Cars are killing the human spirit

We as humans are profoundly influenced by our environment. Certain climates promote certain lifestyles or diets, certain natural resources make way for certain industries and certain physical characteristics of a landscape may foster certain moods.

Over time, as we linger in specific environments and subconsciously internalize their traits, we develop an identity contingent on the place in which it was formed. A Southern California native is as inclined to surf as their Canadian counterpart is to ice skate.

Most of modern civilization doesn’t live in raw and untouched landscapes. Our collective impact on Earth across history is vast, culminating in new types of environments with equal if not greater influence on the human psyche: the man-made ones. The habitats we create that we are most regularly confronted with, superimposed on nature itself: buildings, houses, stores, neighborhoods, roads, bridges and cities.

“[Cities] profoundly affect people,” said Anita Berrizbeitia, former chair of the department of landscape architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design. “They are like organisms … All of the dimensions of a human’s life are compressed and condensed in the limited space of a city.”

I. SENSE AND THE CITY

The relevance of architecture to the human spirit is one most people probably don’t consider often. We might recognize that a quaint cottage imbues feelings of warmth and joy, and a modern skyscraper, of hustle and success. But few of us, save those in the architecture industry, actually venture to dissect how these truths came to be.

More importantly, we overlook the profound impact these structures have on our moods, our understandings of place and time, and even our senses of self.

“The further you get in the [architect] profession, the more you really think of it as, ‘How do you design the experience?’” said Rafael Pelli, partner at architecture firm Pelli Clarke & Partners. “What are the quality of spaces? How do you move through it? It’s much more of a dynamic thing, rather than a passive thing … And I think to be a good experience, it has to be inviting as a pedestrian.”

Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa argues in his book “The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses” that “buildings and cities provide the horizon for the understanding and confronting of the human existential condition.”

Pallasmaa wrote that contemporary society has prioritized sight to a fault and failed to acknowledge through infrastructure that our haptic and sensorial experiences have just as much to do with how we “see” the world as vision itself — the titular “eyes of the skin.”

He argued that when you think of your childhood home, the most evocative memory is not the sight of the house but rather, subtler aspects like the smell from the kitchen, the texture of the carpet and walls or the sounds of the neighborhood.

These tactile experiences stored in the body comprise most of our perceptions of the space around us, yet we rarely give much thought to them. As we move through buildings and cities, we form impressions of them that thus influence our perceptions of self within these spaces.

“I experience myself in the city, and the city exists through my embodied experience,” Pallasmaa wrote. “The city and my body supplement and define each other. I dwell in the city and the city dwells in me.”

If a person’s sensory experience with a space constitutes their perception of it, and therefore their perception of themselves, what does a population’s sensory experience with a city say about the cultural identity of that city?

II. WELCOME TO LOS ANGELES

I must preface with an important disclaimer: I am from New York City. My understanding of successful urbanism is as privileged as it gets.

NYC is the most populated city in the U.S. with a thoroughly developed grid system, mass public transit and a culture built on pedestrianism. So when I came to L.A. for college, I felt a simultaneous sense of curiosity and superiority. Nothing could compete with my hometown, though perhaps it wasn’t a competition at all. Perhaps each city was playing its own game.

“It’s really just a different urban language,” said David Ulin, professor of the practice of English and author of “Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles.”

I spent a lot of my first semester at USC driving around, introducing myself to L.A. on its own terms. There is a billboard that always caught my eye: a huge Fashion Nova advertisement situated above the I-10 and I-110 interchange downtown. Racing through the glittering night, I would notice this larger-than-life woman laying on her side, cut out from the billboard as if she was escaping it, watching the cars go by.

Later in the semester, I found myself on foot, picking up dinner from a restaurant that turned out to be a food truck in a parking lot. It was eerily vast and empty, leading to the underpass of a freeway. As I waited, I looked up and around, trying to discern a sense of place or time. I noticed then that I was underneath the same Fashion Nova billboard, now as a pedestrian rather than a driver.

I was struck with a sharp sense of placelessness. The landscape that I thought I recognized had betrayed me with its sudden foreignness. I couldn’t tie the perception I’d formed of L.A., or this part of it, to the sight, instance and feeling before me. The space was now liminal, anonymous — and most importantly, indefinable.

“L.A. is so diffused and dispersed, there isn’t nearly as clear of a sense of place,” Pelli said.

This evening was the start of my fascination with L.A. and its urban fabric. That night, I was beginning to see L.A. as a labyrinth, though not in its physical complexity.

My perception of the billboard on foot was entangled with my perception of it by car, forcing me to reconcile two different planes of existence into a single impression of the space and myself within it.

