Customer Reviews

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

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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.