De-Infrastructuring Automobility: Political Economies of Urban Highway Repurposing and Removal in São Paulo and Madrid

Abstract

One of the most visible infrastructural legacies of the 20th century is the urban highway which underpinned the massive transformations of cities and regions in the postwar period. As concerns grow about the climate impacts of car travel, however, cities across the world have begun to remove or repurpose sections of urban highways to try and heal the social, economic, and ecological scars of their construction and promote sustainable urban development. In this paper we explore two cases of what we might call this “de-infrastructuring” (see Carse and Kneas, 2019) of automobility: the piecemeal pedestrian appropriation of the Minhocão elevated highway in São Paulo and the ongoing political conflicts over the burial of the A-5 highway in the Latina district of Madrid. In each case, the peopling of highway infrastructure–whether by temporary occupation or permanent removal or burial–is both a popular demand and a potential component of urban redevelopment strategies designed to channel investment back into the spaces that these infrastructures devalued. At the same time, these projects are ongoing, contested, and uncertain, and constitute broadly piecemeal and somewhat ephemeral attempts at “destroying what destroys the planet” (Holgerson and Warlenius, 2016), rather than more systemic approaches to undoing automobility and its socioecological impacts. Highway repurposing in São Paulo and Madrid subsequently raises crucial questions about urban socioecological restructuring and the prospects for a just post-automobile city, questions we explore in this paper.