Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis (Creating the North American Landscape) [Hardcover]

Professor Greg Hise (Author)

Book Description

Series: Creating the North American Landscape | Publication Date: June 11, 1997

"This fresh look at Los Angeles is clearly framed as a study whose subject has national implications... Magnetic Los Angeles is the first authoritative study we have on how the professionalization of planning... affected practice, on how the idea of decentralization became a major force in shaping the environment, and on the intricate details of the process of community building... Hise underscores how rich a yield studying Los Angeles can bring." -- Richard Longstreth, American Studies International

Magnetic Los Angeles challenges the widely held view of the expanding twentieth-century city as the sprawling product of dispersion without planning and lacking any discernable order. Using Los Angeles as a case study, Greg Hise argues that the twentieth-century metropolitan region is the product of conscious planning -- by policy makers, industrialists, design professionals, community builders, and homebuyers -- in direct response to political and economic conditions of the 1920s and the Depression, the defense emergency, and the immediate postwar years.

"Hise postulates a thesis that is as revolutionary as it is straightforward... Hise's narrative is well written and clearly structured, as he nimbly guides the reader through various informational thickets... Magnetic Los Angeles is bound to initiate a whole new direction in planning research." -- Robert Wojtowicz, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians

"Hise has written a fascinating history of L.A. and the thought process behind its developments. He deflates the myth that this megalopolis grew without rhyme or reason." -- Jack Kyser, Los Angeles Times

"This is an important book and should be read by anyone interested in the history of the city, the homebuilding industry, and the twentieth-century western landscape." -- Stuart McElderry, Western Historical Quarterly

"Hise's synthetic perspective is state-of-the-art: he breaks important new ground in the analysis of metropolitan structure... [and] affords us an alternative view of postwar urbanization, one that can easily be translated to other urban settings." -- Robert Hodder, Journal of Planning Education and Research

"A welcome and bracing dose of reality." -- Harold Henderson, Planning

"Hise makes a compelling case for L.A. as a product of middle-class dispersal from disquieting ethnic centers, the Progressive Era's proselytism of the social hygiene in suburbs, [and] 50 years of federal housing policy based on home ownership and segregation." -- D. J. Waldie, Los Angeles Times

Editorial Reviews

From Scientific American

"Relates the history of the river with graceful thoroughness."

Review

"Hise posits a thesis that is as revolutionary as it is straightforward: postwar growth in Los Angeles was not as chaotic and unfocused as planners and ordinary observers have generally assumed; rather, suburban nodes of residential development were planted deliberately around established industrial locations -- most notably those related to aircraft design and production -- not in opposition to the city but as mutually beneficial extensions of it." -- Robert Wojtowicz, JSAH

"Hise has written a fascinating history of L.A. and the thought process behind its developments. He deflates the myth that this megalopolis grew without rhyme or reason." -- Jack Kyser, Los Angeles Times Book Review

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press (June 11, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0801855438
• ISBN-13: 978-0801855436
• Product Dimensions: 10.2 x 7.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,650,391 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Essential reading for understanding the American city of the 20th century, January 2, 2009

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CityLover (Boston USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis (Creating the North American Landscape) (Paperback)

I am surprised by how many people who claim to care about cities and metropolitan regions know so little about their histories. Professional urban designers and planners who toil in the trenches every day, researchers and scholars who pursue a deeper understanding of urban policies and their impacts, and libertarians whose incredibly naive knee-jerk reaction to any urban challenge is "Allow the market to function, and it will take care of the issue, eventually"; all share an ahistorical sense of the city. This important book can help change that.

Magnetic Los Angeles is a careful, detailed, and powerful study of how Los Angeles, or parts of it, came to be in the mid-20th century. Hise weaves a compelling narrative of community planners and developers who wanted to respond to housing needs, obtain profit, and yes--naive as it sounds to this day--build communities. Their solution? A mix of land uses within walkable distances! Residential neighborhoods were built within a 2-mile walking distance of places of work, such as the factories of defense contractors. Two miles was considered a walkable distance at the time; it is now around a quarter of a mile.

Magnetic Los Angeles is also about "sprawl", that lazy, under-theorized, and over-used term that was originally used to describe the low-density, automobile-oriented, and land-use-segregated patterns of urban growth often found in American suburbs. Los Angeles has been held up often as a poster child of so-called "sprawl", but Hise convincingly describes how many of the developments in its urban fringes were designed and built to be planned, walkable, and mixed-use neighborhoods--supposedly the "solution" to "sprawl" that many promote these days!

Cities are the products of many different actors pursuing their own agendas that are sometimes contradictory, sometimes overlap, and more often than not, yield unintended consequences, a point clearly articulated by Kevin Lynch in his book, Good City Form. Hise demonstrates how meticulous archival research, crafting of a historical narrative, and a sense of the roles of some of these different actors and organizations--such as the federal government, local government planners, and private developers--can offer a deeper understanding of this complex process. I would recommend Magnetic Los Angeles highly to those who care deeply about urban growth and its managements, including students and professionals in urban planning, public policy, and real estate development.