Regenerating urban space: putting highway airspace to work

Abstract

As cities are reaching critical densities of urban fabric, they face the dual problem of rising real estate values and vast areas of land in valuable locations occupied by highways and railways along with their supporting operations. Rights‐of‐way of both highways and railways, slicing through dense urban fabric, often act as barriers to growth. Further, they tend to generate edges which are problematic to use in positive ways and that physically delineate social separation. An answer to this phenomenon may be the joint development of air rights associated with urban transportation corridors by providing a means to reknit disrupted neighbourhoods and communities.

Notes

Correspondence Address: Andreas Savvides, Center for Design Informatics, Harvard University, 1033 Massachusetts Ave., 5th Floor, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. Email: [email protected]

The Grotiusplaats project in Den Haag, Netherlands is another example and includes a number of other components associated with the bridge buildings spanning the highway as well as with a tramway station.

The location matrix presented herein, has been based on responses to questions on land use and location planning related to air rights development, submitted in the form of an online survey to Right‐of‐Way personnel in the fifty State Departments of Transportation (DOTs) in the US. It is an updated version of a similar survey conducted by the Highway Research Board in 1969. Support in conducting the survey was provided by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation officials (AASHTO).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andreas Savvides

Correspondence Address: Andreas Savvides, Center for Design Informatics, Harvard University, 1033 Massachusetts Ave., 5th Floor, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. Email: [email protected]