City Limits

Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America's Highways

By: Megan Kimble

Narrated by: Megan Kimble

An eye-opening investigation into how our ever-expanding urban highways accelerated inequality and fractured communities—and a call for a more just, sustainable path forward

“Megan Kimble manages to turn a book about transportation and infrastructure into a fascinating human drama.”—Michael Harriot, New York Times bestselling author of Black AF History

Every major American city has a highway tearing through its center. Seventy years ago, planners sold these highways as progress, essential to our future prosperity. The automobile promised freedom, and highways were going to take us there. Instead, they divided cities, displaced people from their homes, chained us to our cars, and locked us into a high-emissions future. And the more highways we built, the worse traffic got. Nowhere is this more visible than in Texas. In Houston, Dallas, and Austin, residents and activists are fighting against massive, multi-billion-dollar highway expansions that will claim thousands of homes and businesses, entrenching segregation and sprawl.

In City Limits, journalist Megan Kimble weaves together the origins of urban highways with the stories of ordinary people impacted by our failed transportation system. In Austin, hundreds of families will lose child care if a preschool is demolished to expand Interstate 35. In Houston, a young Black woman will lose her brand-new home to a new lane on Interstate 10—just blocks away from where a seventy-four-year-old nurse lost her home in the 1960s when that same highway was built. And in Dallas, an urban planner has improbably found himself at the center of a national conversation about highway removal. What if, instead of building our aging roads wider and higher, we removed those highways altogether? It’s been done before, first in San Francisco and, more recently, in Rochester, where Kimble traces how highway removal has brought new life to a divided city.

With propulsive storytelling and ground-level reporting, City Limits exposes the enormous social and environmental costs wrought by our allegiance to a life of increasing speed and dispersion, and brings to light the people who are fighting for a more sustainable, connected future.

©2024 Megan Kimble (P)2024 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“Megan Kimble turns the history of highway construction into something much larger: a treatise on power and possibility. City Limits proves that the world can change faster than we think.”—P. E. Moskowitz, author of How to Kill a City

“If your commute is a nightmare, or if you have had enough of the asphalt jungle that many America cities have become, read this book. It’s an urgent dispatch from the front lines of the fight to reclaim cities from cars and highways and their legacy of racism, injustice, and climate change. City Limits is not just a compelling read—it’s a road map to a better world.”—Jeff Goodell, New York Times bestselling author of The Heat Will Kill You First

“As dams are to living salmon streams, highways are to living cities. Nothing could be more heartening than the growing movement—powerfully chronicled in City Limits—to move past this sad stage in our country’s development, and on to something new and old that works for people, not cars.”—Bill McKibben, author The End of Nature

Rich, deeply researched data engagingly presented

This book is in the same class as Jane Jacobs' "The Death and Life of Great American Cities", Jeff Speck's "Walkable City" and Chuck Marohn's "Confessions of a Recovering Engineer".

It is a must read for anyone working to restore walkable cities.

Inspiring David and Goliath story taking place all over the country

Megan Kimble exquisitely reads her inspiring book!

Megan balances educating the reader about the impacts of urban highways while methodically weaving in the very personal stories of the people she meets along the way.

I consumed Megan’s book in 1 week!

Great storytelling at the heart of an urgent issue

I enjoyed the way Megan wove together the three stories from Dallas, Austin and Houston to paint the real-life impact of highways on communities.