The Freeway City

Paper Summary:

The name "Los Angeles" has become shorthand for a whole condition of modern civilization: A state of unplanned, disordered, sprawling, polluted, congested chaos. This paper discusses how the great mega-city of Los Angeles seems to embody the problems of the modern world on a mega-scale. The writer focuses on the role that the imagery and reality of transport " above all, freeways and motor transport " played in shaping perceptions of this vast and extraordinary modern metropolis.

From the Paper:

"Los Angeles is not a new city: founded in 1781 and incorporated in 1850, it is the second-oldest city in California and one of the longest-established urban centres in the United States. Yet a recent writer on Los Angeles transport has asserted that it "is known throughout the world as the prototype of the late twentieth-century city". Elsewhere Los Angeles has been described as 'a harbinger of the modern American city ' a prototype for the American metropolis of the late twentieth century". This perception of Los Angeles, for all its relative antiquity, as (for good and ill) a city of modernity and futurity reflects the overwhelmingly twentieth-century nature of its growth. The form that growth has taken has been seen (again, for good and ill) as embodying the fundamental qualities of a pattern of development "typical of twentieth century urbanization". This pattern of urbanism is identified particularly with North America but, partly by virtue of being American, has exercised great influence across the world: a decentralized, dispersed, suburbanized, consumerized, motorized urbanism that we now find adopted in almost every part of the globe where people have congregated in towns and cities."

More papers on The Freeway City:

• Analytical Essay # 88558 : "Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies"
• Essay # 62329 : "America and the Automobile"
• Essay # 17553 : "Transportation In Los Angeles"

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