History + Theory V | Final Paper

An urban texture paved for the demands of the automobile has conditioned a framework for the physical atomization of urban life. Los Angeles has developed such an urbanity long before the tools were embedded by immaterial locative media. To this end, geographic space and the sphere of media conceive a metropolitan region to operate in a state of mobility through complete inertia.

Long before Los Angeles became known worldwide for, among other things, freeways and gridlock, it boasted the largest metropolitan transit system in the United States. The Red and Yellow cars, as they were known, had over 1500 miles of track around Los Angeles and served all the counties except for Ventura and the greater metropolitan area. At the time, Los Angeles was experiencing phenomenal growth. In 1900, the city had less than 175,000 people, but by 1920 there were more than half a million residents. Ranchos and pueblos filled Los Angeles county. People migrated west to farm. This huge influx could be attributed to the discovery of oil in the area and by 1923, Los Angeles was supplying a quarter of the world’s petroleum. As more people showed up, spaces needed to house all these workers and industries, so the city began incorporating townships around it. The Red and Yellow street cars connected them all and, at its peak, carried 80 million passengers a year in the late 1930s. The Red car, the Yellow car and the company that ran them, the Pacific Electric Railway, shut down and closed by 1964. How does it go from being a widely used and known train line, so much so that it still gets remembered today, to a non-existent and non-operational entity? The answer is probably outside honking its horn right now. It has been said that there is a conspiracy perpetrated by General Motors, Standard Oil and others to buy out the street car lines and replace them with buses which, in light of the condition of the early buses, ultimately meant that they were buying out the rail cars to get people into real cars. There was also another school of thought which indicated that street cars became too slow, did not go enough places and had to be on already-laid track— thus, became obsolete when the personal automobile became cheap enough for the average American to buy. The truth is probably somewhere in between—bound to happen but certainly helped along by companies that were seeking to advance their own businesses. What is known is that as the Red car began to decline, investment and improvements to it stopped happening and by 1951, the first freeway began being built. Los Angeles, flush with money, people and space, saw the freeways as a better way to move people about and the citizens were more than happy to have a way to get around quickly in their cars.

These days, Los Angeles sports some 16 million residents in 177 districts throughout 5 counties covering some 35,000 square miles. There are 10 major freeways— any of which make the routinely published list of the worst congestion interchanges. As the movie industry is here, Hollywood always shows the traffic problem in Los Angeles, to the point where whole movies can be based around one man snapping because of traffic or a hit man turning philosophical about how Los Angeles has too many freeways and is too disconnected that no one notices a dead man riding their own metro. Even “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” had the Red car conspiracy as its major sub plot. It has even gone to the point where the best picture of the year bases its entire premise on how Angelenos don’t interact unless they “Crash” into each other. With the rise of the private car came ease of the commute— meaning one did not need to live near where one worked. The introduction of the freeway only reinforced this much further. In light of these two factors, Los Angeles has become highly self-segregated. Anyone can choose to live around the people they feel most comfortable with. And it’s often easier to get around town by everyone taking their own car.

From wagons to street railways to the Red and Yellow cars, to the private car, the demands of the automobile is what has conditioned the mineralization of the urban fabric of Los Angeles. Surfaces emerged to serve the free car. It is what Los Angeles is known for. “Paris is not famous as the home of the metro in the way Los Angeles is famous as the home of the freeway.” (Banham 196) These freeways are the monuments of Los Angeles. “They are works of art as a pattern on the map, as a monument against the sky, and as a kinetic experience as one sweeps through it.” (Banham 72) The two reasons for the dominance of the freeways in Los Angeles is that one cannot help seeing them and that one cannot help using them. The freeway system in its totality is a single comprehensible space—like a river, it is one mass, with one current. It is a habitable media where the space between bodies is an indefinable medium of time and speed. The driving experience has become a special way of being alive and Angelenos share this heightened awareness— trained, disciplined, and controlled in a state of alertness at 80 miles per hour. As a result, driving is part of the urban conversation— such that the English complain about the weather, Angelenos complain about traffic. Thus, the very urban form of the city has configured Angelenos’ state of being—a particular relationship with geographic space, a detachment from human-to-human contact, and a perception of domesticity that moves beyond the walls of home. Coming off a freeway is coming in from outdoors. The ramp of the freeway has become the extension of the garage driveway. Exiting one’s home is not determined by stepping out of the door. The car engenders an interdependent relationship between mobility and domesticity—because to exit outdoors is, in fact, only decided as one disembarks the vehicle at any given final destination. The journey between places has become an extended sense of domesticity.

Where people don’t rub shoulders and a city is experienced through metal and glass, we can rethink urbanity or at least try to assess what is necessary for a city to be urban. Atlanta is a city with no center or a periphery, much like Los Angeles. On a thin carpet of habitation, Atlanta as a landscape still operates as city. It is still urban, and its erasure of a downtown does not make it less of a city. The centerless-ness of Atlanta is, in fact, what makes it urban simply because it works. The clusters are the periphery is the center. The city without their city-full non-city-ness, as Ed Soja describes, is the exopolis. These cities that don’t look like what one might imagine a city to look like—they rethink urbanity because they still operate as urban centers. Other amorphous replacements of suburban cities or outer cities, Soja describes, have been named techno-burbs, postsuburbias, or metroplexes. (Soja 95) These new words are a condition of a “huge tsunami of unknown urban substance” (Koolhaas ). Urbanity has been rethought for cities such as Atlanta because there is an urbanity to them. Atlanta is a peripheral fabric of clusters. And the city that bares a similarity to Atlantascape, another “city without their city-full non-city-ness,” Los Angeles is, in fact, an autopic metropolitan region.