The person and the vehicle seemed to present two separate and distinct realities, and yet were constantly swirled together as I was trying to perceive them as one. Even then, the vehicular experience felt more true to L.A.’s identity, more intentional and developed than its pedestrian counterpart. So I spent many days and nights wondering: What does that do to an L.A. resident’s soul?

III. CITY OF CARS

To even begin to critique the influence of L.A.’s urban fabric, it must first be recognized that the city’s infrastructure was once an idyllic feat of engineering, according to the History Channel. While it remains an impressive accomplishment, the paradise of car culture has become an oversaturated headache with serious psychological consequences. But in the United States post-World War II, cars symbolized innovation and freedom like never before, and California embraced them wholeheartedly.

“There was a great deal of romance about the freedom that a car would bring,” said Roger Sherman, design director and senior associate at urban design and architecture firm Gensler. “You could drive a convertible and enjoy the warm air and the sunshine, and you could go literally anywhere you wanted to.”

But what happens if the population stops benefiting from a car-based ecosystem?

“There’s now this division between the reality of what it’s like getting stuck on the [I-]405 freeway and the dream of being able to hop in your car and take off … You still have that sense, but it’s not as unbridled as it used to be,” Sherman said.

The result of the post-war freeway building boom is the L.A. we know today.

“Beneath the layer of the sprawl, [L.A.] really is a city of neighborhoods,” Ulin said. “If you walk it … you will go through four or five different neighborhoods … and each of those neighborhoods are similar in some way, but they each have their own distinct identity.”

This was the intention of car culture in the first place — a suburban expansion connected by roads that allowed people to easily travel across dozens of miles. The needs of cars eclipsed the needs of people — making room for freeways, strip malls, parking lots and single-story homes.

So when I arrived in L.A., the experience of the city seemed as if you were always simply going from Point A to Point B. What I thought were the pillars of a happy urban life — ample sidewalk space, incorporated greenery and nature — felt impossible to find.

The places where I could experience that took thirty minutes to an hour to get to, and felt laughably artificial. Shopping malls like The Grove seemed to be an attempt at scratching the human itch for authentic urban spaces. But just as crucial to The Grove’s functionality and appeal as its open-air, pedestrian-friendly design is its parking lot.

“The great experiences we think of when we go visit Europe are these older cities that have apartments above shops and offices tucked in amongst them, and it’s all happening all in the same area,” Pelli said. “It’s part of what makes it magical, and what makes it sort of wonderful to be in.”

To move through the city of L.A., however, is to undoubtedly isolate yourself not just from other people, but from the experiences that constitute your perception of place and self.

A vehicle is a space free from confrontation with haptic stimuli, which, as Pallasmaa argues, is “the very essence of the lived experience.” As you drive down the I-110, you’re enclosed in a car — you control the temperature; the texture of the seat and wheel is fixed and decided; the scent is of your choosing, as is the sound. The body is the ultimate human vehicle, and the car — no matter how hard it may try — can never replace that.

IV. CITY OF STARS

Perhaps the most overarching characteristic of L.A. is its culture of creativity and imagination, culminating in the global success of Hollywood and every social byproduct of the entertainment industry.

“The whole idea of the culture of reinvention that is so endemic to the way Los Angeles sees itself — which is both true and not true — grows out of that horizontality, and that idea that it’s very easy to move or reimagine yourself in certain ways,” Ulin said.

The unshakeable sense of placelessness I felt on that dark and empty street, in the shadow of the Fashion Nova billboard, was a separation of myself and my recognizable world — the image of the ad on the freeway, the world of L.A. that can only be experienced by car.

This separation of self and the city’s infrastructural robbery of the senses is both the cause and effect of L.A.’s — and more specifically Hollywood’s — culture: a culture predicated on the reinvention of the vehicle as a fifth limb.

Every day, we move through an environment that impedes on our true sense of self. L.A. objectifies its people to the material status of a vehicle, so we seek validation of selfhood in the material solutions the city offers: reinvention through fame and social media, plastic surgery or “wellness”; avenues of alleged self-substantiation meant to replace the irreplaceable sensory experience of feeling human.

Our authentic selves are consigned to the position of spectator, existing in a space we can never truly inhabit, watching the billboards go by, suspended in a city halfway between earth and sky, waiting for the day we see our own face on the freeway. Only then may we feel worthy of our humanity.

And yet — when all’s said and done, it is an undeniable truth that L.A. is drenched in some magic that casts millions, myself included, under its spell. My eyes wander out my bedroom window toward the gleaming pulse of the downtown skyline, and the mountains behind it that stretch toward eternity. Makes me want to go for a drive …