Book Project

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The Infrastructural State:

The Interstate Highway System and

State Building in Modern America

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(under contract, University of Chicago Press)

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Throughout the twentieth century, the American government embarked on the most expensive and expansive public works project in its history: the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. Designed to link the nation’s cities in a web of economic expansion, the 41,000-mile-long highway system came with lofty promises of personal and national affluence when construction began in 1956. As Arcadi shows, it also came with profound governmental changes. Congress enacted new planning powers for officials, and special fiscal mechanisms that ensured the inviolability of the massive project across time and space. Local, state, and federal personnel crafted a social world that aligned the layers of American federalism in support of a shared mission. As all this occurred, activists made clear that the highway-borne quest for national prosperity produced local precarity, especially in poor and non-white communities that officials bulldozed disproportionately to clear paths for the new highways. Emerging lawsuits revealed the vast power of the governing regime that had developed with the highways. There was little room for community involvement in its activities, or for reformist political pressure.

Tracing this complex history, The Infrastructural State provides a portrait of a state constructing political endurance and domination—and in the process building a nation-sized infrastructure system that prompted communities to grapple with the tensions and exclusions of American democracy. By the twenty-first century, the interstate highway system came to inspire radical new models for community participation in the work of state building—models that expose vexing paradoxes of democratic governance, seeking to balance the knowledge and priorities of experts, politicians, judges, and citizens. Bringing together the history of the nation’s largest public works project and the democratic theorization it makes possible, Arcadi supplies a concrete analysis of modern American governance necessary to advance infrastructural justice and construct a more equitable nation.

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