The stories behind some of the world's weirdest motorways

Telegraph

27-04-2025

In the first half of the 20th century, motorways – also known as expressways or, more generally, controlled-access highways – were heralded as utopian. They were the embodiment of progress, launched with huge parades, decked in Art Deco ornament and applauded by a jubilant press.
The optimism would not last long. All too soon, around the world, such gigantic roads would become symbols of dystopian urban planning from above, wounds inflicted upon cities, mechanised floods tearing communities apart: as Richard J Williams puts it, they were seen as 'an everyday form of devastation'.
The Expressway World challenges this binary. Williams, professor of contemporary visual culture at the University of Edinburgh, points out the self-deception and absolutism in this Manichean way of seeing the built environment. Instead, he views these roads more soberly, as attempts to solve a traffic crisis, the evolution of which branched off into divergent paths. In doing so, he makes a compelling case for truths that lie beyond exaltation or condemnation.
Each chapter focuses on a different place, approach and outcome: the West Side Highway in New York, the Samil Elevated Highway in Seoul, the Minhocão in São Paulo and so on. (The last of these is named after a worm-like folkloric beast.) While his book is notionally centred on automobile infrastructure, Williams effectively creates a portrait of the rise and fall of modernist urbanism. A great deal of its charm lies in returning to the delusionally halcyon days when architectural critics, in this case Reyner Banham, could herald an interchange as a 'work of art'.
Still, given the architectural torpidity and piety of our contemporary age, the megalomania on display here has a certain villainous charisma. For instance, in celebrating the elevated panoramic view over the Hudson that New York motorists would enjoy, the notorious urban planner Robert Moses claimed that 'by comparison, the castled Rhine with its Lorelei is a mere trickle.' Moses's egocentric ambition was exceeded only by Paul Rudolph's gargantuan proposal for Lomex (Lower Manhattan Expressway), which Williams dubs 'Futurism meets the Death Star'; it's still a stunning vision and, if it falls absurdly short of its inspirations, which included the Parthenon and Chartres Cathedral, the audacity is easy to admire. Thankfully, given it would have involved mass evictions and bulldozing swathes of SoHo and Little Italy, Rudolph's Bladerunner-esque design remained a series of unbuilt renderings.
The car was both an object of desire and a tool of democratisation, and the motorway was its apotheosis. Even now, hit one at the right speed and hour and you can still feel, in Banham's words, it's 'the nearest thing to flight on four wheels'. But as these monumental roads spread via government planning, from Fascist autostrada and Autobahn to the American post-war building boom, 'autogeddon' followed. Expressways went from panacea to poison. All the initial hyperbole flipped to denunciations. They were a no-man's-land, embedded with structural violence, so grievous that their very existence put 'civilised life at stake'. Today, they're seen by critics as a necessary evil at best, though the photogenic brutalist retrofuturism of their bridges and service stations continue to attract admirers.
Williams is a scholarly guide: literary, artistic and cinematic references abound. But his strength is his aversion to histrionics. He acknowledges the 'severed neighbourhood[s]', displaced citizenry, race and class issues, pollution and noise that many controlled-access highways caused in urban areas. He quotes from jeremiads, and charts various 'occupations', including the artistic festivals that flourished on the Minhocão. Yet he resists easy partisan positions, and his resolute critical eye makes him something of a gadfly. This is why The Expressway World, which could have been arid or marginal, has a zing to it.
For instance, rather than settling for the monstrous caricature of popular lore (The Spectator labelled him 'the psychopath who wrecked New York'), William argues that Robert Moses was motivated by his own admittedly twisted conception of progress; and while admiring Jane Jacobs's ardent work in opposing the New York expressways and preserving neighbourhoods, Williams rejects her latter-day sainthood, contending that the clashes were, partly, 'one set of privileged actors battling another'. Though he is by no means contrarian, Williams can be commendably sacrilegious. His scepticism towards artwashing and performative politics is timely, especially on how both can reinforce the social inequalities they feign to oppose.
At the same time, he acts as a Devil's advocate for London's Ballardian Westway, which has had few defenders from the beginning (there were over 20,000 objections filed to the Greater London Council at the time regarding their motorway plans): he claims that, for all its ills, it 'brought new possibilities the old city lacked'. Formerly the site of slum tenements, he argues 'the Westway became a carnivalesque space […] in which a certain amount of bounded disorder was possible'. Whether this ideal of 'bounded disorder' can survive either gentrification or deprivation remains to be seen.
William's strongest argument comes in the chapter on the Cheonggyecheon redevelopment in Seoul, where a seven-mile-long elevated motorway, running through downtown Seoul since 1976, was replaced with a riverine space that is, if its global press coverage to be believed, the best thing since Arcadia. 'It's hard to imagine,' Williams retorts, 'a more controlled space outside of an airport or prison.' As he points out, Cheonggyecheon has simply exchanged one form of authority for another, one that has greenery instead of concrete and tarmac, while continuing to consist of 'constant exhortations to behave in approved ways', predicated on 'surveillance and the pressure to spend money'.
The Expressway World is a discerning study of fantasy and erasure. Twenty-first-century urbanism, after all, has become a realm dominated by mythic or near-Biblical thinking, in which the automobile is sinful, the environment (or rather 'simulated nature') is Edenic, and the expressway a convenient scapegoat for modernity's ills. In truth, these roads are just another arena for competing centres of power, their visions and blindnesses. Until that is recognised, we'll be vulnerable to the comforts and temptations of ancient fantasies and those selling them; and for all the talk of the future, society will be hurtling forwards with its eyes firmly fixed on the rear-view mirror.