Abstract
This book is a valuable contribution to urban studies if for no other reason than its true interdisciplinarity. It is an edited volume that came out of responses to the August 2007 collapse of the I-35W interstate highway bridge over the Mississippi River in the heart of Minneapolis and adjacent to the University of Minnesota’s flagship campus. These responses range from technical engineering explanations of why exactly the bridge fell, to historical examples of previous catastrophes along Minneapolis’ portion of the Mississippi, to a description of how the lived experiences of members of the adjacent communities were affected, to connections between the Upper Mississippi watershed and the Gulf of Mexico. This is not a book that summarises the bridge collapse as a unitary event, but displays the numerous ways that scholars of the urban can relate to a singular incident and draw broader conclusions from it for the future.
Design professor Thomas Fisher opens the book and the section on ‘The bridge’ by explaining how the bridge collapse was a symbol of the failure of ‘fracture-critical design’, with its lack of redundancy and corresponding high degrees of interconnectedness and sensitivity to exponential stress. The recent financial crisis, New Orleans’ levee walls and the electrical grid are other examples of how we need to build in redundancy and alternatives to many of our systems to increase their resiliency. Civil engineers Robert Ballarini and Minmao Liao summarise the results of their study of how the bridge failed, explaining how if one set of gusset plates “had been one inch thick instead of one-half inch thick, the tragic bridge collapse would not have happened” (p. 32). The technical terminology and concepts are explained clearly and simply, making me wish that more urban studies volumes had contributions from a civil engineering perspective. Landscape planner Patrick Nunnally writes about the redesign process, emphasising that the figure of US$400 000 per day being lost due to the severed transport connection drove much of the decision-making, plus a brief mention of how state-level politics were involved.
In the section on ‘The city’, geographer Judith Martin describes the impact on the neighbourhoods adjacent to the bridge from a resident’s point of view, noting that the greatest difficulty came not from their own daily routines being disrupted (because they rarely used the Interstate bridge), but from the thousands of commuters who were not used to driving on city streets. While the potential existed for suburban drivers to explore new parts of the city, most stuck to their familiar ways and missed out on the opportunity. Geographer Roger Miller explains the larger forces driving urban and suburban development and notes that our assumption that more mobility is better is not always valid, especially when it comes to the resiliency of the corresponding built environments. Tragically, both Judith and Roger have passed away since the book went to press, but these chapters embody their passion for urban landscapes and places.
The third section on ‘The river’ opens with historian John Anfinson describing past catastrophes in the same location, including the near collapse of St Anthony Falls, on which the milling town of Minneapolis was founded, and the struggle over cholera and the financing of water treatment in the early 20th century. There are some clear parallels in terms of how the events occurred, the debate over the appropriate government response and the way in which these major incidents have been all but forgotten. From journalism and education, Mark Pedelty, Heather Dorsey and Melissa Thompson discuss the ‘Bridge project’, a class event that required students to carry out an artistic performance on the Mississippi River bridge that connects the two halves of the university campus, and connections to environmental activism and the river more generally. Public policy professor Deborah Swackhamer explains some of these broader issues around the Mississippi, including how agricultural and other activities in Minnesota (where the river begins) have an impact all the way down to the Gulf. Nunnally concludes with some thoughts on where we might go from here in terms of working with the river and not against it, and how a long-term city–river relationship might look.
The overall point of the book is best summarised in the third chapter by Nunnally In sum, we’re pretty good at engineering and can develop extraordinary measures to meet extraordinary demands and circumstance. But the bigger questions, about what are the best uses of public goods, who decides, who will pay for what, and how that process will be worked out, remain muddled (p. 54).
Collectively, the authors seem to conclude that, while there was an opportunity to reconsider how our transport system elevates the car over every other mode and shuts out urban neighbourhoods in the process, that opportunity was lost in the rush to get back to normal. At the same time, the potential still exists for a reconnection with the Mississippi River, something that will be made directly through signs on the new bridge and over the longer-term through work on the part of the university, the National Park Service and the city.
I would have liked to hear about the year the bridge was out from a commuter’s perspective: did they switch to the bus or rail, did they spend less time at home because of a longer commute, did they come back later to explore the neighbourhoods they were driving through, etc.? I also would have preferred a more detailed treatment of the politics surrounding the bridge collapse, particularly the implications at the state and national levels. Nevertheless, this book demonstrates quite well that only by incorporating multiple disciplinary perspectives—engineering, history, design, geography and policy—can we understand the impacts of an event like the I-35W bridge collapse and its implications for the people and environments of the city and the region.