Book Talk & Informal Lunch 1/9 with Prof. Clayton Nall - on The Road to Inequality: How the Federal Highway Program Polarized America and Undermined Cities

Informal Lunch will be Served Open to the Public

THE ROAD TO INEQUALITY  shows how policies that shape geographic space change our politics, focusing on the effects of the largest public works project in American history: the federal highway system. For decades, federally subsidized highways have selectively facilitated migration into fast-growing suburbs, producing an increasingly non-urban Republican electorate. This book examines the highway programs' policy origins at the national level and traces how these intersected with local politics and interests to facilitate complex, mutually-reinforcing processes that have shaped America's growing urban-suburban divide and, with it, the politics of metropolitan public investment. As Americans have become more polarized on urban-suburban lines, attitudes towards transportation policy - a once quintessentially 'local' and non-partisan policy area - are now themselves driven by partisanship, endangering investments in metropolitan programs that provide access to opportunity for millions of Americans.

 'Clayton Nall has rewritten the legacy of America's interstate highway system and with it, the historical geography of the post-war Republican Party. With a stunning mixture of methods, each of them appropriate to its question and carefully deployed, Nall probes how our highway network has fashioned unequal chances along dimensions of place, race and politics. A master stroke of modern political science.' Daniel Carpenter, Harvard University, Massachusetts

'The author conducts insightful analyses of road atlases, historical housing ads, and a longitudinal panel survey to revisit well-studied concerns such as white flight and partisan realignment… M. L. Godwin, Choice

Add to Calendar: http://events.stanford.edu/ical/download.php?id=81759