Few other land uses inspire ambivalence like the highway, and rightly so. Like the twin Hindu deities, Brahman and Vishnu, the highway is both creator and destroyer, giving life to cities and then making them uninhabitable. Serving the role played by the railroad and the river in earlier times, the highway is the city's lifeline to the larger world. And just as the river and the railroad each gave the city a new kind of settlement, the highway has given rise to its own type of urbanism: the strip....
