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Power Moves: Transportation, Politics, and Development in Houston

2019; Oxford University Press; Volume: 105; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jahist/jaz132

1945-2314

Carlton Basmajian,

American Environmental and Regional History

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).