Congress for New Urbanism, a national organization that champions walkable urbanism, selected the campaigns to Bring Back 6th and replace the Rethinking I-94 corridor with TwinCitiesBoulevard for the biennial Freeways Without Futures report.
These two freeway removal projects join eight other campaigns advocating for equity and reconnection during a time of reckoning for North American urban freeway infrastructure. The ten campaigns in this report offer a roadmap to better health, equity, opportunity, and connectivity in every neighborhood, while reversing decades of decline and disinvestment.
Bring Back 6th!
Olson Memorial Highway is an urban highway running through North Minneapolis. It is one of many urban highways that divides communities, pollutes the environment, and creates a hazardous environment for nearby residents. Olson Memorial Highway has a uniquely devastating history, as the construction of the highway was at the expense of a thriving Black and Jewish cultural corridor along 6th Avenue N that was home to dozens of homes, shops, businesses, and music venues.
Bring Back 6th! is a campaign led by Our Streets Minneapolis in partnership with the Harrison Neighborhood Association to address the historic and ongoing harms of Olson Memorial Highway and reclaim the highway land to reconstruct 6th Avenue N.
Twin Cities Boulevard
Minnesota has a generational opportunity to repair the historic harms of the dispossession of land for the construction of I-94 that decimated thousands of homes and businesses in majority-minority communities. The Twin Cities Boulevard is a vision for the Minnesota Department of Transportation’s Rethinking I-94 project.
The entire Rethinking I-94 project corridor community deserves the opportunity to legitimately consider options that do not rebuild the highway and how it would impact lives. The reality is that I-94 was never built for the communities adjacent to the corridor. The Twin Cities Boulevard is a reparative movement to convert I-94 between downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul into a multi-modal, community-oriented boulevard and return the surrounding land to neighboring communities via a publicly held land trust.
About Congress for New Urbanism
The Congress for the New Urbanism’s (CNU) mission is to champion walkable urbanism. We provide resources, education, and technical assistance to create socially just, economically robust, environmentally resilient, and people centered places. We leverage New Urbanism’s unique integration of design and social principles to advance three key goals: to diversify neighborhoods, to design for climate change, and to legalize walkable places. Visit cnu.org for more.