Imaging Landscapes, Roads, Race, and Power

Drawing on two contrasting images of the "highway to nowhere" in Baltimore and a stretch of the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia, this essay throws a spotlight on the politics of planning and designing roads in mid-twentieth century America. It examines the intertwined roles of race, class, and profession, focusing on the relationship between race and infrastructures as a systemic issue underlying individual decisions and policies. Race and infrastructures are prominent political topics now that the U.S. federal Department of Transportation is awarding grants to study tearing down interstate highways that have fractured and destroyed inner-city neighborhoods. These policies build on acknowledgments that federally funded infrastructures were not neutral delivery systems, but embodied racist and professional ideologies. While historians of technology have long studied the relationship between values and technology, such analyses are becoming more salient.