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.