Benefitting From a Cover Up: How Concealing Urban Highways Can Create Parkland

Posted on February 24, 2012 by Peter Harnik

A twelfth excerpt from the recently released book published by Island Press called Urban Green: Innovative Parks for Resurgent Cities. In this post, we look at some cities who have created parkland by concealing or burying highways. Urban radicals want automobiles banned. Urban moderates can perhaps live with cars as long as they’re neither seen nor heard. In European central [...]

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Public Space Nouveau: Reclaiming the River Seine

Posted on May 12, 2010 by Ben Welle

The Mayor of Paris announced recently that the city is closing an expressway along the River Seine in a project that could have a major impact on public space in the city. Time magazine describes the current one-day-a-week closure and how this may spread to 365 days per year: On a recent Sunday in Paris, [...]

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Video on Seoul’s Reborn Stream

Posted on July 20, 2009 by Ben Welle

Andrew Revkin of the New York Times provides a great video and backstory of the “daylighted” stream in Seoul, North Korea involving the tearing down of a highway and construction of the waterway and linear park.

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Freeway Teardowns in New Orleans, Louisville?

Posted on July 17, 2009 by Ben Welle

We’re back with some more news on freeway teardowns, this time highlighting efforts in New Orleans and Louisville, KY. This last week an article appeared in the New Orleans Times-Picayune about that city considering tearing down a segment of the elavated freeway I-10. The idea is to replace the segment with what was originally on [...]

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Freeways to Parks

Posted on October 29, 2008 by Ben Welle

Next American City’s Daily Report writes about the Congress for the New Urbanism’s push for tearing down freeways in several cities. Urban designers took the freeway, which was perfectly suitable as a connector between cities, and tossed it into the city itself……… It sliced through cities, severing their once-convenient grid systems. It blocked access to [...]

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Something is Alive Under I-5

Posted on September 20, 2008 by Ben Welle

What does $170,000 in public money, $26,000 in donated funds, 44,000 volunteer hours and a space under a freeway get you between two of Seattle’s most densely populated neighborhoods? A mountain bike park, what else? (Short article in the Seattle Times.) “The space under the freeway and between Seattle’s Eastlake and Capitol Hill neighborhoods was [...]

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