Los Angeles (Part III)
Part of an ongoing series that revisits different ideas I explored as part of my graduate studies in the Environmental Humanities.
RESPONDING TO REYNER BANHAM: LOS ANGELES (FORWARD, PP. 195-226)
In the discussion of his final ecology of Los Angeles, Reyner Banham engages the built space and created environment that most likely serves as Los Angeles’ most controversial and divisive. This area of contest is the massive freeway systems that stretch across and connect the built spaces of the sprawling LA Basin. This final ecology demonstrates the same major themes and ideas expressed throughout the book, while also attempting to illuminate the Autotopia of LA in a light that moves beyond tropes of smog and dehumanizing mass crowding that are often associated with life in the megalopolis.
The overriding metaphor of palimpsest used by Banham to describe Los Angeles’ diverse ecologies is most clearly seen in the built environment of the Los Angeles freeway systems. Many of these arteries of transit have literally been transcribed on the landscape on top of the electric railway lines that connected the city prior to the rise of the automobile. The emergence of car culture (and the potential of highly mobile “door to door” transit) is critical to understanding Los Angeles and its citizens for Banham. This approach directly confronts the (presumably outsider) reliance on the tropes of smog and overcrowding that are so often assumed as staple components of (dehumanizing) life in Los Angeles. To Banham this assumption is patently false, as he states that it is the freeway where an Angelino “is most integrally identified with his great city" (pg. 203).
Another overriding theme of Banham's project manifests in ascribing a material object from the freeway culture of Los Angeles as a prime exemplar of the fusion of functionality and style that is unique to LA. Much like the surfboard in Suburbia, the custom hot rod of the freeway is a means of creative expression and functional form that manifests in an utterly unique Los Angeles ecology.
But while these observation and theories are compelling I wonder if Banham would have the same feelings about the Los Angeles of today. Are the massively crowded freeways of contemporary LA (that Banham writes off as fear-inducing tropes) still legitimately reasonable places to glimpse true facets of the Los Angeles environment? Or has Los Angeles evolved into something with a complexity beyond the vantage point offered by Banham's historical context?
Similarly, what of the “forgotten” geography of the LA Basin? Created as a byproduct of the freeway construction that acted to build and order commercial space in highly scripted ways, the process of creating highly segregated space was in full effect at the time Banham wrote. Yet, he spends little to no time discussing the “forgotten” ecology of diverse neighborhoods and communities that reveal many of the deep social and environmental injustices that are still very much a part of the American identity and experience.
The sense I take of Los Angeles from Banham is paradoxical. It is a place that bears both further nuanced observation and critique, as well as the literal ground that has historically held the seeds of America’s deepest systemic racism (which has periodically blossomed into some of America's most explosive race riots). Does the reality on the ground in LA today still fit the schema of four ecologies built by Banham in his architectural history of the place?