A new study from researchers at USC about the effects of local highway pollution on children's health would be alarming under any circumstances, especially for parents. But it happens to arrive just as Los Angeles is building or planning scores of projects -- including housing, parks and schools -- right on the edge of major freeways.
Seen in that light, the study carries significant implications not just for antipollution efforts but also for the future shape of the city. It should make us think not just about cleaning the air but about how and where we build.
In the last few years, we've come to view land near freeways as a last frontier in a Los Angeles that grows more crowded by the year. When developers and public agencies such as the Los Angeles Unified School District are searching for large, empty parcels of land, they often find that the only ones that they can afford are freeway-adjacent, in the unlovely jargon of the real estate business.
And when planners, architects or academics get together to talk about and sketch designs for the Los Angeles of the future, their proposals inevitably call for new buildings swarming like kudzu along and across freeways.
In the same way that the futuristic city plans of the last century looked to the air, calling for buildings on stilts or stacked like pancakes or connected by floating zeppelins, architects these days tend to see L.A.'s ribbon of highways as the unlikely foundation for a new kind of post-sprawl urbanism.
Last month, Eric Owen Moss won a competition sponsored by the History Channel that asked architects to imagine and help design the Los Angeles of 2106.
"We intend to build over, under, around and through the freeways" of the city, he declared in his winning entry.
Of course, it's hardly surprising to learn that pollution levels are higher near freeways than in other parts of the city. But the data from USC are compelling enough to suggest that when it comes to zoning, we should give up the idea of that land as a means for reshaping L.A. and increasing density and see it instead as territory to be avoided -- at least when it comes to placing facilities where kids spend a good portion of the day.
Proposals such as Moss' may anticipate the day when we'll no longer use cars, at least in their current form, and the freeways that once carried them will be empty and ready for reinvention. But even in the most optimistic scenarios, we still face several decades of highway pollution.
