Michael Dear puts it best: "The apex of twentieth-century modernist urban planning in Los Angeles is perhaps best represented by the freeway-building era. Transit-rationality was replaced by a freeway-rationality .... The freeways ultimately created the signature landscape of modernist Los Angeles -- a flat totalization, uniting a fragmented mosaic of polarized neighborhoods segregated by race, ethnicity, and class." And as the challenges come "from those left behind and unable or unwilling to unroot themselves to the new frontier" we see " clear nonconformity between Los Angeles' persistently modernist urban planning and the emergent postmodern urbanism of Southern California." 'The' becomes redefined through plurality, contradiction, contingency, and perhaps a bit of chaos. "There is no longer a single civic will nor a clear collective intentionality behind LA's urbanism; and the obsolete land-use planning machinery is powerless to influence the city's burgeoning social heterodoxy. This is the insistent message of postmodern Los Angeles: that all urban place-making bets are off; we are engaged, knowing or otherwise, in the search for new ways of creating cities." Michael J. Dear (2000). The Postmodern Urban Condition. Oxford: Blackwell, quotes from p. 110, 111.