Review Essay: Modern Urban Planning and the Civic Imagination: Historiographical Perspectives on Los Angeles

Willard Huntington Wright , "Los Angeles-The Chemically Pure," in The Smart Set, March 1913, repr. in The Smart Set Anthology, ed. Burton Rascoe and Groff Conklin , 90-102 (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1934 ).

Morrow Mayo, Los Angeles (New York: Knopf, 1933), 270.

Carey McWilliams , Southern California: An Island on the Land (1946; repr., Salt Lake City, UT: Peregrine Smith Books, 1973).

Reyner Banham , Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971 ; repr., Berkeley and Los Angeles : University of California Press, 2001). Quote from "Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles," BBC documentary, 52 min., 1972.

Collections of this work include Allen J. Scott and Edward W. Soja , eds., The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century ( Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996); and Michael J. Dear , ed., From Chicago to L.A.: Making Sense of Urban Theory (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002).

Mike Davis , City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles ( London: Verso, 1990). Examples of the new Los Angeles history produced in the 1990s are well represented in two collections. See Charles G. Salas and Michael S. Roth , eds., Looking for Los Angeles: Architecture, Film, Photography, and the Urban Landscape (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute , 2001); and Tom Sitton and William Deverell , eds., Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001).

Greg Hise , Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press , 1997), 11.

Ibid., 20.

Ibid., 54.

For more on the political and social life of working-class suburbs in Los Angeles, see Becky M. Nicolaides , My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965 ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Nicolaides's work challenges that of Hise in presenting interwar suburban communities grounded in an ethos of individualism and private homeownership free of government intervention.

Dana Cuff , The Provisional City: Los Angeles Stories of Architecture and Urbanism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 5.

Ibid., 16.

See, for example, John R. Logan and Harvey L. Molotch , Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987); Steven Gregory , Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); Jon C. Teaford , The Metropolitan Revolution: The Rise of Post-Urban America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); and Lance Freeman , There Goes the `Hood: Views of Gentrification from the Ground Up ( Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006).

Cuff, The Provisional City, 338.

Don Parson , Making a Better World: Public Housing, the Red Scare, and the Direction of Modern Los Angeles (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 2.

Ibid., 9.

Ibid., 106-7.

For more on red-baiting and Los Angeles's cultural politics, see Sarah Schrank , "The Art of the City: Modernism, Municipal Censorship, and the Emergence of Los Angeles' Postwar Art Scene," American Quarterly 56, no. 3 (September 2004): 663-91.

William Fulton , The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles (1997; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

Ibid., 12.

For more on the visual nature of Los Angeles's booster imaginary, see Sarah Schrank , Art and the City: Civic Imagination and Cultural Authority in Los Angeles (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

William Alexander McClung , Landscapes of Desire: Anglo Mythologies of Los Angeles (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000).

Greg Hise , "Industry and Imaginative Geographies" in Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s, eds. Tom Sitton and William Deverell , 13-44 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001).

William Deverell , Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004).

Ibid., 9.

Ibid., 10.

Mary Pickford , cited in Greg Hise and William Deverell , Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 33.

For more on the racialized Anglo imagination and Los Angeles's cultural landscape, see Phoebe S. Kropp , California Vieja Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006).

Eric Avila , Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley and Los Angeles : University of California Press, 2004), 77.

Ibid., 120.