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.