In Magnetic Los Angeles Greg Hise challenges these assumptions. The twentieth-century metropolitan region, he argues, is in fact 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 Depression, defense emergency, and immediate postwar years. Hise explains how New Deal housing policies and the war-time location of manufacturing spurred the growth of satellite communities on the urban fringe. Here large-scale builders adopted and implemented formal principles and construction practices drawn from environmental reform, regional planning, and the garden city movement.

The book has three aims. First, it places the history of city-building in California in a national context. Second, it explains the changing form of American cities during the twentieth century using Los Angeles as a primary case study. Where other accounts focus exclusively on housing and homebuilding, this book reveals a significant rearrangement of urban functions, the concomitant dispersion of industry and commerce. The third, most ambitious, intention is to uncover and interpret the imaginative structures residents and scholars have devised for understanding American citiesand thereby contribute to a reframing of current debates in urban theory.