By: Robbie Whelan

This comes via a new website called Baltimorphosis, which is run by Peter Tocco and a man who has become a ubiquitous Internet presence on any forum or site that  discusses urban planning or transportation issues, Gerald Neily. Neily is a former Baltimore traffic planner and the author or the urban planning blog Baltimore Inner Space, where wonks and activists alike get together to discuss the Red Line, the redevelopment of Owings Mills Mall, and other issues.

The video here, however, is a neatly-produced activist video about West Baltimore’s infamous Highway to Nowhere, a failed road project that literally destroyed large portions of several low-income neighborhoods before petering out somewhere near Edmondson Village. What remains is 50-some acres of depressed roadway that serves just a few miles of the commuter route between Woodlawn and downtown. Driving the length of the Highway to Nowhere, as the video notes, takes just a few minutes, and completely cuts the motorist off from the surrounding neighborhoods.

One of the main messages of this little item is that the highway ought not to be destroyed or built-over, but rather re-made as a sort of a mass community art project by and for people of color. The video gets a tad ridiculous when “art-maker” and Open Society Institute grantee Ashley Milburn, who is championing the project, compares overhead views of the site surrounding the highway to diagrams of a slave ship, and we don’t hear much about the extent of the project (sure, having lots of huge murals would be nice, but would that really change the area or its use, or make up for the loss of community caused by this project?), but overall it’s interesting. It’s a bit of fresh air to hear people proposing low-cost, grassroots development to remedy what is effectively state-engineered blight, rather than expensive, entitlement-ridden panacea that are sure to get lost in years of community disputes or even lawsuits.

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