Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis Hardcover - 1997

From the publisher

"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 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

"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

"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