Romanticizing Inequity? A Visual Essay Exploring the L.A. Freeway in Popular Culture

When contemplating what I wanted to do for my creative blog post, I kept revisiting the idea of writing a personal essay in the style of my gal Joan Didion. While I have long been a devoted fan of hers, her essay that we read early in the quarter, “Bureaucrats” made me realize how much we as planners can extract about the community’s relationship with their local transportation system (or built environment more generally) through personal reflections. But in a less academic sense, I also just saw myself in her writing. As a native of Los Angeles County, there is a comfort in concrete and freeways and traffic that many outsiders won’t understand. Yet as I set out to start writing with a Didionesque lens, I felt conflicted. Is it a privilege for me to be able to romanticize the highways of my childhood, even though I now know as a planner how destructive those roads are to communities? I myself grew up in a low-income neighborhood off of the 710, a corridor notorious for pollution and poverty. But sometimes even still, I dream of miles of brake lights and wake up aching for home. 

And I am not alone. I began to search for cultural references in movies, television, literature, and music that romanticize Los Angeles’s notorious congestion and expansive network of freeways. There are many. Are these references grossly out-of-touch conceptions of what it means to live in a region defined by limited mobility for the most marginalized, or are they reflective of the ways in which we find meaning and beauty in our surroundings when the agency removed from us by planners and politicians past gives us no other option? Does popular culture have a responsibility not to make light of destructive systems? To explore this, I offer examples of media that romanticize the LA freeway, and juxtapose them with local news headlines that better explain the reality of living in communities that have been displaced or altered because of that same freeway system.  

An excerpt from the aforementioned Joan Didion essay, “Bureaucrats” (1979) the freeway as  Los Angeles’ only secular communion // An LA Taco article about the divisive and racist nature of L.A.’s freeway system.

A quote from architectural critic Reyner Banham which equates Los Angeles’ roads as the city’s magnum opus  // An article from the New York Times about the health consequences of long commutes

 

A screengrab from the popular SNL skit “The Californians” which playfully teases Angelenos for the centrality of freeways and roads to our regional vernacular // An L.A. Times Op-Ed which really just gets to central point

Lyrics from “Meet Me at Our Spot” by artist Willow Smith // L.A. Times article that questions why we keep building housing near freeways, despite numerous studies proving how proximity to congested freeways causes major health issues, predominantly amongst low-income communities

The opening scene of the blockbuster film “La La Land” which offered a musical number of Angelenos singing and dancing in traffic / An article from Curbed about the symbolism of protests on freeways by communities of color.

So I want to ask again, it our responsibility to accurately and consistently describe the effects of infrastructure and top-down urban policies on our communities? Or is it further violence to police art and its ability to find love and freedom by turning these oppressive monuments into symbols of community resilience and shared identity?