He's Also Describing Baton Rouge

I finally found the time to plow through a fairly long article from Monthly Review written by Paul Sweezy, who passed away a week and a half ago. Called Cars and Cities it originally appeared in the April 1973 volume of the periodical.

The text is not for the faint of heart in regards to economics. Additionally, being over thirty years old, the statistics are certainly out of date. But if you feel like a little bit of independent Marxist analysis of the internal combustion culture--minus any references to gearheads or NASCAR Dads--by all means give it a look. Here are a couple of the concluding paragraphs:

Where these conditions [a thriving urban center] are found, the city retains much of its traditional structure and character, despite the ubiquitous sprawl and the decaying slums and ghettos between downtown and the outer residential areas. But where these conditions are not found or are found in a relatively undeveloped form—and this is the case with most cities which have experienced most of their growth during the automobile age—there has been a strong tendency for the old urban structure to break down and a new one without historic precedent to take its place. The process of sprawl has brought with it a decentralization of most of the functions usually associated with downtown, with resultant emergence of a multiplicity of subcenters, each offering some of the services of downtown—shopping areas, branch banks, motels, restaurants, cinemas—but without any of its character or magnetism. When this stage has been reached, the city as a meaningfully organized and structured form of civilized living has disappeared in favor of an amorphous aggregate of people, dwellings, cars, roads, and economic units jumbled together in a more or less continuous and potentially ever-expanding geographical area. Los Angeles is the obvious prototype of this kind of urban area. It was vividly characterized as long ago as 1959, in a perceptive series of articles by Harrison Salisbury in the New York Times, as follows:

Here, nestled under its blanket of smog, girdled by bands of freeways, its core eviscerated by concrete strips and asphalt fields, its circulatory arteries pumping away without focus, lies the prototype of Gasopolis, the rubber-wheeled living region of the future.

Los Angeles is no longer a city as the term has been conventionally defined: Sam S. Taylor, general manager of Los Angeles traffic, calls Los Angeles a "mobile region."

For anyone looking toward the future, toward the end result of the full autofication of the American metropolis, Los Angeles is the phenomenon to analyze most carefully.

When Lincoln Steffens went to the Soviet Union just after the Bolshevik Revolution, he proclaimed, "I have seen the future—and it works."

Today's visitor to Los Angeles might paraphrase Steffens and say, "I have seen the future—and it doesn't work." (March 3, 1959)