  urlLink Guardian Unlimited | World dispatch | Autopian dream : "'Where are all the people? ' my three-year-old son asks as we drive around Los Angeles (and often just a quarter of a mile to the local grocery store).
After three months here, he has learnt the two answers: 'They're in their buildings', and 'they're in their cars'. Los Angeles can be an eerie, solitary place for somewhere so crowded. There is something almost unnatural about living in an urban environment with so many human artefacts but so few signs of actual people. But that's the way the city has been designed, ever since the car proclaimed itself ruler of the place. In 1928, LA averaged one car for every 2.9 people - the ratio is probably the reverse today - and city planning was dictated by the need to accommodate commuters and shoppers driving in from the suburbs.
By the 1940s the first LA freeways were upon us, and by 1971 Reyner Banham was using the phrase 'autopia' in his wonderful study Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. As he noted, 'The private car and the public freeway together provide an ideal - not to say idealised - version of democratic urban transportation: door-to-door movement on demand at high average speeds over a very large area. '" 
