Greg Hise is an associate professor of urban history in the School of Policy, Planning, and Development at the
University of Southern California and is coeditor of Rethinking Los Angeles.
Review
"Hise posits a thesis that is as revolutionary as it is straightforward: postwar growth in Los Angeles
was not as chaotic and unfocused as planners and ordinary observers have generally assumed; rather, suburban nodes
of residential development were planted deliberately around established industrial locations--most notably those
related to aircraft design and production--not in opposition to the city but as mutually beneficial extensions
of it."
--Robert Wojtowicz, JSAH
"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 Book Review
"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
"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 anyone interested 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
Johns Hopkins University Press Web Site, September, 2001
Summary
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.
