Cities across the US are rethinking streets, going beyond sidewalks and bike lanes to welcome nonmotorists to share the roadway. David L. Prytherch traces the historical evolution of America’s streets and explores contemporary movements to retake them from cars for diverse forms of mobility and community life. Can we design more just streets? Here, Pryterch gets into it with Mimi Sheller and Peter Norton.



David Prytherch is professor of geography at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He is author of Reclaiming the Road: Mobility Justice beyond Complete Streets; Law, Engineering, and the American Right-of-Way: Imagining a More Just Street; and coeditor of Transport, Mobility, and the Production of Urban Space. 

Mimi Sheller is Dean of The Global School at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Sheller is founding co-editor of the journal Mobilities, founding co-director of the Centre for Mobilities at Lancaster University, England, and past president of the International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility. Sheller is author of Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes.

Peter Norton is associate professor of history in the Department of Engineering and Society at the University of Virginia. He is author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City and Autonorama: The Illustory Promise of High-Tech Driving.




REFERENCES:
John Urry
The Death and Life of Great American Cities / Jane Jacobs
People for Mobility Justice
Robert Moses
Complete Streets
The Untokening
Kimberly Crenshaw



Praise for the book:
How are cities across the United States reclaiming their streets as more equitable and diverse public spaces for everyone? Reclaiming the Road combines the history of urban planning and street design standards with theoretical insights about mobility politics and struggles for access and equity. Reporting from the front lines of recent post-pandemic physical and cultural transformations of public space in nine major American cities, David L. Prytherch raises profound questions about what streets are for and how they might be equitably shared. The result is a fresh, hopeful vision for intersectional mobility justice and public placemaking.
—Mimi Sheller, author of Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes

David L. Prytherch gives a crisp, clear, and accessible narrative of the movement to reclaim public streets after one hundred years of domination by private automobile interests. He touches on many of the key players in this epic struggle, from traffic engineers to complete streets and mobility justice advocacy. Steering us through the politics of streets during the Covid-19 pandemic and recovery, this is a refreshingly innovative and optimistic book for anyone concerned about our urban mobility future.
—Jason Henderson, coauthor of Street Fights in Copenhagen: Bicycle and Car Politics in a Green Mobility City



Reclaiming the Road: Mobility Justice beyond Complete Streets by David L. Prytherch is available from University of Minnesota Press.





Can we design better public streets?

Red Gold: The Managed Extinction of the Giant Bluefin Tuna is a book that asks why so many big bluefin tuna have vanished from the Atlantic Ocean. Author Jen Telesca notes that the term “red gold” has emerged out of the exorbitant price her ruby-colored flesh commands on the global market; for reference, in January 2019, a 613-pound Pacific bluefin tuna sold at market in Tokyo for an astounding record of $3.1 million US dollars. To research this book, Telesca gained unparalleled access to the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (also known as ICCAT) to show that the institution has faithfully executed the task assigned to it by international law: to fish as hard as possible to grow national economies. This interview between Telesca and editor Jason Weidemann was recorded in May 2020.

More about the book: http://z.umn.edu/redgold

A transcription of this conversation is available: z.umn.edu/t-redgold

Can we design better public streets?

University of Minnesota Press

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