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Book Review
Canada and the United States
Greg Hise. Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis. (Creating the North American Landscape.) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1997. Pp. xiii, 294. $35.95.
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Greg Hise's insightful book examines the development of the Los Angeles Metropolitan Region to reevaluate our notions about suburbanization in the post-World War II era. What he finds was not the unplanned, chaotic, and sprawling bedroom communities often associated with modern suburbanization but rather the "product of a planned dispersion of jobs, housing, and services throughout metropolitan regions" (p. 4). Indeed, the book is about historical continuity rather than the discontinuity associated with the postwar suburban movement. Hise ties the postwar suburban trend to two important interwar efforts: modern community planning and the minimum house movement. |
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Hise opens his book by tracing the influence of community planning, which refocused attention from the dwelling to the neighborhood. He sees the "Garden City" movement and the "Neighborhood Unit" idea as important influences. The interwar years, according to Hise, also witnessed an aggressive campaign to manufacture standard, low-cost houses for wage earners. Such ideas helped to shape the housing response to the rapid migration into California during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. A fascinating chapter on "Model Communities for Migrant Workers" looks at the Farm Security Administration's innovative rural community projects for itinerant labor, projects that served as an example of community building efforts that could be developed quickly and efficiently. |
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