The Massive Media
Architecture is a massive medium, it communicates what those who build it value most – their hopes, desires, aspirations. In the same way, infrastructure conveys what is important to a given society.
In Los Angeles we think of infrastructure as something that purely addresses our functional needs. But what we build, where we build, and how we build it speaks volumes about what we hold dear.
Most of our infrastructure is invisible to us. Our utilities are primarily underground; where they make their appearance – as telephone poles, electrical transmission lines, cell sites – we have become accustomed to them, their undeniable ugliness becoming the banal background to our lives. But when they require a more physical presence – as buildings, bridges, tunnels, water channels, freeways – we need to understand the message we are conveying.
In 1958 the California Division of Highways released “The California Freeway System” a 37-page document that Kevin Starr characterized as a “quasi-utopian” vision of the state’s future. It proposed a dense network of highways that would make travel through the state efficient, even pleasurable. One of the highways proposed was what would become State Route 710, a link between Long Beach and Pasadena. Most of the freeway was built, but its progress was halted when the citizens of South Pasadena rose up to protest the inevitable destruction of its city which lay in the road’s intended path. The threat of closing the resulting “gap” – which extended from the end of the 710 in Alhambra and the 210 in Pasadena – was very real until the EIR supporting the project was decertified in 2004.
Recently, a movement to “close the gap” has returned, this time with the option of taking the freeway underground, with a handful of alternate alignments. The motivations are murky: certainly the city of Alhambra would like to resolve the issue of traffic – the dispersal of commuters from the end of the 710 to their homes in the surrounding cities – but a less expensive low-build alternative could take care of this; in addition, the need to transport freight from the port of Long Beach to the northern half of the state – a closed gap would divert truck traffic away from the already congested Interstate 5 – begs the question: are trucks the best way to accomplish this, especially with rising fuel prices? Certainly a rail alternative should be explored.
A yet more sinister motivation is also possible – an opportunistic seizing of government funds, made available through Measure R as well as the Federal Stimulus Package. The website for the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority shows a commitment of $780 million dollars for such a project, which would include partial funding by a public/private partnership that would no doubt demand a toll for travel through the proposed tunnel. This would be a boondoggle of epic proportions whenever it was introduced; but now, in this economy?
Whatever the reason for the sudden reemergence of the 710 gap issue, the response must be the same: absolute rejection. We are not the same city we were in 1958; the myth of flow – that more lanes will make our lives batter, is part of an outmoded way of thinking that we cannot seem to shake. Clearly more lanes means more cars, more trucks – and more pollution. If indeed we require an expansion of capacity to facilitate movement from our ports to the rest of the country, why can’t we look at all our options instead of resorting to the kneejerk response of more traffic lanes. Especially if we are to become the model of sustainability that Mayor Villaraigosa imagines for our future.
In psychology they call this repetition compulsion. We keep choosing the same things because they are familiar, even comfortable. Even if we know it is unhealthy. Even if we want to change. But the fact remains: we are what we build. We say we want to be green but our actions reveal our true character. We need behavior modification – if we are to become what we want, we have to change what we do.
Let’s begin by abandoning the now antiquated promise of a freeway paradise, what Reyner Banham called “Autopia,” and embrace the more complicated challenges that confront a maturing metropolis: housing, healthcare, and mass transit. Rather than passively allowing the city to build itself, which reflects negative values – laziness, complacency, alienation – why can’t we build the city that reflects values that we want to project – things like energy, connectivity, community – and use the massive media of architecture and infrastructure to lead us to a more sustainable future?
