Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis

Creating the North American Landscape

by Greg Hise, Center for American Places

Argues that the 20th-century metropolitan region was planned―in response to political and economic conditions of the 1920s and the Depression, the defense emergency, and the immediate postwar years. Recipient of the Spiro Kostof Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians 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.

Genres: Cities

320 pages, Paperback

First published June 11, 1997

Reviews

[Andrea · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Today we survey a landscape pieced together from discrete fragments, an urban collage rather than an urban mosaic."

I'm not quite sure what that means, and although this is very well researched and incredibly detailed, I'm not sure that what Hise is arguing is so very different from other accounts of suburban growth, rather it enhances them. I think it adds a more historical dimension, underlines the fact that not all suburbs developed as exclusive developments for the wealthy. It should perhaps have gotten four stars, but it failed to engage with so much I am interested in, even after raising it, that I couldn't give it more.

First he looks at the rise and practices of community building itself, and the way that private developers were in fact engaged in what he calls 'progressive land-use planning.' The second is the huge influx of industry and manufacturing jobs into LA during and after WWII, creating an equally huge gap between existing housing and the housing needs of the new workers. And finally the spatial relationships between land use that brings these two together. That in fact the suburbs did not occur in higgeldy piggeldy fashion, but rather that developers recognized the need to build them near jobs, recognized that they were connected to a larger whole and were part of the region.

He states "Whereas most accounts refer to urban expansion and dispersion in terms of restrictive, residential neighborhoods, Whitnall and his colleagues envisioned growth and development occurring in urbanized clusters within the metropolitan region." I think there is undoubtedly a difference depending on time period, the early suburbs Hise describes are hugely influenced by the need to provide affordable housing to defense and industrial workers as quickly as possible. Connecting their techniques to the agricultural housing experiments, the FHA emphasis on building the smallest and cheapest housing possible? This is indeed all new. These early suburbs were in fact rather different from 'exclusive' developments -- though even at this time they remained exclusive in terms of race. It is interesting, however, to see them in terms of white class diversity:

Like Howard, the community builders and planners chronicled in this study placed particular emphasis on social class. One of their primary objectives was to extend home ownership down the economic ladder and make every wage earner a home buyer. More critically, they set out to fashion neighborhoods with residents drawn from different occupational groups. I have found that their success at the latter was greater than we have recognized to date.

Hise doesn't enter into the question of race at all, but I am looking forward to thinking more about how this might play into the construction of race, the privileges of whiteness. Hise states at another point:

Although stridently opposed to mixed-race neighborhoods, Burns and other developers chose to build housing that families from different occupational, income, and social strata could afford. Burns believed his projects would counter a stratification that he viewed as "un-American."

This makes so clear how 'American' was once defined through skin color, but also begs the question of how this ideal of class diversity within a community was lost (if it did indeed exist, though this does seem to be the case). Hise does not look at this at all.

The look at the kind of community planning that took place was also interesting, but the fact still remains that it was privately done and carried out development by development. There wasn't enough of a critical look at this I didn't think, or enough on how developers and local government worked together (or not) though the sections on the FHA are illuminating.

[Liam · Rating 4 out of 5]

"[W]e must set aside the accepted wisdom that housing production, not employment, led and continues to lead urban expansion. Excluding industry from our explanatory schema violates one of the basic principles advanced by each generation of community builders, who knew that all raw land is not prima facie subdividable." (4)

"There are significant methodological parallels between the [Pierce] foundation's space-and-motion investigations and Frederick W. Taylor's better-known time-and-motion studies." (studies of space for the "minimum house", 62-3)

"In Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, and other metropolitan regions throughout the country, private home builders sited their new neighborhoods in close proximity to employment, aggressively marketed their projects' location as a primary inducement for sales, and targeted wage earners employed in defense industries as their principal buyers." (contra residentially-driven sprawl hypothesis, 125-6)

"[I]ndustry provided an economic base, jobs, and people, the foundation necessary for large-scale builders' experiments in modern community planning." (215)