Project Description
Urban growth in America is not like other developed nations. Most cities in Europe and Asia have existed for centuries; designed and built when distances were measured by walking. The United States however – especially in the West – has famously urbanized since the invention of the automobile. Suburbia has been sprawling outward from many city centers since the 1940s, but the pace and extent has been most obvious in western cities where surrounding land was cheap because it was uninhabited, and/or stolen from indigenous people.
E-470 is a high speed tollway built in the 1990s around the eastern fringe of Denver, Colorado. It was originally a remote road, surrounded by wheat fields and used primarily to bypass the city. By 2010, the highway acted as a sort of container for the sprawl. At that time, one was struck by the contrast between dense housing to the west, and on the other side, open plains stretching endlessly toward the Kansas border. Development has since jumped the highway like a wildfire, and continues to expand eastward unabated.