Los Angeles as the Freeway City: Iconography and Identity

Los Angeles as a Modern Metropolis

The name "Los Angeles" has become shorthand for a whole condition of modern civilization — a state of unplanned, disordered, sprawling, polluted, congested chaos. The great mega-city of Los Angeles seems to embody the problems of the modern world on a mega-scale. But how and why did we come to see Los Angeles this way? In particular, what role has the imagery and reality of transport — above all freeways and motor transport — played in shaping perceptions of this vast and extraordinary modern metropolis?

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 a city of modernity and futurity reflects the overwhelmingly twentieth-century nature of its growth. The form that growth has taken has been seen, 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.

The Role of Transport in Shaping the City

Transport has been described as the greatest shaper of Los Angeles after land and water, and any study of the development of the city must take into account its character and influence. Los Angeles has been shaped by topography, location, climate, resources, and population. It could be argued that transport, and particularly urban transport, has been the factor that brought all these influences together and exerted a powerful influence of its own over the ways in which they have operated and interacted.

Motor transport began to make an impact in southern California at an early date and on a large scale. The low-density, dispersed nature of Los Angeles accommodated itself well to the automobile, but such were the numbers of cars in the region, and so frequently were they used, that in central areas traffic congestion became an early problem. The more cars were used, the worse congestion became — and cars were not the only users of road space; both interurban and streetcar lines inflexibly occupied large areas of the street plan.

During the 1920s, a range of potential solutions to the problem of congestion were investigated: the improvement of existing roads and the creation of new ones, bans and restrictions on street parking, the construction of elevated railways or subways, and the creation of a rapid transit system. The issue was not simply one of facilitating easier movement of traffic; it was a question of what kind of city its citizens wanted Los Angeles to be — centralized or decentralized, concentrated or dispersed. The dominant interpretation of the city by the mid-1920s was that it was decentralized and dispersed, and that planning and traffic engineering solutions should recognize that fact, even celebrate it, and further its development as representative of a new kind of modern city. Overall, this interpretation led to rail-based forms of transport losing out to the provision of facilities for motor vehicles. It was during this period that the pattern of the city's transport infrastructure took a form dictated by the car and the way it was used: the widening, straightening, and improving of existing roads; the construction of new highways; the development of the high-speed, limited-access freeway; and the decline of public transit generally — culminating in the effective disappearance of rail-based urban transit altogether.

From Parkways to Freeways: Infrastructure and Expansion

When people think of the effects the car has wrought on Los Angeles, they tend to think first of the vast grandeur of the freeways — "one of the greater works of man," according to Reyner Banham. Freeways were proposed on a large scale during the 1920s and 1930s, but economic depression and the demands of American participation in the Second World War meant that such projects were slow to come to fruition. The concept of the "parkway" — a limited-access, relatively high-speed, landscaped road — was imported from the east and caught the imagination of downtown business interests, who wanted to encourage traffic into a centre free of jams and congestion; subdividers and real estate developers, who wanted to open up access to new suburban areas; and the automobile lobbies, who wanted people to buy and use cars even more than they already did.

In 1937, the Automobile Club of Southern California proposed a system of "motorways" in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, and the first of these routes — through Cahuenga Pass, and the Arroyo Seco Parkway (later the Pasadena Freeway) — were in operation by the late 1930s. It was not until the 1950s and 1960s, however, that freeway construction went into high gear. After the war, funding for the new system was found through increased state taxation on fuel and road licences, and the resulting investment produced a fourfold increase in California's freeway mileage between 1950 and 1955, including such important routes in the Los Angeles area as the Santa Ana and San Bernardino Freeways.

The freeway became an icon of Los Angeles, summarizing in its epic vistas, its association with rapid circulation and mobility, and its effects on the cityscape, a certain idea of large-scale technological modernity. By the 1970s, Los Angeles as "the city as freeway" had essentially arrived. It was Reyner Banham who described the "local language" of Los Angeles as "the language of movement" and called the city "the uniquely mobile metropolis."