Twin Cities Parkway
Fall 2021 | Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesotainstructed by Dan D’Oca
How can we heal the scars of urban highway construction while reimagining a more equitable use of valuable land currently dedicated to the automobile?
The Twin Cities Parkway is a phased proposal to graft the neighborhoods along I-94 back together through a site-sensitive and community-based redesign of the highway corridor between Minneapolis and St. Paul. Rather than just moving cars, the Twin Cities Parkway prioritizes moving people while also offering life-giving spaces that provide housing, parks and greenspaces, food and energy production, and other valuable social and ecosystem services to the community. In doing so, the Twin Cities Parkway begins to repair the laceration made by I-94 fifty years past. In the interstate’s place, a new type of mobility infrastructure is grown, one that stores carbon instead of emits, connects rather than divides, purifies rather than pollutes, calms rather than congests, and heals rather than hurts. The Twin Cities Parkway proposal represents what we’ve learned and how we’ve progressed in the fifty years since we first allowed our cities to be rent asunder by urban highways.
