A just future is within reach for UCLA’s Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. To achieve this end, the Playboy Mansion must be destroyed. This essay will present the Mansion’s history to explain why in terms of socio-sexual justice, then recommend how to execute demolition in order to avoid repeating the mistakes that have left Westwood’s residential space so misallocated. Neither private nor public agencies have the capacity to mark the Mansion for demolition without re-enclosing this property for the purposes of elites. Only the people themselves can destroy the Playboy Mansion in a way that will guarantee this land’s future uses as a common good.

This article presents a history of jitneys from the Gilded Age streets until their return to discourse among post-1970s transportation neoliberals. Transportation neoliberals were an intellectual set including professors, policymakers, consultants, and con men. They discovered the history of jitneys, which Southern Californians invented during a wartime slump in global commerce in 1914. Abolished in the U.S., jitneys remained in operation in crisis-prone cities like Manila and Harare. Selective memories of jitneys in an age of austere state budgets contributed to the trade’s return as a cheap, unregulated alternative to public transit. History was the tool that led jitneys, in the guise of Lyft and Uber, back into U.S. streets after the global financial crisis.

This project began with questions about the tremendous amount of time those in Los Angeles have spent inside their automobiles. “Drive Time” argues for the significance of car cultures as sites where drivers articulated numerous varieties of social difference, which have included sexual, racial, moral, and spatial hierarchies. Sensory studies has proven a helpful methodology for work about undocumented uses of technology, for drivers left traces of their hidden activities and personal attitudes all over their vehicles and along roadside strips in the half-century after the Second World War. “Drive Time” presents these findings in a series of twelve case studies of McDonald’s, of the Rose Parade, of Rebel Without a Cause, of Pop Art, of the Beach Boys, of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, of former Governor Ronald Reagan’s talk radio show, of Cheech & Chong, of the Hillside Strangler attacks, of the Thomas Guide, of taco trucks, and of drive-by shootings. Readers will find this approach involves polysensory descriptions of taste, touch, smell, sight, and sound. The result is a rereading of the centrality of the automobile to the forming of the senses - as well as their reformation - in Los Angeles’s motorist monoculture.