Authors of Urbanism: The Expressway World with Richard J. Williams

In the demonology of the contemporary city, is there anything more toxic than the expressway? Dividing neighbourhoods, depressing land values, concentrating atmospheric pollutants, the mammoth infrastructure of the expressway is now increasingly crumbling into the ground.

How did we build the expressway world in the first place? And what are we going to do now with it now?

Based on the recent book, The Expressway World (Polity 2025), this talk explores these questions partly through the great expressway abolitions of recent years, such as Boston’s Central Artery (buried and covered by a park) and Seoul’s Cheonggyecheon (replaced with an artificial river). But the book also uncovers the hidden stories of expressways that have become weird attractions in their own right, from London’s Westway to São Paulo’s Minhocão, celebrated in art and literature. Above all, the book proposes, counterintuitively, that we find ways to live with the expressway world and to adapt it to a different future, inspired by the many examples where people have already reinvented this challenging legacy on their own terms.

Engaging with case studies across the world and recent thinking in the environmental humanities and architectural theory, this is a thought-provoking invitation to reconsider the most maligned structures of the recent urban past. The Expressway World concludes with a chapter on Glasgow’s M8, and the talk includes reflections on both the M8’s present status and its future.

Click here to find out more about The Expressway World.

About the author

Richard J. Williams is Professor of Contemporary Visual Cultures at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of ten books, mostly about cities. As well as The Expressway World, his most recent books are The Culture Factory: Architecture and the Contemporary Art Museum (2021) and Reyner Banham Revisited (also 2021). He has written on cities for the New York Times, the London Review of Books, the Architectural Review and many other venues. Infrastructure in Image, a new book co-edited with Igea Troiani, will appear in 2027.