UAB Professor’s Article on U.S. “Freeway Revolt” Wins National Award

An article about past grassroots efforts in the United States against the construction of urban expressways by University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Distinguished Professor Raymond A. Mohl, Ph.D., has won the Michael Robinson Award. The award is presented by the Public Works Historical Society, an affiliate of the American Public Works Association (APWA).

   July 7, 2009

Raymond Mohl. Download image.

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - An article about past grassroots efforts in the United States against the construction of urban expressways by University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Distinguished Professor Raymond A. Mohl, Ph.D., has won the Michael Robinson Award. The award is presented by the Public Works Historical Society, an affiliate of the American Public Works Association (APWA).

The award will be presented to Mohl during the APWA annual meeting Sept. 14.

Mohl's article, "The Interstates and the Cities: The U.S. Department of Transportation and the Freeway Revolt, 1966-1973," was published last year in the Journal of Policy History.

The article looks at how construction of the nation's interstate highway system, beginning in the late 1950s, impacted urban city centers. Entire neighborhoods, historic districts, parks and environmentally sensitive areas were slated for demolition to make way for the new expressways, Mohl said.

In response, citizen activists in the inner cities began grassroots efforts to challenge the routing decisions made by state and federal highway engineers, Mohl said. What started in San Francisco soon spread to other parts of urban America, and by the late 1960s the "freeway fighters" began to win a few battles, causing the U.S. Department of Transportation to postpone, cancel or shift some urban expressways to alternate routes.

Mohl is an urban historian whose work focuses on race, ethnicity and public policy. He teaches in the UAB Department of History and has written and edited more than a dozen books and more than 100 scholarly papers. He has written about recent interstate freeway developments such as Boston's Big Dig and the expansion of outer beltways in many cities to keep up with metropolitan sprawl, including Birmingham's Northern Beltline of Interstate 459.

He has presented more than 100 lectures at professional meetings both nationally and internationally. Mohl is the founding editor of the Journal of Urban History.

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