifying trends across local and state developments, especially concerning the many ongoing highway redesigns, retrofits, and expansions (in addition to policy developments, like the ongoing trend of states seeking to bolster their own voting rights legislation in anticipation of SCOTUS striking down what remains of the Voting Rights Act).

One unfortunate trend is reflected in recent developments in Austin’s “I-35 CapEx” project and Minneapolis’ “Rethinking 94.” Both of these projects were supposed to result in caps being built over highways which had a history of dividing and displacing Black communities. Instead, both of these projects will simply be further widenings of the existing highways—with the decision to build caps deferred to a future date.

I say this is a “trend” as these projects are yet more instances of the promise of caps being used to justify widening the highways beneath them—sometimes significantly so. One could argue this started with the Big Dig itself, an oft-cited inspiration for many of these projects, which replaced a six lane elevated structure with a 10 lane tunnel. More recently, capping projects in Dallas (Oak Cliff) and Denver—both of which prominently centered equity—have nearly doubled the width of the highways beneath.

While most of these projects have certainly resulted in improved urban placemaking and a limited degree of physical “reconnection” within the vicinity of the caps themselves, they have done little to reduce air pollution in surrounding areas, and have done even less to promote the sort of large-scale mode shift to more equitable mobility that advocates had hoped such projects could begin to achieve.

[CONTINUED IN COMMENTS]

02/12/2026

These before-and-afters of Downtown Dallas illustrate the architectural “fortress effect” which emerged in American urban cores (i.e. CBDs) as a reaction to white flight and suburbanization in the mid-20th century. As many of the middle-class white people who had left for the suburbs began to see the “inner city” as a place of racialized danger, planners (and developers) sought to redesign downtowns such that suburban automobile commuters could minimize all unwanted interaction with “the street.” [1].

In the first photo, this strategy took the form of destroying all the storefronts and mixed-use buildings on the block, replacing them with a single, large federal office building that features a dedicated parking garage, enabling employees to drive directly into the structure without having to walk on city streets. A two-story-high granite wall on all four sides with just one entrance is what greets everybody else.

In the second photo, similarly, the dozens of small, mixed-use buildings which met the ground with storefronts, restaurants, and businesses (and often had a few units of housing above) have been replaced with office towers and high-rise parking structures that meet the ground with blank walls and driveways.

The third image is the same story, looking north from the three-way intersection of Elm St., Ervay St., and Live Oak St. In this instance, this stretch of Live Oak was discontinued, with the two former triangular blocks consolidated into a super block for the construction of 1700 Pacific (another post-modern office tower, which also meets the ground with a granite wall and features “skybridges” to adjacent blocks, enabling workers to avoid descending to the street).

In “City of Quartz” (1990), Mike Davis writes of the redevelopment of Los Angeles’ Downtown, but it could easily apply here to Dallas (even with Texas’ far more stringent segregation policies): “Photographs of the old Downtown in its prime show mixed crowds of Anglo, Black, and Latino pedestrians of all ages and classes. The contemporary Downtown “renaissance” is designed to make such heterogeneity virtually impossible.” [2].

[CONTINUED IN COMMENTS]

01/22/2026

January update of “Reconnecting Communities” news.

This month shows that, even as the federal government convulses between fits of international imperialism and domestic authoritarianism, there’s still a lot of good work happening at the state, local, and grassroots level. Just see the upper-right quadrant of the chart: anti-ICE resistance across the country shows us in real time that communities can quickly organize far more good people than the government can hire random goons. Decades of advocacy and public investment in transit will continue to pay off, as new subway, LRT, and bus lines open around the country, transformative steps toward creating a more equitable mobility system. Progressive new local administrations—notably in NYC and Seattle—have “hit the ground running,” with proposals directly attacking the high cost of living that continues to exacerbate existing patterns of class and racial segregation. In short: while the federal situation is basically as bad as it could be, there’s too much hard-work, organizing, and advocacy going on out there to be entirely pessimistic.

Back to the chart: Like last time, developments are arrayed along two axes: one axis which positions an item based on whether it represents progress towards reconnection, or the opposite; and another axis which (for better or worse) compares whether an item represents transformative change vs. something more ingrained in the status quo.

More explanation of these axes and links to the individual articles at the link in bio.

Segregation by Design

05/21/2026

05/05/2026

04/30/2026

04/27/2026

04/20/2026

04/12/2026

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