TY - JOUR
AU - Basmajian, Carlton, Wade
AB - Kyle Shelton's Power Moves provides a detailed look at how Houston's transportation infrastructure has shaped the planning and building of the city. Though the third-largest U.S. city, and by some measures the most ethnically diverse, Houston remains an enigma to most Americans. Thanks to the recent misery caused by Hurricane Harvey, for better or worse Houston has moved into the spotlight. Shelton situates his discussion within a new vein of scholarship that “defines infrastructure as more than the concrete, metal, or fiber-optic networks that shuffle humans and the resources we use across the globe” (p. 19). In this perspective, the rigidity of roads and rails is replaced by a conception of them as a plastic manifestation of regional politics. Shelton guides us through the postwar history of transportation planning in Houston, beginning in the mid-1940s. He explains how the region's residential fabric was inextricably tied to “the link between Houston's decades of population growth and the explosion of suburban developments oriented around new highways” (p. 39). As new highways chewed up houses and neighborhoods in the 1950s and 1960s, residents from different walks of life began to realize the costs of “access to broader forms of freedom” that “roads and personal cars” entailed (p. 71). Over time, organized resistance to more roads sparked “longer-lasting infrastructural activism against official-driven planning” as “Houstonians from across the region began to resist the locating of roads through their communities” (pp. 87, 89). By the early 1970s, Houston's breakneck rate of growth had spawned a burgeoning transportation crisis, just as in its sun belt neighbors. Many analysts saw mass transit as the solution but, as with Atlanta and Los Angeles, regional transit proved challenging. In Houston, at least, while citizen action around transit proposals “marked yet another example of the emerging political power of Houston's African-American and Mexican-American population,” it did not solve the congestion problem (p. 122). As the 1980s dawned, the clash over whether Houston would lay rails or build more roads “pushed the region away from the fragile coalition of suburban and urban residents” critical to moving projects forward (p. 163). Considering that Houston voters finally approved a light-rail transportation system in the 2000s, Shelton argues that while durable citizen coalitions still faced obstacles, the public and the planners eventually came together in way that “vested the rail with significance and turned a transportation line into a venture through which a community organized and articulated its vision for the future” (p. 218). The takeaway from Houston's experience is the role of citizen participation. While problems of spatial inequality, especially in terms of capital investment, are far from solved, broader public engagement appears to have improved the process and has given “citizens a greater opportunity to shape the city's future decisions” (p. 234). While Houston appears to be a typical sun belt metropolis, dominated by automobiles and riven by class and race boundaries, Power Moves sheds light on how the city came to be and what unique Houston characteristics the nation is finally noticing. © The Author 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Power Moves: Transportation, Politics, and Development in Houston
JF - The Journal of American History
DO - 10.1093/jahist/jaz132
DA - 2019-03-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/power-moves-transportation-politics-and-development-in-houston-sk2jw4zMQr
SP - 1077
VL - 105
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -