In Hamburg, Germany they are planning to create 60 acres of greenspace, complete with bicycle lanes and walking paths, by capping a 2 mile section of the A7 Autobahn. This past fall, in New York, they opened the final phase of Highline, the elongated-city-park-in-the-sky that transformed a dilapidated and obsolete piece of infrastructure into an urban oasis. In Vancouver, Council is considering the removal of the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts, remnants of a freeway project that never saw the day. They would be replaced with a ground-level, boulevard style arterial roadway, complete parks and alternative transportation facilities, which would allow for the reconnection of severed neighbourhoods in the Downtown East Side. Across the United States, at home in Canada and in other parts of the world, cities are looking to knit together disparate parts of the urban form through the creative re-envisioning of infrastructure, softening and humanizing its harsh edges.
Projects of this nature aim to reduce noise pollution by physically isolating or reducing traffic. Another objective is to increase community connections by forging links between communities separated by highways and they encourage social mixing in newly created or reclaimed public space. The greening of infrastructure also invites developers and residents into previously undesirable neighbourhoods, fostering residential and commercial development, and building more diverse social capital. The greening of infrastructure also addresses climate change insofar as it encourages active transportation and contributes to carbon sequestration, but these outcomes are generally seen as co-benefits to the dominant objectives of social and economic development.