"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 anyoneinterested 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

Most people equate Los Angeles with smog, sprawl, forty suburbs in search of a city-the great "what-not-to-do" of twentieth-century city building. But there's much more to LA's story than this shallow stereotype. History shows that Los Angeles was intensely, ubiquitously planned. The consequences of that planning-the environmental history of urbanism--is one place to turn for the more complex lessons LA has to offer.
Working forward from ancient times and ancient ecologies to the very recent past, Land of Sunshine is a fascinating exploration of the environmental history of greater Los Angeles. Rather than rehearsing a litany of errors or insults against nature, rather than decrying the lost opportunities of "roads not taken," these essays, by nineteen leading geologists, ecologists, and historians, instead consider the changing dynamics both of the city and of nature.
In the nineteenth century, for example, "density" was considered an evil, and reformers struggled mightily to move the working poor out to areas where better sanitation and flowers and parks "made life seem worth the living."
We now call that vision "sprawl," and we struggle just as much to bring middle-class people back into the core of American cities. There's nothing natural, or inevitable, about such turns of events. It's only by paying very close attention to the ways metropolitan nature has been constructed and construed that meaningful lessons can be drawn. History matters.
So here are the plants and animals of the Los Angeles basin, its rivers and watersheds. Here are the landscapes of fact and fantasy, the historical actors, events, and circumstances that have proved transformativeover and over again. The result is a nuanced and rich portrait of Los Angeles that will serve planners, communities, and environmentalists as they look to the past for clues, if not blueprints, for enhancing the quality and viability of cities.

""Eden by Design" is a compelling and fascinating description of a possible Los Angeles that never came to be. Greg Hise and William Deverell have resurrected the Olmsted Brothers' 1930 plan for Los Angeles County, and then, in a wonderful introduction, put the plan in context so that to read it now is to see not only what seemed dangerous and possible in 1930 but also how and why one route to the present was chosen over others. In their hands, the plan acts like a ghost of Los Angeles, reminding us about a vanished past, lost possibilities, and the secrets that our present masks."--Richard White, author of "The Organic Machine"

"The Report is not only a vital document in the history of Los Angeles . . . but a lost classic of a neglected golden age of city planning and landscape architecture. . . . It embodies a truly regional perspective; an ecological perspective; a long-range vision; an integration of design with finance and administration; and a truly grand interpretation of public space. It deserves to be known to every serious student of the American planning tradition."--Robert Fishman, author of "Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia"

"An essential document for understanding the history of the West's largest city. Los Angeles had the opportunity to become an extraordinarily beautiful environment, a Paris in the desert. The editors make clear why, sadly, it did not; but also they hold out hope that portions of this brilliant but neglected plan might still be recovered."--Donald Worster, author of "Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas"

"A welcome addition to the literature of American urban planning history."--Roger Montgomery, Professor of ArchitectureEmeritus, University of California, Berkeley

The Los Angeles region is increasingly held up as a prototype--for good or ill--of our collective urban future; however, it is probably the least understood and most under-studied major city in the United States. Very few people beyond the boundaries of Southern California have an accurate appreciation of what the region is, who lives there, and what it does. This collection of essays brings together some important voices to dispel the myths about Southern California and to begin the process of rethinking Los Angeles. This important volume seeks to go beyond the "rebuilding" literature and explore the multiple meanings of Los Angeles, fuse theory and method into a new vision of an urban reality, break with the traditional boundaries of urban analysis, and account for the complexities of the regional megacity. Editors Michael J. Dear, H. Eric Schockman, and Greg Hise have assembled a groundbreaking volume that will be of interest to scholars and students of urban studies and American culture. Tentative contents