De-infrastructuring automobility: The politics of urban highway repurposing and removal in São Paulo and Madrid.

• Much critical scholarship on highways focuses on negative impacts, but there is growing attention to removal as an opportunity to undo their harms. • The "de-infrastructuring" of urban highways—whether by repurposing or removal— involves contests over both mobility and urban development. • Infrastructural obduracy is shaped by political, economic, and social factors. • Reconfiguring transport infrastructure invokes distributional questions over flow and place that render highways potent sites of urban contestation. • Broadening the scale of highway removal is essential for thinking about post-car urban futures. One of the most visible infrastructural legacies of the 20th century is the urban highway, which underpinned the massive transformations of cities and regions in the postwar period. As concerns grow about the climate impacts of car travel and urban sprawl, however, cities across the world have begun to remove or repurpose sections of urban highways to try and heal the social, economic, and ecological scars of their construction and promote sustainable urban development. These processes speak to key scholarly debates in geography and cognate fields on the relationship between transport infrastructure and processes of urban change. In this paper we explore two cases of what we call the "de-infrastructuring" of automobility: the piecemeal pedestrian appropriation of the Minhocão elevated highway in São Paulo and the ongoing political conflicts over the burial of the A-5 highway in Madrid. In each case, the peopling of highway infrastructure—whether by temporary occupation or permanent removal—is both a popular demand and a potential component of urban redevelopment strategies designed to channel investment back into the spaces that these infrastructures devalued. At the same time, these projects are ongoing, contested, and uncertain, and constitute broadly piecemeal and somewhat ephemeral attempts at repair, rather than more systemic approaches to undoing automobility and its socioecological impacts. Highway restructuring in São Paulo and Madrid therefore raises crucial questions about urban socioecological restructuring and the prospects for a just post-automobile city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]