highway hearing
What you see behind this text is the 1956 film Highway Hearing, produced by the federal government to promote the benefits of the newly planned Interstate Highway System. Framed as a civic gathering, the film stages a public hearing in which residents, officials, and politicians collectively endorse rerouting a “generic American” town to make way for a new expressway. Though presented as participatory, the film ultimately depicts scripted consent and predetermined outcomes.
This Directed Research examines the public hearing as a space of architectural violence, where residents are repeatedly asked to voice concerns in spaces that inherently serve to advance a predetermined vision of urban progress. In response to and as a critic of these spaces, the project turns to sound as an alternative mode of representation, one that resists the dominant visual narratives long used to justify destruction within planning initiatives discusses in public hearings and within urban planning.
Focusing on Detroit’s I-375 freeway as a case study, this project explores the ongoing debate around its proposed removal. Located near downtown, I-375 is currently slated for demolition, yet the plan has met with significant concern from residents. This project offers a different way of engaging with the site through sound. In Detroit’s history, imaging and maps have often served as tools of erasure—photographing blight, imaging decay, and projecting obsolescence onto neighborhoods through "ruin porn". By contrast, sound carries a tension latent with memory and contradiction, offering a way to complicate and disrupt these flattened visual narratives. Furthermore, sound as a mode of city-making is deeply embedded in Detroit’s cultural history, making it a fitting medium to explore the layered narratives of highway removal.
Click below to hear five sound mixes created for this project. Each explores a motif or figure drawn from hearing proceedings: Resident, Planner, City, Future, and Phantom. After the project is complete, these mixes will live on in the collections of the people who helped in this project or were involved in some way. The hope is that through this, the content featured here will live on and take new life at some point when they are listened to again. These mixes of field recordings, interviews, and archival material form speculative narratives that resist linear time and traditional representation.