No abstract

Silvia Vignato and Matteo Carlo Alcano, eds, Searching for Work: Small-scale Mobility and Unskilled Labor in Southeast Asia (Thailand: Silkworm Books, 2018), 312 pp., 16 illustrations, $40.00 John Wei, Queer Chinese Cultures and Mobilities: Kinship, Migration and Middle Classes (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2020), 216 pp., 9 illustrations. HK$495 Ben Nobbs-Thiessen, Landscapes of Migration: Mobility and Environmental Change on Bolivia's Tropical Frontier, 1952 to the Present (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 342 pp., 12 halftones, 4 maps, 2 graphs, $35.50 Gretchen Sorin, Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2020), xviii +332 pp. $28.95 Candacy Taylor, Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America (New York: Abrams Press, 2020), 360 pp. $35.00

The “highway to nowhere” is a 1.32 mile fragment of an arterial expressway located in Baltimore, Maryland. This segment was designed to contribute to a proposed limited access highway system that was never constructed after years of activism, debate, and lawsuits. This article examines the history of the construction of this highway segment to suggest that conflicts over the design, sitting, and construction of infrastructure are fundamentally struggles over the definition and production of space. This analysis utilizes Henri Lefebvre’s triad of spatial production as an analytical framework to identify distinct spatial forms that surface during the process of infrastructure building. Utilizing this analytical framework may enrich the STS-based infrastructure inquiries by bringing to the surface the multiple forms of spatial production that structure system-building activities. In conclusion, I suggest that utilizing Lefebvre’s triad within studies of infrastructure surfaces important, and potentially transformative, local claims to space. Such claims are of renewed importance as cities across the US confront the segregationist histories of the built environment.