ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the aesthetic experience of the automobile-oriented city in the work of several authors of the 1960s, most importantly the English architectural historian and critic Reyner Banham. The chapter uses the term “City on the Highway” to describe this mode of urban organization, borrowing a phrase coined by the historian of planning Peter Hall. Banham’s 1971 book Los Angeles is particularly important for the argument for its detailed account of freeway driving, in a chapter titled “Autopia”. Banham’s understanding of driving incorporates a sense of individual agency in continual dialog with a system, in which individuals willingly subject themselves to known risks. His highly individualistic understanding of the City on the Highway is contrasted with the contemporary version of the concept associated with the Google spinoff company Waymo, which, it is argued, seeks to mitigate risk through automation.
