Power Moves

Since World War II, Houston has become a burgeoning, internationally connected metropolis—and a sprawling, car-dependent city. In 1950, it possessed only one highway, the Gulf Freeway, which ran between Houston and Galveston. Today, Houston and Harris County have more than 1,200 miles of highways, and a third major loop is under construction nearly thirty miles out from the historic core. Highways have driven every aspect of Houston’s postwar development, from the physical layout of the city to the political process that has transformed both the transportation network and the balance of power between governing elites and ordinary citizens.Power Moves examines debates around the planning, construction, and use of highway and public transportation systems in Houston. Kyle Shelton shows how Houstonians helped shape the city’s growth by attending city council meetings, writing letters to the highway commission, and protesting the destruction of homes to make way for freeways, which happened in both affluent and low-income neighborhoods. He demonstrates that these assertions of what he terms “infrastructural citizenship” opened up the transportation decision-making process to meaningful input from the public and gave many previously marginalized citizens a more powerful voice in civic affairs. Power Moves also reveals the long-lasting results of choosing highway and auto-based infrastructure over other transit options and the resulting challenges that Houstonians currently face as they grapple with how best to move forward from the consequences and opportunities created by past choices.

As our nation struggles to find the will to repair and develop our failing infrastructure, Shelton's detailed and nuanced account is timely indeed. This is a book worth pondering, written about a city that continues to stumble towards sustainability, justice, and accessibility., This book will be of value to regional policy-makers and activists, urban historians and planners, Houston history buffs, and historians of transportation, technology, and the environment. It was a pleasure to read Shelton's work., A detailed look at how Houston's transportation infrastructure has shaped the planning and building of the city…While Houston appears to be a typical sun belt metropolis, dominated by automobiles and riven by class and race boundaries, Power Moves sheds light on how the city came to be and what unique Houston characteristics the nation is finally noticing., An important addition to the historiography of Houston…Power Moves is essential reading for students and scholars of Houston history and urban history., [An] important book...impressively researched, the arguments being well-evidenced...It is difficult not to be discouraged about the prospects of infrastructure democracy because of very different conceptions of the public good (and because of climate change, a result in great part of our transportation choices). But Power Moves shows that democratically achieved positive outcomes, given the right conditions, can sometimes be the result.

Kyle Shelton is the director of strategic partnerships and a fellow at Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research. His writing on transportation and urban development has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, Journal of Urban History, Nature, and CityLab.