Route 66, where are you? : four cities and the development of a shared cultural resource

Although small towns, rural areas, state organizations, and federal programs are all pursuing the redevelopment of the Route 66 corridor, this paper focuses on how four urban communities currently are engaging with this cultural resource: Albuquerque, New Mexico; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Rancho Cucamonga, California; and Flagstaff, Arizona. More specifically, the paper answers two central questions; have urban places along the Route 66 corridor engaged in the preservation, development, and interpretation of the route, and if so, how and why have those forms of engagement differed from one another. Four case study chapters describe how engagement has taken different forms in different cities depending upon the city's overall economic and political context, the city's other redevelopment efforts, and the degree to which the city's built fabric has survived the last twenty to thirty years of the corridor's economic decline. Each chapter concludes with site-specific recommendations for each city. After examining several local contexts for corridor redevelopment, the paper analyzes Route 66 as a national cultural resource and recommends strategies for local and interstate development and interpretation.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Dodge, Anne Clayton

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• J. Mark Schuster.

• Urban Studies and Planning.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/37655

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/37655