All over Los Angeles, ad-hoc tent cities ... are cropping up along, above and under freeways, a phenomenon that is upending how we think about the biggest and most conspicuous kind of infrastructure in the region.
The freeway system, which Southern Californians once saw as a ticket to freedom, an emblem of L.A.'s love of individuality and movement, increasingly serves as a landscape of hard luck and a desperate sort of community — a place to hunker down.
In pursuing a monumental scale, the freeway has historically refused to acknowledge its role in shaping, dividing or serving individual neighborhoods. Unlike the boulevard, which operates at both regional and local levels, the freeway knows only one register. It keeps its eye permanently fixed on the wider horizon, the macro city. There is no public space in the city so aloof from its local surroundings or so rigorously organized to repel people on foot.
But the vacuum seal that once kept the L.A. freeway separate from economic and social pressures has been broken. As the homeless population grows in a city whose public realm is the haggard product of several decades of neglect, the freeway has taken on a crucial, if often dispiriting, neighborhood role despite itself.
You can read the rest @
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/architecture/la-et-homelessness-and-the-freeway-20151226-column.html
The interstate highway system once allowed us to travel freely whenever and wherever we wanted. In the new America, however, it serves as an umbrella for people who have nowhere else to go.
It would not surprise me if some day a giant street sweeping machine were to plow into these tent cities and clear away these poor souls along with the rest of America's unwanted trash.
Welcome to the market state.
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