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.