City Limits

“Texas highways have destroyed and dominated our built environment. Megan Kimble’s book City Limits offers a new vision. . . . City Limits reveals the human consequences of our built environment.”—The Texas Observer

“Kimble has penned a big-picture book about a ponderous topic with fascinating implications: what highways mean for American life.”—Bloomberg

“At once a compelling inventory of what people have sacrificed for vehicular speed, an instructive primer on who makes what go where in urban space, and a call to rethink our reliance on highways in light of their environmental impact.”—Los Angeles Review of Books

“Kimble channels Caro by locating the human drama behind freeways and failures of urban planning.”—The Millions

“Expertly documented . . . Kimble’s book doesn’t offer any false promises of easy victories, but it compels us to search for a better way.”—San Antonio Express-News

“Though Kimble focuses on Texas, she clearly shows how its policies and practices are a microcosm for the country as a whole. . . . Kimble demands that we count the cost of our prevailing vision of flourishing so that we might imagine the possibility of a different future.”—Englewood Review of Books

“Gripping. . . . a propulsive, deeply human, and ultimately hopeful story of the people who are leading that fight, even as they stand to lose their homes, businesses, and the very fabric of their neighborhoods.”—Streetsblog USA

“Immersive . . . Kimble delivers an invigorating window onto American grassroots activism.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“If your commute is a nightmare, or if you have had enough of the asphalt jungle that many America cities have become, read this book. City Limits is not just a compelling read—it’s a road map to a better world.”—Jeff Goodell, New York Times bestselling author of The Heat Will Kill You First

“As dams are to living salmon streams, highways are to living cities. Nothing could be more heartening than the growing movement—powerfully chronicled in City Limits—to move past this sad stage in our country’s development, and on to something new and old that works for people, not cars.”—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

“Megan Kimble turns the history of highway construction into something much larger: a treatise on power and possibility. City Limits proves that the world can change faster than we think.”—P. E. Moskowitz, author of How to Kill a City

“City Limits is a triumph. Megan Kimble echoes Robert Caro exposing how powerful groups like TxDOT are able to take away people’s homes, destroy their neighborhoods, and run roughshod over communities with virtually no accountability.”—Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class

“Megan Kimble’s paradigm-shifting City Limits details how American cities came to completely revolve around cars—to the detriment of the people who live in those cities and suburbs, as well as to the communities that highways have displaced.”—Roxanna Asgarian, author of We Were Once a Family

“City Limits, a definitive, neighborly guide to how our cities got so sliced up by highways, the damage they’ve done to communities and the climate, and the many great ideas for how we could replace them, if only we can organize ourselves.”—Maurice Chammah, author of Let the Lord Sort Them