It is the size of Los Angeles that makes it unique in these respects. Every other city in the world also has to deal with self-segregation and commuter culture. But the mass influx of different cultures into an area so large means that Los Angeles is not so much a city, but a continent, complete with different countries, cultures, and customs. The region encompasses a vast infrastructural layout operating in a language of movement. On the one hand, the freeway is only the mode in which such a region is connected. On the other hand, it is the demands of the private car that has conditioned the city to be conceived as a region. The urban texture of Los Angeles is one of mobility and “the city can never be fully understood by those who cannot move fluently through its diffuse urban texture” (Banham 5). Within a region so large, it is inevitable that people live atomized lives. If one only sees the noise walls and graffiti on the sides of freeways, and most of what citizens do is confined to small spaces—home, car, office, job—the only people they see are ones who look and act like them. In a city paved for the wheels of the automobile, a citizen’s means of travel is what conditions this segregation.

The LA Metro has 73.1 miles of track, 65 stations from North Hollywood to Long Beach, from Pasadena to Redondo, with proposed extensions to Santa Monica, the airport to Venice. There are 274,000 daily riders out of 60 million people in the greater Los Angeles area. Most people forget there is even a train system in Los Angeles. Began in 1990, the train line in Los Angeles hasn’t had the time to build a reputation like the one in New York City or Paris. But in a city known worldwide for having packed freeways, less than 2% of the population ride public transportation that has nothing to do with the roads. There is a vast difference between the infrastructural layout of the freeway system and the Metro line. Another kind of urbanity of atomized living emerges when we try to compare car culture with the Metro sub-culture. The Los Angeles that Angelenos understand when they drive is different from the Los Angeles that commuters experience when they ride the Metro. Even an understanding of space is completely reconditioned as a driver tosses belongings in a car and a Metro rider stuffs only what is needed for the day in a messenger bag. An urbanity of remoteness is further perpetuated by electronic media as Metro riders spend time connecting to others via smart phone rather than the person sitting next to them. And drivers are navigated by a GPS system rather than stopping at a local gas station to ask for directions. Although, within the dominant car culture in Los Angeles, there is a particular locative media that Angelenos share— such that the English keep an eye out for information on weather, Angelenos are barraged by real-time electronic traffic signs on the freeway. Metro riders just need to check what time the next train is arriving. People are divided by their mode of transportation. A metropolitan region is divided by its very own urban texture.

These days, cities don’t need to meet to be thought of as a region. Electronic communication has connected cities via virtual information technology—we need not move to travel. The urbanism of locative media is now what is conditioning atomized living. Because there is an urbanity to connectivity via technology, networks have given citizens a sense of place without any sort of physical encounter. This makes Los Angeles an even more physically detached, impersonal urban experience. Because while there is an urbanism about the network, there is also an urbanism about where it is taking place. (McCullough 29) If media means remoteness and the place is even more so, then Los Angeles has achieved a state of mobility through complete inertia—moving without moving at all, sitting in the speeding car, clicking buttons on the smart phone. The framework of atomized living is in place and the technology is now embedding it. Los Angeles has already been operating in this atomized urbanity. Electronic media now allows everyone in the world to live the way Angelenos have been living for years. It is important to note that this particular urbanity to living atomized lives in Los Angeles has been a condition of the city long before locative media and even the private car. While Angelenos blame car culture and “always being behind metal and glass” for this disconnected urban life, they often forget that the streets were already in place, which followed the same already-laid track of the Pacific Electric Railway in the early 1900s. Living far was always the case. The journey of the commute was always the urban character of Los Angeles.

The synergy of immaterial locative media and geographic space has made Los Angeles a model for the urbanism of atomized living. The infrastructure of a city that persists the impersonal, passive, non-physical encounter is further perpetuated by the tools that create the world of virtual urban experience. It has been said that Los Angeles is a lonely town—this can be attributed to the nature of what the city requires for one to move, but just as equal is one’s passive decision to remain subjected to this isolated mobility of urban detachment. The demands of the automobile have conditioned Angelenos to live atomized lives. To contextualize Soja within the region of Los Angeles, it is, in fact, our mode of transportation, not space, not time that hides consequences from us.

Sources/Citations

Banham, Reyner. “The Architecture of Four Ecologies” University of California Press; 1 edition April 2, 2001

Jenks, Charles. “The Heterogeneity of Los Angeles” in Heteropolis. pp 23-32

Klein, Norman. “Booster Myths, Urban Erasure” in The History of Forgetting. June 1997

Publisher: New Left Books pp 27-72

Soja, Ed. “Inside Exopolis: Scenes from Orange County” in Variations on a Theme Park. (Sorkin, ed.) pp 94-122

Koolhaas, Rem. “Atlanta” in S,M,L,XL. Monacelli Press; Subsequent edition. 1997. pp 832-859

McCullough, Malcom. “On the Urbanism of Locative Media,” Places Journal, Vol. 18 #2, 2000, pp16-19

Cooper, Julian. “Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles” One Pair of Eyes. Produced by Malcolm Brown. BBC Colour 1970

Bottles, Scott. “Los Angeles and the Automobile: The Making of the Modern City” University of California Press 1991